Elizabeth Shaw Melville sighted (mistakenly?)

Update 2: In yet another society page mention, the second wife of Herman Melville's deceased brother Allan appears in connection with a stage performance by Lydia Thompson:

Mrs. Allan Melville, of New York, gave a box party to see Lydia Thompson, on Saturday evening to Senator Fair, Judge and Mrs. MacArthur, Miss Carrie Lathers and Mr. Coleman. After the play a supper was partaken of at Wormley’s.
-- Evening Star, April 5, 1886; found at Genealogy Bank

Lydia Thompson was then appearing in Oxygen, "one of the stupidest burlesques that have ever been placed upon the stage" according to one contemporary critic who nevertheless praised its star as a "true burlesquer":

"She dances with her old agility, sings fairly and is graceful in her acting."
--Washington, D. C. Critic-Record, May 22, 1886

At any rate, this attending and hosting parties in high society was very much in the line of Jane Louise Dempsey Melville. 

Update 1: The newspaper notice lists "Mrs. Herman Melville" among the reception guests, but is that a mistake for "Mrs. Allan Melville," widow of Herman's deceased younger brother?

Certainly Elizabeth Shaw Melville was well connected as the daughter of Judge Shaw, especially in Boston, but those elite names in the New York Graphic society item seem more like social acquaintances of Jane Dempsey Randolph Melville (1824-1890).  And neighbors, maybe? Mrs. Allan Melville's home was still on 35th Street, near to the Townsends' home on 34th where the party for Madame Lucca took place. In the New York Tribune for December 3, 1886, "Mrs. Allan Melville" is listed under the heading "Musical and Dramatic Notes" among subscribers for a "substantial farewell testimonial" to Steve Massett (celebrated "Jeems Pipes" of Pipesville in California).

I meant to follow up on this before now, but forgot about it until seeing this one show up in the gallery of popular posts at Melvilliana.

And in high society.  From the New York Daily Graphic, Friday, May 1, 1874:

PERSONALITIES.
... A very pleasant reception was given by Mrs. John D. Townsend, at her residence in West Thirty-fourth street, on Wednesday evening, in honor of Madame Lucca. Among the guests were Mrs. ex-Judge Roosevelt and daughter, Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence Turnure, Mrs. Herman Melville, and Mrs. John T. Beeckman. The music was by Professor Eben's orchestra, and the floral display is understood to have been very fine. 

Found at Fultonhistory.com

Later, to clarify: Despite the impression created by Google search results, the portrait below is a Guy Little Theatrical Photograph in the V&A collections, of opera singer Pauline Lucca--not Herman Melville's wife! Pauline Lucca (1841-1908) was a "prominent operatic soprano," born in Vienna.  Rivalry with Mathilde Mallinger reportedly motivated her triumphant US tour, 1872-1874. 

Photograph of Pauline Lucca, late 19th c. Guy Little Collection 

Copyright: © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Mrs. John D. Townsend was Elizabeth A. Delano Swan Townsend, the former Miss Delano Swan of Boston.  Her husband was the "well-known criminal lawyer" John Drake Townsend (1835-1896).  Townsend wrote the posthumously published indictment of Tammany Hall, New York in Bondage (1901).  Both Townsends made the news for their support of women's suffrage.

"Mrs. ex-Judge Roosevelt" is probably the former Cornelia Van Ness,  "for many years queen in the leading society of New York" and wife of then ex-Judge James John Roosevelt (1795-1875).  Appleton's Cyclopaedia acknowledges her "good service in organizing hospital and charitable associations for the aid of the National troops during the civil war" and later support of New York charities.

Lawrence Turnure at his death in 1899 was "one of the best-known bankers of New York."  Mrs. Lawrence Turnure was the former Jane Redfield.

Mrs. John T. Beeckman and her husband are unknown to me at this point.  Connected with the old Albany Beeckmans?

Looks like Eben's Orchestra kept busy playing at all kinds of New York social events...

