Sops for hell-hounds in PIERRE

Aeneas and the Sibyl in the Underworld
Arnold Houbraken (1660–1719) via The Metropolitan Museum of Art

This post aims to help readers achieve a better grasp of metaphorical language in Herman Melville's seventh book, Pierre; Or, The Ambiguities (New York, 1852). The need for such help may be seen in a few misleading footnotes for the 2017 Norton Critical Edition, edited by Robert S. Levine and Cindy Weinstein, that occasionally miss the boat, so to speak. Students, take heart. Faulty footnotes like the one on steamers as clams, discussed in a previous post, show that even highly trained professionals have trouble understanding what Melville wrote.

Another bit of editorial misdirection occurs in Book 25 (Lucy, Isabel, and Pierre. Pierre at His Book. Enceladus) at pages 331-2 of the NCE. Context: Pierre is a struggling author, having fled to the Big City with his pretend-wife (and alleged half-sister) Isabel, along with their farmgirl-friend Delly. Out of the blue, Pierre's angelical ex-fiancée Lucy Tartan has joined them. Lucy's brother Fred and her rejected suitor Glen Stanly have attempted one intervention already, a failure. Since Fred and Glen vowed "swift retribution," Pierre has every reason to expect intolerable public shaming of some kind, either a violent physical attack or a lawsuit. Granting the noble "manliness" of his sworn enemies, Pierre figures correctly that legal action will not satisfy Fred and Glen as "gentlemen of spirit":

... so invincible is the natural, untamable, latent spirit of a courageous manliness in man, that though now socially educated for thousands of years in an arbitrary homage to the Law, as the one only appointed redress for every injured person; yet immemorially and universally, among all gentlemen of spirit, once to have uttered independent personal threats of personal vengeance against your foe, and then, after that, to fall back slinking into a court, and hire with sops a pack of yelping pettifoggers to fight the battle so valiantly proclaimed; this, on the surface, is ever deemed very decorous, and very prudent—a most wise second thought; but, at bottom, a miserably ignoble thing.

 https://books.google.com/books?id=JXK7HN62EcQC&pg=PA457&lpg=PA457&dq#v=onepage&q&f=false

The NCE editors rightly gloss Melville's word pettifoggers as "Inferior or disreputable lawyers" but mistakenly equate sops with "fools." In context, the plural noun sops can't mean "fools." Fops are fools, and saps, but sops are what you might pay lowlife lawyers with. Grose's 1785 Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue defines SOP as

"a bribe. A sop for Cerberus, a bribe for a porter, turnkey, or gaoler."

https://books.google.com/books?id=LXMKAAAAIAAJ&pg=RA18-PA7&dq#v=onepage&q&f=false

In a word, sop means bribe. Literally a piece of bread soaked in liquor, sop by extension may designate "anything given to pacify" according to Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language:

"SOP, sop, n. s. what is sopped; any thing steeped in liquor, commonly to be eaten; any thing given to pacify, from the sop given to Cerberus."

Webster likewise invokes Cerberus, the monstrous three-headed dog that guards Hades:

 SOP, n.

... Any thing given to pacify; so called from the sop given to Cerberus, in mythology.

--A Dictionary of the English Language Volume 2 (London, 1832). 

In the best dictionaries of Melville's day, the word "sops" itself calls out Cerberus. In Book 6 of The Aeneid, the Sybil of Cumae pacifies Cerberus with drugged honey-cake. Dryden translates:

The prudent Sibyl had before prepar'd
A sop, in honey steep'd, to charm the guard;
Which, mix'd with pow'rful drugs, she cast before
His greedy grinning jaws, just op'd to roar.
With three enormous mouths he gapes; and straight,
With hunger press'd, devours the pleasing bait.

In Pierre, Melville extends the allusion to Cerberus with an image of hungry curs, seemingly primed for attack. Literally a team of legal hacks, Melville's "pettifoggers" are depicted in figurative language as an aggressive "pack" of "yelping" animals--paid off like Virgil's Cerberus, in "sops." Signifying, in this context, bribes.

Metaphorically then, Melville represents unscrupulous lawyers as dogs or Hounds of Hades. To sic litigious hell-hounds on Pierre would be the prudent way of exacting revenge. "We'll see you in court." However, as Pierre rightly calculates, his cousin Glendinning Stanly and Frederic Tartan are too noble for that course of action. Instead the cousins meet in the street, with tragic results you can read about in the Norton Critical Edition; the 1852 first edition; the 1949 Hendricks House edition; the 1971 Northwestern-Newberrry Edition; or Hershel Parker's Kraken Edition (Harper Collins, 1995), illustrated by Maurice Sendak.

