d that the combination of Harry
Franco and the poet must assuredly bring forth great literary results
and financial success. But the partnership did not work at all well.
In a very short time Poe bought out his partner's interest through an
arrangement with Horace Greeley and moved the office of the paper into
Clinton Hall. But the _Broadway Journal_ under the management of Poe
was less of a success than it had been under Briggs and Poe, and the
poet retired from it in the first month of 1846.

This Clinton Hall in which Poe had his office was a substantial
building at the southwest corner of Nassau and Beekman streets. Temple
Court now stands on the site. A second and a third building of the
name have arisen in Astor Place, the second having been remodelled in
1854 from the Astor Place Opera House, the scene of the
Forrest-Macready riots. The present building, tall and heavy-looking,
is the home of the Mercantile Library, as each Clinton Hall has been
in its turn, and still retains the name first given to it in 1830,
when Governor De Witt Clinton presented a _History of England_ as a
nucleus for the library.

About the time when Poe was with the _Broadway Journal_ he moved into
a house not a great many steps from Broadway, in Amity Street, since
renamed West Third Street. Here amid surroundings marked by a
simplicity due less to simple tastes than poverty Poe lived and wrote
by the side of the delicate wife who was wasting away before his eyes.
Here he penned the _Philosophy of Composition_, by which he would make
it appear that _The Raven_ was not a product of inspiration, but the
work of calm reason and artistic construction,--a theory which no one
seems to have accepted. Here, too, he wrote _The Literati of New
York_, a series of papers that appeared in _Godey's Lady's Book_, and
were the sensation of the hour in literary circles. Their criticisms
were severe and impassioned, and one of the criticised, believing
himself ill-treated and his writings unjustly abused, sought
vindication. His answer entirely overlooked the libel laws and he was
promptly sued for damages by Poe. This was Thomas Dunn English, a
young man then twenty-four years old, who a few years before, in 1843,
had been asked by N.P. Willis to write a poem for the _New Mirror_.
The poem was written and sent to Willis with the suggestion that he
either print it or tear it up as he thought best. Willis printed it,
and though the writer came to be known