Enceladus

Manitou Stone in Newbury, MA
Image Credit: Mary Gage via Stone Structures of North America

"No more now you sideways followed the sad pasture's skirt, but took your way adown the long declivity, fronting the mystic height. In mid field again you paused among the recumbent sphinx-like shapes thrown off from the rocky steep. You paused; fixed by a form defiant, a form of awfulness. You saw Enceladus the Titan, the most potent of all the giants, writhing from out the imprisoning earth;—turbaned with upborn moss he writhed; still, though armless, resisting with his whole striving trunk, the Pelion and the Ossa hurled back at him;—turbaned with upborn moss he writhed; still turning his unconquerable front toward that majestic mount eternally in vain assailed by him, and which, when it had stormed him off, had heaved his undoffable incubus upon him, and deridingly left him there to bay out his ineffectual howl...."

"Not unworthy to be compared with that leaden Titan, wherewith the art of Marsy and the broad-flung pride of Bourbon enriched the enchanted gardens of Versailles;—and from whose still twisted mouth for sixty feet the waters yet upgush, in elemental rivalry with those Etna flames, of old asserted to be the malicious breath of the borne-down giant;—not unworthy to be compared with that leaden demi-god—piled with costly rocks, and with one bent wrenching knee protruding from the broken bronze;—not unworthy to be compared with that bold trophy of high art, this American Enceladus, wrought by the vigorous hand of Nature's self, it did go further than compare;—it did far surpass that fine figure molded by the inferior skill of man. Marsy gave arms to the eternally defenseless; but Nature, more truthful, performed an amputation, and left the impotent Titan without one serviceable ball-and-socket above the thigh."
Pierre (1852), 470-471

Plagiarizing Napoleon's Praise in "Jimmy Rose"

In his glory days before bankruptcy, Jimmy Rose is said by the narrator of Melville's short story "Jimmy Rose" (first published in Harper's magazine, November 1855) to have plagiarized a compliment. Plagiarized in a good way, since done in praise of a hero:

"Sir," said he, in a great drawing-room in Broadway, as he extended toward General G----- a brace of pistols set with turquois. "Sir," said Jimmy with a Castilian flourish and a rosy smile, "there would have been more turquois here set, had the names of your glorious victories left room." 

Ah, Jimmy, Jimmy! Thou didst excel in compliments. But it was inwrought with thy inmost texture to be affluent in all things which give pleasure. And who shall reproach thee with borrowed wit on this occasion, though borrowed indeed it was? Plagiarize otherwise as they may, not often are the men of this world plagiarists in praise.

Melville assures us the compliment to General G (for Gaines, as in Edmund P. Gaines?) was "borrowed wit," without identifying any source.

Melville is not kidding here, the praise is plagiarized--from Napoleon.  In complimenting General G----- on the number of his victories while making a presentation of pistols, Jimmy Rose adapts the eloquence anecdotally attributed to Napoleon when doing the same thing:

He [Napoleon] presented Moreau, on one occasion, with, a magnificent pair of pistols as a cadeau. "I intended," said he, " to have got the names of your victories engraved upon them, but there was not room for them."

Quoted from "Eloquence of the Camp--Napoleon Bonaparte" in the December 1847 Dublin University Magazine, reprinted in Littell's Living Age (January 29, 1848) and the February 1848 Eclectic Magazine.

An earlier version of the same anecdote more closely matches Melville's conceit, with diamonds on Moreau's pistols described as competing for space with the desired engraving of the recipient's many martial triumphs:

ELEGANT COMPLIMENT TO MOREAU.

It was in 1796 that the directory first introduced the practice of giving arms of honour to those individuals who had distinguished themselves in the field. Buonaparte, on becoming consul, abandoned this custom, and only recurred to it once, in favour of Moreau. Soon after the winter campaign, which had been distinguished by the battle of Hohenlinden, Napoleon presented the victor with a pair of pistols richly set with brilliants, and taking them out of his hands immediately after, gave them to the minister of the interior (Lucien), with directions that the general's victories should be engraven on them. "But not all of them," he added; "for in that case there will be no room for the diamonds!"

Quoted from The Napoleon Anecdotes, ed. W. H. Ireland, vol. 3 (Boston, 1830), 179,

Battle of Hohenlinden

the view from Jupiter

Earth and moon

"'Fellow-men! we must go, and obtain a glimpse of what we are from the Belts of Jupiter and the Moons of Saturn, ere we see ourselves aright."


