ll. Three mayors
have lived there, and in the immediate vicinity dwelt such
distinguished literary persons as Bayard Taylor, Henry James, George
William Curtis, N.P. Willis (_Nym Crynkle_), our immortal Poe himself,
Anne Lynch,--poetess and hostess of one of the first and most
distinguished salons of America--Charles Hoffman, editor of the
_Knickerbocker_, and so on. Another centre of wit and wisdom was the
house of Dr. Orville Dewey,--whose Unitarian Church, at Broadway and
Waverly Place, was the subject of the first successful photograph in
this country by the secret process confided to Morse by Daguerre.

[Illustration: OLDEST BUILDING ON THE SQUARE. On this moment of writing
it is still standing on the south of Washington Square.]

Edgar Allan Poe lived with his sick young wife Virginia, on Carmine
Street, and lived very uncomfortably, too. The name of his
boarding-house keeper is lost to posterity, but the poet wrote of her
food: "I wish Kate our cat could see it. She would faint."

Poor Poe lived always somewhere near the Square. Once in a while he
moved away for a time, but he invariably gravitated back to it and to
his old friends there. It was in Carmine Street that he wrote his
"Arthur Gordon Pym," with Gowans the publisher for a fellow lodger; it
was on Sixth Avenue and Waverly Place that he created "Ligeia" and
"The Fall of the House of Usher." After Virginia's death, he took a
room just off the Square, and wrote the "Imp of the Perverse," with
her picture (it is said) above his desk. It was at these quarters that
Lowell called on him, and found him, alas! "not himself that day." The
old Square has no stranger nor sadder shade to haunt it than that of
the brilliant and melancholy genius who in life loved it so well.

Poe's friend Willis published many of his stories and articles in the
_Sun_, still a newcomer in the old field of journalism. Willis has his
own connection with the tale of the Square, though not a very
glorious one. The town buzzed for days with talk of the sensational
interview between _Nym Crinkle_ and Edwin Forrest, the actor. Mr.
Willis made some comments on Forrest's divorce, in an editorial, and
that player, so well adored by the American public, took him by the
coat collar in Washington Square and exercised his stage-trained
muscles by giving him a thorough and spectacular thrashing.

Somewhere in that neighbourhood, much earlier, another editor, William
Coleman, founder of the _Eve