If there was ever a moment when Herman Melville stood a chance of recouping the readership he had lost by publishing Moby-Dick and Pierre, it may have been with the release, in 1855, of Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile. Written at the height of his powers (just after Encantadas and before Benito Cereno), this historical romance is based on the ghostwritten autobiography of Revolutionary War veteran R. Potter, whose career as a patriot soldier was thwarted by captivity, poverty, and prolonged exile in England. Potter is, among other things, a good read, from its wry send-up of Benjamin Franklin to its rendition of the famous naval battle between the Serapis and the Bon Homme Richard to its pungent images of eighteenth-century London. Lest the pace flag, Melville imports two Revolutionary War celebrities - Ethan Allen and John Paul Jones - into his tale and improvises, sometimes wildly, sometimes waggishly, on the adventure sequences. Gaudy yet grounded in history, humorous yet insightful, the swashbuckling Potter seems as if it should have been the popular success that had been eluding its author since Typee and Omoo. Yet despite favorable reviews, the novel never quite took off (in fact, it was eclipsed by another Revolutionary War romance, Kate Aylesford: A Story of the Refugees, released by Melville's own publisher, Putnam). More surprising still, not even the strip-mining of Melville's ouevre by twentieth-century critics has managed to reclaim what may be Melville's least read book. Critics who have addressed Potter have generally faulted it on one of two grounds. Lewis Mumford, Warner Berthoff and Newton Arvin have found it diffuse, to the point of negligence, hardly more than a heap of sketches - in short, a victim of its episodic format.(1) George Henry Lewes, Charles Feidelson Jr., and F. O. Matthiessen, meanwhile, have criticized the book's conclusion (Potter's exile) for its vagueness, nihilism, labored symbolism, and failure adequately to represent a key part of history (his destitution in London).(2) Matthiessen, pressing the issue farthest, scores the book's slurred climax as a failure of will on Melville's part. The author's over-identification with his protagonist, claims Matthiessen, subverted his artistic purpose. This second criticism surprises. Moby-Dick and Pierre are nothing. if not testimonies to a writer who faces up to the implications of a tale, whether that means killing off an entire cast of characters save one or grappling with themes such as atheism and incest. And as to Berthoff's and others' felt lack of a unifying organization (Israel Potter gives an impression of exceptional imaginative power scattering its effects more or less at random - Berthoff, p. 59), the table of contents alone reveals a comprehensive structural principle that belies the charge of impromptu execution. Israel in the Lion's Den, Samson among the Philistines, Israel's Flight Towards the Wilderness, Israel in Egypt: such chapter headings, absent in Melville's source (Henry Trumbull's Life and Remarkable Adventures of R. Potter), suggest a figural, or typological, scheme overarching this saga.(3) Melville seems to have framed the novel on his culture's premise that its history and destiny postfigured that of the Biblical Israel; that Americans were a chosen people, brought out of captivity, blessed by God and appointed to a divine spiritual and historical mission. But why should Melville have conceived his historical romance in such figural terms? Even more fundamentally, what was Melville's in adapting Potter? His aim, suggested contemporary French critic Emile Montegut, was to portray America's penchant for mythologizing her own history: Israel Potter ... represente le caractere americain au moment ou il etait en formation.(14) Montegut's approach has been updated by recent critics like Arnold Rampersad, who argues that Melville's aim . …