MELVILLE’S GRANDFATHERS
Project Gutenberg EPUB3 edition
Weaver, Raymond M. (Raymond Melbourne)
GENERAL PETER GANSEVOORT
MAJOR THOMAS MELVILLE
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 old-fashioned 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—
That he had a Roman nose,
And his cheek was like a rose
In the snow:
But now his nose is thin,
And it rests upon his chin
Like a staff,
And a crook is in his back,
And a melancholy crack
In his laugh.