Melville called "a tool of jesuitism" for slander of Protestant missions

Transcribed below from the Nottingham Review (Friday, 8 November 1850), a strong endorsement of the recent attack on Melville's Omoo in the Eclectic Review. The article on "Mr. Melville and South-Sea Missions" first appeared in the Eclectic Review for October 1850 and was reprinted in the December 1850 Eclectic Magazine and Littell's Living Age - 16 November 1850.

LITERATURE.

THE ECLECTIC REVIEW... The next article is an interesting sketch of the "Biography of Leigh Hunt.” Like the subject it is serial, discriminative, and quietly humorous. The paper that follows is a review of the "South Sea Narratives" of Herman Melville. A more thoroughly-deserved castigation no author ever received than the gentleman in question gets in this article. This tool of jesuitism thought that he could quietly damage the Protestant missions in Polynesia by mingling with his "sea-yarns” the most slanderous imputations upon the integrity, character, and worth of the missionaries. But into the pit which he has dug, he has fallen himself! The reviewer, who is evidently au fait at sifting evidence, has made Melville himself prove that he has been guilty of "deliberate and elaborate falsehood," and that he is "a prejudiced, incompetent, and truthless witness!" When the October number of the Eclectic meets his eye, and hereafter when he remembers it, we think his ears will tingle. He has got what he well deserved, and we hope it will do him good. --Nottingham Review and General Advertiser for the Midland Counties (Friday, 8 November 1850); found at The British Newspaper Archive