SOURCE: “Melville's Cosmopolitan: Bayard Taylor in The Confidence Man,” in Amerikastudien, Vol. 22, 1977, pp. 286-89.

In the following essay, Lang and Lease examine Herman Melville's portrayal of Taylor in The Confidence Man.

Shortly after finishing The Confidence-Man, Melville came down from the Berkshires to New York where he spent “a good stirring evening” with Evert Duyckinck (as Duyckinck described it in a diary entry dated October 1, 1856). According to Duyckinck, Melville was “charged to the muzzle with his sailor metaphysics and jargon of things unknowable” and overflowing with ironical wit. Duyckinck concludes his entry with a significant sentence that has been overlooked by commentators on The Confidence-Man: “[Melville] Said of Bayard Taylor that as some augur predicted the misfortunes of Charles I from the infelicity of his countenance so Taylor's prosperity ‘borne up by the Gods’ was written in his face.”¹ Melville's characterization of Taylor as a darling of the...