it. An action for libel,
however it may be decided, has at least the one inevitable result of
perpetuating it.

Take the historical case of the Man with the Iron Mask. Out of pure
deviltry, it would appear, Voltaire started the story, as mere a fiction
as one of his written romances, that the mysterious prisoner was no less
than a half-brother of Louis XIV; and Dumas, seeing the dramatic
possibilities of the legend, picturesquely elaborates it in _Le Vicomte
de Bragelonne_. Never, probably, was so impudent an invention, and
surely never one so successful; for it is in vain that historians expose
it over and over again. Learned editors have proved with no shadow of a
doubt that the real man of the mask was an obscure Italian political
adventurer; but though scholars may be convinced, the world will have
nothing of your Count Matthioli, and will probably go on believing
Voltaire's story to the end of time.

"At least there must have been something in it" is always the last word
on such debatable matters; and the curious thing is that, whenever a
doubt of the truth is expressed, it is never the victim, but always the
scandal, to which the benefit of the doubt is extended. Whatever the
proven fact, the world always prefers to hold fast by the disreputable
doubt.

All that is necessary is to find the dog a bad name. The world will see
that he never loses it. In this regard the oft-reiterated confidence of
the dead in the justice of posterity is one of the most pathetic of
illusions. "Posterity will see me righted," cries some poor victim of
human wrong, as he goes down into the darkness; but of all appeals, the
appeal to posterity is the most hopeless.

What posterity relishes is rather new scandals about its immortals than
tiresome belated justifications. It prefers its villains to grow blacker
with time, and welcomes proof of fallibility and frailty in its immortal
exemplars. For rehabilitation it has neither time nor inclination,
and it pursues certain luckless reputations beyond the grave with a
mysterious malignity.

Such a reputation is that of Edgar Allan Poe. One would have thought
that posterity would be eager to make up to his shade for the criminal
animus of Rufus Griswold, his first biographer. On the contrary, it
prefers to perpetuate the lying portrait; and no consideration of the
bequests of Poe's genius, or of his tragic struggles with adverse
conditions, no editorial advocacy, or documentary evidence i