answer for, thou that first of men brought
the shepherd to Court, and made courtiers wild to go a Maying with the
shepherds.

XIV. To Edgar Allan Poe.

Sir,--Your English readers, better acquainted with your poems
and romances than with your criticisms, have long wondered at the
indefatigable hatred which pursues your memory. You, who knew the men,
will not marvel that certain microbes of letters, the survivors of your
own generation, still harass your name with their malevolence, while old
women twitter out their incredible and heeded slanders in the literary
papers of New York. But their persistent animosity does not quite
suffice to explain the dislike with which many American critics regard
the greatest poet, perhaps the greatest literary genius, of their
country. With a commendable patriotism, they are not apt to rate native
merit too low; and you, I think, are the only example of an American
prophet almost without honour in his own country.

The recent publication of a cold, careful, and in many respects
admirable study of your career ('Edgar Allan Poe,' by George Woodberry:
Houghton, Mifflin and Co., Boston) reminds English readers who have
forgotten it, and teaches those who never knew it, that you were,
unfortunately, a Reviewer. How unhappy were the necessities, how
deplorable the vein, that compelled or seduced a man of your eminence
into the dusty and stony ways of contemporary criticism! About the
writers of his own generation a leader of that generation should hold
his peace, he should neither praise nor blame nor defend his equals;
he should not strike one blow at the buzzing ephemerae of letters. The
breath of their life is in the columns of 'Literary Gossip;' and they
should be allowed to perish with the weekly advertisements on which
they pasture. Reviewing, of course, there must needs be; but great minds
should only criticise the great who have passed beyond the reach of
eulogy or fault-finding.

Unhappily, taste and circumstances combined to make you a censor; you
vexed a continent, and you are still unforgiven. What 'irritation of a
sensitive nature, chafed by some indefinite sense of wrong,' drove you
(in Mr. Longfellow's own words) to attack his pure and beneficent Muse
we may never ascertain. But Mr. Longfellow forgave you easily; for
pardon comes easily to the great. It was the smaller men, the Daweses,
Griswolds, and the like, that knew not how to forget. 'The New Yorkers
never f