Related posts

• Clams, boats, and footnotes in Pierre
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2019/05/clams-boats-and-footnotes-in-pierre.html 

• Where Pierre shot Glen Stanly
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2020/05/where-pierre-shot-glen-stanly.html

• Melville's illy
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2019/01/melvilles-illy.html 

Sterling G. Cato in 1848, seeking Typee

Tue, Nov 28, 1848 – Page 3 · Spirit of the South (Eufaula, Alabama) · Newspapers.com
From the Eufaula Democrat (Eufaula, Alabama), November 28, 1848:

NOTICE.— To all to whom this shall come—GREETING; and to borrowers of books in particular. Bring up and return "Typee," and entitle yourself who ever you are to the thanks and gratitude of

S. G. CATO.
Eufaula, Nov. 27, 1848.

Georgia native Sterling Green Cato (1817-1867) was then an Alabama lawyer, hence the formality of his published notice asking for the return of Typee by an unknown or at least unidentified borrower. As Territorial Judge in Kansas,1855-1858, S. G. Cato would become notorious for (besides his drinking, gambling, and saying "de Cote" for "the court") his pro-slavery agenda and activism. In Alabama Cato and his brother Lewis Lewellyn Cato belonged to the influential secessionist group known as the Eufaula Regency. S. G. Cato died in Liberty, Missouri on October 24, 1867, at the age of 50 not 60 years as reported in the Liberty Tribune of October 25, 1867; reprinted November 2, 1867 in the viciously racist Weekly Caucasian. About which see Aaron Astor, "The Lexington Weekly Caucasian: White Supremacist Political Discourse in post-Civil War Western Missouri," chapter 11 in Bleeding Kansas, Bleeding Missouri, ed. Jonathan Earle and Diane Mutti Burke (University Press of Kansas, 2013), pages 189-204.


Wed, Sep 8, 1869 – Page 2 · Harrisburg Telegraph (Harrisburg, Pennsylvania) · Newspapers.com

From our legal department: about Gansevoort Melville's autograph on the old Common Pleas Roll

New York, NY about 1842 / Image Credit: AES Online

An 1897 article in the New York Sun lists the name of Herman Melville's older brother Gansevoort among "noteworthy autographs" entered on "sundry loose foolscap sheets containing signatures of the attorneys who had been specially admitted to the bar in the Common Pleas between the years 1823 and 1846." Retired court clerk Nathaniel Jarvis, Jr. is credited with having the loose sheets bound in one volume, eventually to be placed (the writer of the article speculates) with the"Bar Institute."

OK, we need our lawyer now. Would that be the New York City Bar Association, or something like it? Does this volume of the old Common Pleas Roll now exist? Where? Maybe it's in the New York City Department of Records. Historic records including some Common Pleas archives are held at the Division of Old Records at 31 Chambers Street.

The lengthy 1897 tally of "noteworthy" names on the old Common Pleas Roll includes (for 1842, between Aaron Vanderpoel, Sr. and Richard B. Kimball):

"Gansevoort Melville, honored in Tammany Hall."

Wonderful and surprising, really, to find Gansevoort remembered this late as a Tammany orator.

One early and illustrious signature on the Common Pleas roll is "the cramped autograph of Charles Fenno Hoffman, who soon gave up law for literature, and wrote lyrics and songs." Other friends of Herman Melville with autographs entered in the roll are Cornelius Mathews (1837), Theodore E. Tomlinson (remembered as "the young man eloquent of the bar"), and George L. Duyckinck (1846).

The 1897 New York Sun article titled THE COMMON PLEAS ROLL is available via Fulton History:

http://fultonhistory.com/newspaper%209/New%20York%20NY%20Sun/New%20York%20NY%20Sun%201897%20Jan-Dec%20Grayscale/New%20York%20NY%20Sun%201897%20Jan-Dec%20Grayscale%20-%202254.pdf

The same old roll was described by James Wilton Brooks in his 1896  History of the Court of Common Pleas of the City and County of New York:

The original roll of the Court from 1821 to 1848, during which period every aspirant to the bar of the City of New York had first to be admitted to practice in the Common Pleas, shows almost every New York name which was prominent at that period, whether in the legal, social or business world. In those days every would-be lawyer had to pass several examinations before he was admitted to full practice.

He was first admitted to the Common Pleas as attorney at law. After three years of active practice he applied for admittance as counsellor at law to the Supreme Court. He had also to pass a special and supposedly equally thorough examination in the Court of Chancery.  (28-29)

Brooks in his Preface mentions having contributed the May 19, 1895 report for the NY Sun on the "End of the Common Pleas," so possibly he also wrote the 1897 Sun article that mentions Gansevoort Melville. Then again, the Sun writer's considerable knowledge of long-gone lawyers suggests an older writer or accomplice--perhaps A. Oakey Hall.

As reported also in the 1897 NY Sun article, Brooks's 1896 History notes that besides promising to uphold the Constitution, attorneys had to take the anti-duelling oath and swear never to participate “directly or indirectly in any duel.”