t tastes and fashions
change, and few things are better calculated to inspire the literary
critic with humility than to read the prophecies in old reviews and see
how the future, now become the present, has quietly given them the lie.

From among the professional _litterateurs_ of his day emerges, with
ever sharper distinctness as time goes on, the name of Edgar Allan Poe
(1809-49). By the irony of fate Poe was born at Boston, and his first
volume, _Tamerlane, and Other Poems_, 1827, was printed in that city
and bore upon its title-page the words, "By a Bostonian." But his
parentage, so far as it was any thing, was Southern. His father was a
Marylander who had gone upon the stage and married an actress, herself
the daughter of an actress and a native of England. Left an orphan by
the early death of both parents, Poe was adopted by a Mr. Allan, a
wealthy merchant of Richmond, Va. He was educated partly at an English
school, was student for a time in the University of Virginia, and
afterward a cadet in the Military Academy at West Point. His youth was
wild and irregular; he gambled and drank, was proud, bitter, and
perverse, finally quarreled with his guardian and adopted father--by
whom he was disowned--and then betook himself to the life of a literary
hack. His brilliant but underpaid work for various periodicals soon
brought him into notice, and he was given the editorship of the
_Southern Literary Messenger_, published at Richmond, and subsequently
of the _Gentlemen's_--afterward _Graham's_--_Magazine_ in Philadelphia.
These and all other positions Poe forfeited through his dissipated
habits and wayward temper, and finally, in 1844, he drifted to New
York, where he found employment on the _Evening Mirror_ and then on the
_Broadway Journal_. He died of delirium tremens at the Marine Hospital
in Baltimore. His life was one of the most wretched in literary
history. He was an extreme instance of what used to be called the
"eccentricity of genius." He had the irritable vanity which is
popularly supposed to accompany the poetic temperament, and was so
insanely egotistic as to imagine that Longfellow and others were
constantly plagiarizing from him. The best side of Poe's character
came out in his domestic relations, in which he displayed great
tenderness, patience, and fidelity. His instincts were gentlemanly,
and his manner and conversation were often winning. In the place of
moral feeling he had the artistic