orgave him,' says your latest biographer; and one scarcely
marvels at the inveteracy of their malice. It was not individual vanity
alone, but the whole literary class that you assailed. 'As a literary
people,' you wrote, 'we are one vast perambulating humbug.' After that
declaration of war you died, and left your reputation to the vanities
yet writhing beneath your scorn. They are writhing and writing still.
He who knows them need not linger over the attacks and defences of your
personal character; he will not waste time on calumnies, tale-bearing,
private letters, and all the noisome dust which takes so long in
settling above your tomb.

For us it is enough to know that you were compelled to live by your
pen, and that in an age when the author of 'To Helen' and' The Cask
of Amontillado' was paid at the rate of a dollar a column. When such
poverty was the mate of such pride as yours, a misery more deep than
that of Burns, an agony longer than Chatterton's, were inevitable
and assured. No man was less fortunate than you in the moment of his
birth--_infelix opportunitate vitae_. Had you lived a generation later,
honour, wealth, applause, success in Europe and at home, would all have
been yours. Within thirty years so great a change has passed over the
profession of letters in America; and it is impossible to estimate the
rewards which would have fallen to Edgar Poe, had chance made him the
contemporary of Mark Twain and of 'Called Back.' It may be that your
criticisms helped to bring in the new era, and to lift letters out of
the reach of quite unlettered scribblers. Though not a scholar, at least
you had a respect for scholarship. You might still marvel over such
words as 'objectional' in the new biography of yourself, and might ask
what is meant by such a sentence as 'his connection with it had inured
to his own benefit by the frequent puffs of himself,' and so forth.

Best known in your own day as a critic, it is as a poet and a writer of
short tales that you must live. But to discuss your few and elaborate
poems is a waste of time, so completely does your own brief definition
of poetry, 'the rhythmic creation of the beautiful,' exhaust your
theory, and so perfectly is the theory illustrated by the poems. Natural
bent, and reaction against the example of Mr. Longfellow, combined
to make you too intolerant of what you call the 'didactic' element in
verse. Even if morality be not seven-eighths of our life (the exact
pro