Apparently Melville like Coleridge, Dr. Johnson and De Quincey was an enthusiastic admirer of Sir Thomas Browne, even describing him as some kind of ‘cracked archangel’.

In fact one source of inspiration for Melville’s penning ‘Moby Dick’ was from his reading of Browne’s description of a beached sperma-ceti whale upon the Norfolk coast; Melville was taken by Browne’s observation of the smallness of its eye in proportion to it’s vast size. 

I always thought that Americans were proud of ‘Moby’ as the great American novel, with its symbolism of chasing the elusive American dream, but have recently encountered bloggers keen to down-grade its importance, considering it bloated in size and vastly over-rated. No pleasing some !