--Mardi: And a Voyage Thither Volume 2, chapter 71 - A Book from the "Ponderings of Old Bardianna"

the finest thing Herman Melville never said

Library of Congress

Sorry, wrong Melville:

We cannot live for ourselves alone. Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads, and along these sympathetic fibers, our actions run as causes and return to us as results.  HERMAN MELVILLE
Hillary Clinton

"We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men."
Brainy Quote

"We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects."  Quotations Page

"We cannot live for ourselves alone. Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads, and along these sympathetic fibers, our actions run as causes and return to us as results.” 

Garrison Keillor

NYC Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg

AllAuthor

Interaction Institute for Social Change

All these lovely quotes and misquotes about "sympathetic threads" and "invisible fibers" (or in some versions, "sympathetic fibers" and "invisible threads") connecting humanity derive from a sermon by the once famous Anglican preacher Henry Melvill (1798-1871).

via East India Company at Home

On Tuesday morning, June 12, 1855, the Rev. Henry Melvill gave a sermon on "Partaking in Other Men's Sins" at St. Margeret's Church, Lothbury.  No. 2,365 in the "Penny Pulpit" series, Melvill's exposition of 2 John 11 was reprinted in a book of Melvill's Golden Lectures for 1855.  Here's the original quote in its original context, Henry Melvill's sermon on the evil consequences of setting a bad example:

You see, then, how in a variety of ways the fact that every man may set an example generates this other fact, that every man may be partaker of the sins of other men. We allow no man to shelter himself under the plea of insignificance. We deny that a man can be insignificant; he was formed in the image of his God, he is destined to be immortal. We deny yet more strongly a Christian to be insignificant; he is "a city set upon a hill;" penury cannot make him insignificant, lowliness of station cannot make him insignificant; he is a new creature, and as a new creature must attract attention and become a centre of influence. There is not one of you whose actions do not operate on the actions of others—operate, we mean, in the way of example. He would be insignificant who could only destroy his own soul; but you are all, alas! of importance enough to help also to destroy the souls of others; and henceforwards we would have you remember, that whensoever you act you act for a multitude; eyes are upon you, many or few, according to the position that you occupy ; some are either watching to take pattern, or waiting for your halting. Be vicious, and viciousness may go down as an heir-loom in half a hundred families; be inconsistent, and enmity to the gospel may be propagated over a parish ; give occasions of offence, and many may fall; those who are entering in the narrow way may be discouraged, and those who have already entered may be made to stumble. Ye live not for yourselves; ye cannot live for yourselves ; a thousand fibres connect you with your fellow-men, and along those fibres, as along sympathetic threads, run your actions as causes, and return to you as effects. Ye sin not for yourselves; ye cannot sin for yourselves; ye are members of a body, and as no member can suffer alone, neither can any be injurious alone. Oh! fearful but unquestioned power which every one of us possesses—the power through the influence of example of multiplying ourselves, so that we may sin in places where we have never been, and in times when we shall not be alive. Example is like the press; a thing done is the thought printed; it may be repeated, if it cannot be recalled; it has gone forth, with a self-propagating power, and may run to the ends of the earth, and descend from generation to generation. So then, my brethren, appear we must at the tribunal of God; judged we must be by things done in the body; but when our personal actions have all been examined and weighed in themselves, alas! alas! there may remain a catalogue which thought itself can hardly measure; and these may be made up of infractions—infractions through example, for example may be justly said to bid God speed to evil doers—infractions to the prohibition contained in the words—" He that biddeth him God speed is partaker of his evil deeds."  -- Henry Melvill, The Golden Lectures page 454.

Here's the quotation from a nineteenth-century collection, correctly attributed to "H. Melvill": 

EXAMPLE—Evil Influence of.

Be vicious, and viciousness may go down as an heirloom in half a hundred families; be inconsistent, and enmity to the Gospel may be propagated over a parish; give occasions of offence, and many may full; those who are entering in the narrow way may be discouraged, and those who have already entered may be made to stumble. Ye live not for yourselves; ye cannot live for yourselves; a thousand fibres connect you with your fellow-men, and along those fibres, as along sympathetic threads, run your actions as causes, and return to you as effects.
H. Melvill.

Six Thousand Illustrations of Moral and Religious Truths (London, 1885), ed. John Bate, 311-12. In 1885 the deceased preacher was far more famous than the living writer, and readers on both sides of the Atlantic could be expected to know "H. Melvill" meant the Reverend Henry Melvill. If they didn't the index told them: "Melvill, Rev. H."

