d of the magazine to
a Mr. Graham, a rival publisher. At this period Poe collected into two
volumes, and got them published as 'Tales of the Grotesque and
Arabesques', twenty-five of his stories, but he never received any
remuneration, save a few copies of the volumes, for the work. For some
time the poet strove most earnestly to start a magazine of his own, but
all his efforts failed owing to his want of capital.

The purchaser of Burton's magazine, having amalgamated it with another,
issued the two under the title of 'Graham's Magazine'. Poe became a
contributor to the new venture, and in November of the year 1840
consented to assume the post of editor.

Under Poe's management, assisted by the liberality of Mr. Graham,
'Graham's Magazine' became a grand success. To its pages Poe contributed
some of his finest and most popular tales, and attracted to the
publication the pens of many of the best contemporary authors. The
public was not slow in showing its appreciation of 'pabulum' put before
it, and, so its directors averred, in less than two years the
circulation rose from five to fifty-two thousand copies.

A great deal of this success was due to Poe's weird and wonderful
stories; still more, perhaps, to his trenchant critiques and his
startling theories anent cryptology. As regards the tales now issued in
'Graham's', attention may especially be drawn to the world-famed
"Murders in the Rue Morgue," the first of a series--'"une espece de
trilogie,"' as Baudelaire styles them--illustrative of an analytic phase
of Poe's peculiar mind. This 'trilogie' of tales, of which the later two
were "The Purloined Letter" and "The Mystery of Marie Roget," was
avowedly written to prove the capability of solving the puzzling riddles
of life by identifying another person's mind by our own. By trying to
follow the processes by which a person would reason out a certain thing,
Poe propounded the theory that another person might ultimately arrive,
as it were, at that person's conclusions, indeed, penetrate the
innermost arcanum of his brain and read his most secret thoughts. Whilst
the public was still pondering over the startling proposition, and
enjoying perusal of its apparent proofs, Poe still further increased his
popularity and drew attention to his works by putting forward the
attractive but less dangerous theorem that "human ingenuity could not
construct a cipher which human ingenuity could not solve."

This cryptographic asser