daughter, that the image of Peter Gansevoort was one of the most potent influences during Melville's most impressionable years. The heroic presence that dominated Melville's imagination, "measured six feet four inches in height; during a fire in the old manorial mansion, with one dash of the foot, he had smitten down an oaken door, to admit the buckets of his negro slaves; Pierre had often tried on his military vest, which still remained an heirloom at Saddle-Meadows, and found the pockets below his knees, and plenty additional room for a fairsized quarter-cask within its buttoned girth; in a night scuffle in the wilderness before the Revolutionary War, he had annihilated two Indian savages by making reciprocal bludgeons of their heads. And all this was done by the mildest hearted, the most blue-eyed gentleman in the world, who, according to the patriarchal fashion of those days, was a gentle, white-haired worshipper of all the household gods; the gentlest husband and the gentlest father; the kindest master to his slaves; of the most wonderful unruffledness of temper; a serene smoker of his after dinner pipe; a forgiver of many injuries; a sweethearted, charitable Christian; in fine, a pure, cheerful, childlike, blue-eyed, divine old man; in whose meek, majestic soul the lion and the lamb embraced-fit image of his God." His portrait was to Melville "a glorious gospel framed and hung upon the wall, and declaring to all people, as from the Mount, that man is a noble, god-like being, full of choicest juices; made up of strength and beauty." Most of the images of God that Melville met in actual secular embodiment, suffered tragically by comparison with this image of mortal perfection which Melville nursed in his heart. Most men that Melville met, in falling short of the mythical excellence of Peter Gansevoort, whom he never knew in the flesh, seemed to Melville, to be libels upon their Divine Original. According to Melville's account, he could never look upon his grandfather's military portrait without an infinite and mournful longing to meet his living aspect in actual life. Yet such was the temper of Melville's mind, his life such a tragic career of dreaming of elusive perfection, dreams invariably to be dashed and bruised and shattered by an incompatible reality, that it is safe to sur

mise-with no impiety to the memory of Peter Gansevoortthat had Melville known his maternal grandfather, the old General's six feet four of blood and bone would have shrunk, with his extravagance of all human excellence, to more truly historical dimensions.

Melville's paternal grandfather, Major Thomas Melville, who died in 1832, when Melville was thirteen years old, inspired his grandson to no such glowing tributes. Born in Boston, in 1751, an only child, he was left an orphan at the age of ten. It appears by the probate records on the appointment of his guardian in 1761, that he inherited a considerable fortune from his father. He was reared by his maternal grandmother, Mrs. Mary Cargill. Mrs. Mary Cargill's brother was the celebrated and eccentric dissenter and polemic writer, John Abernethy of Dublin, who in his Tracts (collected in 1751) measured swords with Swift himself triumphantly; her son, David, was both a celebrated warrior against the Indians, and the father of twenty-three children, fifteen of whom were sons. Whatever the immediate male relatives of Mrs. Mary Cargill did, it would appear, they did vigorously, and on an enterprising scale. She was herself an old lady of very independent ideas about the universe, and her grandson, Thomas Melville-Melville's grandfather,-perpetuated much of her independence. Indifferent to the caprices of fashion, Thomas Melville persisted until his death in 1832, in wearing the oldfashioned cocked hat and knee breeches. Oliver Holmes said of him: "His aspect among the crowds of a later generation reminded me of a withered leaf which has held to its stem through the storms of autumn and winter, and finds itself still clinging to its bough while the new growths of spring are bursting their buds and spreading their foliage all around it." And so the Autocrat wrote:

"I saw him once before,
As he passed by the door,
And again

The pavement stones resound
As he totters o'er the ground

With his cane.

They say that in his prime,

Ere the pruning-knife of Time
Cut him down,

Not a better man was found

By the Crier on his round
Through the town.

But now he walks the streets,
And he looks at all he meets
Sad and wan.

And he shakes his feeble head
And it seems as if he said,
'They are gone.'

The mossy marbles rest

On the lips that he has pressed
In their bloom,

And the names he loved to hear
Have been carved for many a year
On the tomb.

My grandmamma has said,

Poor old lady, she is dead

Long ago