It's a simple case of mistaken identity.  Showing among other things how error multiplies, and also the deceptive authority of numbers.  A thousand false iterations, in this case a thousand (at least?) mis-attributions of the "sympathetic threads" quote to Herman Melville, do not validate the statement. 

Not that Herman Melville would necessarily have disclaimed the fine words of Reverend Melvill.  While visiting London in 1849, Herman made a point of going to hear Henry preach.  Melville on Melvill:

This morning breakfasted at 10, at the Hotel de Sabloneire (very nice cheap little snuggery being closed on Sundays)  Had a "sweet ommelette" which was delicious.  Thence walked to St: Thomas's Church, Charter House, Goswell Street, to hear my famed namesake (almost) "The Reverend H Melvill."  I had seen him placarded as to deliver a Charity Sermon.  The church was crowded--the sermon was admirable (granting the Rev: gentleman's premises).  Indeed he deserves his reputation.  I do not think that I hardly ever heard so good a discourse before--that is from an "orthodox" divine.  [entry for December 16, 1849, Melville's Journals]

 Update: see more proof here, if you need it...

• https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2013/02/henry-melvills-thousand-fibres-and.html

The Rev. Henry Melvill on Partaking in Other Men's Sins

 

 Related posts:

• Psuedo-Melville and Fake Fanon
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2021/12/pseudo-melville-and-fake-fanon-prophets.html

• Henry Melvill's thousand fibres and sympathetic threads, proved
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2013/02/henry-melvills-thousand-fibres-and.html

• Henry Melvill said it
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2016/04/henry-melvill-said-it.html 

• Another fine quotation by Rev Henry Melvill https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2014/05/another-fine-quotation-by-rev-henry.html

• Two more quotations wrongly ascribed to Herman Melville
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2014/05/two-more-quotations-wrongly-ascribed-to.html

• Koestler and Melville on originality
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2014/08/koestler-and-melville-on-originality.html

• Amiel on Aging, not Melville
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2014/08/amiel-on-aging-not-melville.html
  

Lacordaire, the model for Melville's Dominican in CLAREL

"The people once elected me
To be their spokesman. In this gown
I sat in legislative hall
A champion of true liberty--
God's liberty for one and all--
Not Satan's license. Mine's the state
Of a staunch Catholic Democrat."
--Clarel 2.25

Melville’s portrait of the Dominican priest in Clarel as “A champion of true liberty” draws heavily on the real life and times of Father Henri–Dominique Lacordaire (1802-1861). "Dieu et la Liberté!" was the motto of the journal L’Avenir (The Future), founded in 1830 by Lacordaire with Montalembert and others dedicated to the extension of civil liberties including basic freedoms of religion and education (separation of church and state), freedom of the press, freedom of association, and the extension of voting rights. In the 1862 review essay on "Lacordaire and Catholic Progress," Melville's converted countryman Orestes Brownson praised Lacordaire as:

"inherently a brave man, what we call a manly man, the hero of the pulpit, and the champion of free speech, free education, free thought, and free discussion."
-- Brownson's Quarterly Review - July 1862 

In her 1867 biography, Dora Greenwell calls Lacordaire

"the tried champion of popular liberty."  (130) -- Dora Greenwell, Lacordaire

Melville's democratically inclined Dominican distinguishes true liberty from a worldly, carnal understanding of freedom or "Satan's license." So too, Lacordaire, from the pulpit of Notre Dame preached that without Christ and the Church, "liberty becomes license" (in the paraphrase by Greenwell, 72).

Melville's Dominican "sat in legislative hall" as an elected representative of the people. Likewise Lacordaire was famous in his time for briefly serving in the French National Assembly. Historian Robert Gildea explains:

"Lacordaire was elected in Marseille, one of twenty priests and three bishops to be elected to the National Assembly, and took his place there dressed in his white Dominican robes."  Children of the Revolution: the French, 1799-1914 (Harvard University Press, 2010), 130.

