d him took
advantage of his change of fortune to slight and insult him. He was
sensitive and proud, and felt the change keenly. It was this which
embittered him. By nature no person was less inclined to reserve or
bitterness, and as a boy he was frank and generous to a fault." In
speaking of his poems, Mr. Sully remarked: "He has an eye for
dramatic, but not for scenic or artistic effect. Except in _The
Raven_, I can nowhere in his poems find a subject for a picture."

In closing these reminiscences, I may be allowed to make a few remarks
founded upon my actual personal knowledge of Poe, in at least the
phase of character in which he appeared to me. What he may have been
to his ordinary associates, or to the world at large, I do not know;
and in the picture presented to us by Dr. Griswold,--half maniac, half
demon,--I confess, I cannot recognize a trait of the gentle, grateful,
warm-hearted man whom I saw amid his friends,--his careworn face all
aglow with generous feeling in the kindness and appreciation to which
he was so little accustomed. His faults were sufficiently apparent;
but for these a more than ordinary allowance should be made, in
consideration of the unfavorable influences surrounding him from his
very birth. He was ever the sport of an adverse fortune. Born in
penury, reared in affluence, treated at one time with pernicious
indulgence and then literally turned into the streets, a beggar and an
outcast, deserted by those who had formerly courted him, maliciously
calumniated, smarting always under a sense of wrong and
injustice,--what wonder that his bright, warm, and naturally generous
and genial nature should have become embittered? What wonder that his
keenly sensitive and susceptible poetic temperament should have become
jarred, out of tune, and into harsh discord with himself and mankind?
Let the just and the generous pause before they judge; and upon their
lips the breath of condemnation will soften into a sigh of sympathy
and regret.

LX

ARTEMUS WARD

Poor Artemus! says Haweis in his lecture on the American humorist, I
shall not see his like again, as he appeared for a few short weeks
before an English audience at the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly.

Sometimes, as to looks, profoundly dejected, at others shy or
reproachful; nervously anxious to please (apparently), yet with a
certain twinkle at the back of his eye which convinced you of his
perfect _sang froid_, and one thing always--full,