Introduction To The Edition Of 1892

INTRODUCTION TO THE EDITION OF 1892.

BY ARTHUR STEDMAN.

OF the trinity of American authors whose births made the year
1819 a notable one in our literary history,--Lowell, Whitman, and
Melville,--it is interesting to observe that the two latter were
both descended, on the fathers' and mothers' sides respectively,
from have families of British New England and Dutch New York
extraction. Whitman and Van Velsor, Melville and Gansevoort,
were the several combinations which produced these men; and it is
easy to trace in the life and character of each author the
qualities derived from his joint ancestry. Here, however, the
resemblance ceases, for Whitman's forebears, while worthy country
people of good descent, were not prominent in public or private
life. Melville, on the other hand, was of distinctly patrician
birth, his paternal and maternal grandfathers having been leading
characters in the Revolutionary War; their descendants still
maintaining a dignified social position.

Allan Melville, great-grandfather of Herman Melville, removed
from Scotland to America in 1748, and established himself as a
merchant in Boston. His son, Major Thomas Melville, was a leader
in the famous 'Boston Tea Party' of 1773 and afterwards became an
officer in the Continental Army. He is reported to have been a
Conservative in all matters except his opposition to unjust
taxation, and he wore the old-fashioned cocked hat and
knee-breeches until his death, in 1832, thus becoming the
original of Doctor Holmes's poem,'The Last Leaf'. Major
Melville's son Allan, the father of Herman, was an importing
merchant,--first in Boston, and later in New York. He was a man
of much culture, and was an extensive traveller for his time. He
married Maria Gansevoort, daughter of General Peter Gansevoort,
best known as 'the hero of Fort Stanwix.' This fort was situated
on the present site of Rome, N.Y.; and there Gansevoort, with a
small body of men, held in check reinforcements on their way to
join Burgoyne, until the disastrous ending of the latter's
campaign of 1777 was insured. The Gansevoorts, it should be said,
were at that time and subsequently residents of Albany, N.Y.

Herman Melville was born in New York on August 1,1819, and
received his early education in that city. There he imbibed his
first love of adventure, listening, as be says in 'Redburn,'
while his father 'of winter evenings, by the well-remembered
sea-coal fire in old Greenwich Street, used to tell my brother
and me of the monstrous waves at sea, mountain high, of the masts
bending like twigs, and all about Havre and Liverpool.' The
death of his father in reduced circumstances necessitated the
removal of his mother and the family of eight brothers