Closer to Melville's milieu, volume 24 of Bentley's Magazine (1848) features a report on the National Assembly that laments the absence of Lacordaire:

"The strange white robe of the eloquent Dominican monk, the Pere Lacordaire, has disappeared: he has retired in disgust before the tumultuous nature of the National Assembly."  (77) -- Bentley's Miscellany, Volume 24

Writing in the London Theological Review 11 (1874), Charles Beard included the white robe in his catalog of essential traits and accomplishments of Lacordaire:

One of the great religious sensations of the times was the appearance of the white Dominican robe in the pulpit of Notre Dame, after so many years during which the public wearing of the dress of any religious order had been prohibited. Lacordaire lived to exhibit the same habit upon the benches of the National Assembly of 1848... But much more curious and interesting than this episode of religious reaction in France, is the completeness with which the mediaeval idea of holiness took possession of Lacordaire's mind, and the reconciliation which to a certain extent he effected in himself between the ascetic saint and the orator, the politician, the man of letters.
-- The Theological Review, Volume 11

Lacordaire's monastic asceticism is quite visibly shared by Melville's Dominican. Indeed, it's practically the first thing Clarel, Derwent, Rolfe, Vine, and company notice about the stranger, after his white robe:

Surprise they knew, yet made a stir
Of welcome, gazing on the man
In white robe of Dominican,
Of aspect strong, though cheek was spare,
Yellowed with tinge athlete may wear
Whom rigorous masters overtrain
When they with scourge of more and more
Would macerate him into power.
Inwrought herewith was yet the air
And open frontage frankly fair
Of one who'd moved in active scene
And swayed men where they most convene.  -- Clarel 2.25

Melville seems to have picked up his word "macerate" from The Inner Life of the Very Reverend Père Lacordaire, of the Order of Preachers (Dublin, 1867), which thus recalls Lacordaire's monastic "austerities":

"every kind of maceration in use among the saints; — hair-cloths, disciplines, scourges of every kind and description, were all known and practised by him!" (343) 

-- Bernard Chocarne, Inner Life

Melville's Rolfe looks "incredulous" at the Dominican's description of himself as a "Catholic Democrat." "Hardly those terms ye reconcile, " observes the priest, yet that's what Lacordaire was all about, "reconciling democracy with Catholicity" ("Two Catholic Reformers," Annals of St Joseph Volume 28 (July 1916) pages 73-75 at 73). Orestes Brownson, again, cited

"the democratic tendencies so apparent in Pere Lacordaire"
-- Brownson's Review - July 1862

 as essential and characteristic qualities.

James Trenor, in the translator's preface to Montalembert's Memoir of the Abbé Lacordaire (London, 1863) attests to Lacordaire's reputation for the very attributes that Melville gives his Dominican priest:

He fought for liberty; he was for twenty years the idol of the French youth. He was one of the greatest of modern orators. He was sent to represent France in the National Assembly at a time when the frock of the monk was looked upon with anything but favor.  (vi-vii)

In the introduction to American Risorgimento (The Ohio State University Press, 2009) Dennis Berthold summarizes Melville's take on the Dominican as "a satirical portrait of the Dominican priest" (page 23; elaborated in chapter 6 at pages 241-248). In his 2004 article for Nineteenth-Century Literature on "The Italian turn of thought" in Clarel, Professor Berthold pointed out that the Dominican’s confidence in Rome oddly ignores the curbed authority of the Pope in recently unified Italy (359-366). But "satirical portrait" ought to be reconsidered now, in light of Melville's use of defining details from Lacordaire's real-life story as the basis for his treatment of the Dominican. Even the historical incongruity remarked by Berthold nicely registers the influence of Lacordaire, who died nearly a decade before the 1870 annexation of Rome.

Lacordaire’s earlier activism in the cause of democratic liberties, his memorable election in 1848 to the French National Assembly, his eloquence in the pulpit of Notre Dame, and even his rumored “austerities” in the exercise of monastic self-discipline—all widely reported in contemporary sources—gave Melville ample material for his portrait of the

“Disinterested, earnest, pure
And liberal” -- Clarel 2. 26

exponent of Roman Catholicism.

Here's Lacordaire himself, writing in February 1861 on "Christianity and Democracy":

...the union of liberty and Christianity is the sole possible salvation of the future. Christianity alone can give liberty its real nature, and liberty alone can give Christianity the means of influence necessary to it.

M. de Tocqueville understood this, and this is the great feature of his life. Christianity made him a complete liberal, pure, disinterested, superior to the parties which divided the men of his day, and God willed that despite this superiority, he should win the unanimous homage of France, Europe and America. His opinions, like his memory, should be the compass of all those who think like you, Sir, and in the eulogium which I passed upon him, on a memorable occasion, I had no other intention than to throw into relief a figure evidently given us as a model. 

