Gil Blas (and Don Juan) on the prairie

From Gil Blas by Alain-René Lesage:

"Henceforth I will make a better choice of a confidant, and keep one of greater ability than you. Go,” added he, pushing me by the shoulder out of his closet, “go tell my treasurer to give you a hundred ducats, and may Heaven bless you. Good-by, Master Gil Blas, I wish you all manner of prosperity, and a little better taste.” --The Archbishop’s Veracious Secretary

Smollett's translation online of the same scene, Book 7 Chapter 4:

God speed you, good Master Gil Blas! I heartily pray that you may do well in the world! There is nothing to stand in your way, but the want of a little better taste.

Lesage's vain archbishop can't take the criticism he asked for. Thus does Gil Blas humorously fail in the role of scribe and confidant. On the prairie, the captain is the obliging scribe. In this particular dialogue, the captain momentarily trips up his critical Imaginary Friend, now playing the role of archbishop to the narrator's Gil Blas:

"... Dear critic, and lover of bathos! hast thou found poetry in a full stomach?"

I. F. "The devil's in the moon. —And there goes another wolf 'concert'"—

"With the thorough bass of a thousand bulls."

I. F. — "All as thoroughly musical as the donkey braying in the caravan camps. I wish you a very good evening, 'and a little better taste.' "--Scenes Beyond the Western Border, January 1852 and Scenes and Adventures in the Army

In blaming the moon for his brief burst of romantic feeling, the normally staid and practical Imaginary Friend quotes from a stanza in the first canto of Bryon's Don Juan:

CXIII
The sun set, and up rose the yellow moon:
     The devil's in the moon for mischief; they
Who call'd her CHASTE, methinks, began too soon
     Their nomenclature; there is not a day,
The longest, not the twenty-first of June,
     Sees half the business in a wicked way
On which three single hours of moonshine smile—
And then she looks so modest all the while.  --Don Juan, Canto the First

For more Byron on the prairie, see old posts Ah, Byron and a poet's audacity.
Below, the full exchange between the Captain and his Imaginary Friend, as originally published in the January 1852 Southern Literary Messenger:

Melville re-imagined one of his sources, Scoresby, as Dr. Zogranda. In The Trying-Out of Moby-Dick, Howard Vincent credits Willard Thorp with recognizing

that Zogranda is a misspelling of the name of Dr. Sangrade from Le Sage's Gil Blas. (p235)

Similarly noted in the Hendricks House Moby-Dick:

Willard Thorp has suggested that Melville invented this doctor by misspelling the name of the physician of Valladolid, Sangrado, to whom the chief character attaches himself as apprentice in Le Sage’s Gil Blas.

Melville's Sources lists all three citations to Thorp,Vincent, and the Mansfield and Vincent edition of Moby-Dick.