-- Montalembert, Lacordaire's Letters to Young Men, trans. James Trenor (London, 1865), 200-201.

Aha! So Melville puts Lacordaire's own words in Derwent's mouth (Derwent? I think that's right) in sympathetically describing the Dominican as disinterested, pure, liberal. In his portrait of the Dominican, Melville seems even to have appropriated the memorializing project that Lacordaire attempted for de Tocqueville, only applying it to Lacordaire himself. Just as Father Lacordaire says he aimed to eulogize de Tocqueville, so Melville, too, through his borrowings from the life of the historical Lacordaire, has attempted

"to throw into relief a figure evidently given us as a model." 

Related posts

• Saints as Syrens
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2020/08/saints-as-syrens.html

• Clarel's name
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2019/11/clarels-name.html

Old Mortality and Melville's approach to rewriting history

renewing with his chisel the half-defaced inscriptions....

Renewing gravestones with hammer and chisel was the unpaid business of Old Mortality, the source (not the main subject) of Sir Walter Scott's Old Mortality (1816).  

Rennovating or "retouching" old inscriptions:  what a great metaphor for Melville's habit of re-writing from sources!  Melville thought so.  Acknowledging a pamphlet autobiography as the primary source for Israel Potter (1856), Melville in the fanciful dedication compares his inventive rewrite of the original narrative to

"a dilapidated old tombstone retouched."  

Fittingly, Melville returns to the tombstone image and finishes the job of retouching in the last chapter, which as Alide Cagidemetrio points out in Fictions of the Past is titled Requiescat in Pace.  Cagidemetrio (and who else, I wonder?) gets the allusion to Scott's Old Mortality, and writes with fine insight about its significance for Melville's characterization of Israel Potter, and more broadly as a poet's approach to the rewriting of history:

The “old tombstone retouched” is a topos for the “poetics” of historical fiction.  The Cameronian tombstones in Walter Scott’s Old Mortality may serve as its most illustrious example.  The introduction to the novel is in fact the introduction to a character of the past, Old Mortality.  He is a forgotten, poor, and aged patriot turned by historical events, like Melville’s Israel, into a wanderer.”  Fictions of the Past:  Hawthorne & Melville (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), 182.

"'Poetics' of historical fiction" is wonderful.  Aesthetics too or an aesthetic seems also implied.  Some day we might try elaborating on that theme, here at Melvilliana, Melville's aesthetics of the rewrite.

The use of multiple personae is interesting, too, and reminds me of Melville's experimenting with imaginary narrators and editors in his manuscript "Burgundy Club" sketches.  For great insight into that strategy check out Robert A. Sandberg's 1989 article on "the adjustment of screens."  Similarly the story of Old Mortality, as one of Walter Scott's Tales of My Landlord, has been redacted supposedly through various authorial and editorial personae, including (besides Scott himself and the landlord of the Wallace inn), the fictive narrator Peter Pattieson (deceased) and fictive editor Jedediah Cleishbotham.

From the description of Old Mortality's occupation as Peter Pattieson allegedly gave it in manuscript, according to Jedediah Cleishbotham in the "preliminary" first chapter of Old Mortality (Tale II in Tales of My Landlord:

"During this long pilgrimage, the pious enthusiast regulated his circuit so as annually to visit the graves of the unfortunate Covenanters, who suffered by the sword, or by the executioner, during the reigns of the two last monarchs of the Stewart line....In the most lonely recesses of the mountains, the moor-fowl shooter has been often surprised to find him busied in cleaning the moss from the grey stones, renewing with his chisel the half-defaced inscriptions, and repairing the emblems of death with which these simple monuments are usually adorned.

"... As the wanderer was usually to be seen bent on this pious task within the precincts of some country churchyard, or reclined on the solitary tombstone among the heath, disturbing the plover and the black-cock with the clink of his chisel and mallet, with his old white pony grazing by his side, he acquired, from his converse among the dead, the popular appellation of Old Mortality.

"... Conversing with others, he was grave and sententious, not without a cast of severity. But he is said never to have been observed to give way to violent passion, excepting upon one occasion, when a mischievous truant-boy defaced with a stone the nose of a cherub's face, which the old man was engaged in retouching."

Old Mortality / sculptural group at Laurel Hill Cemetery, Philadelphia
by James Thom (c. 1836) via Wikimedia Commons