apartment, turned suddenly and confronted his pursuer. There was a sharp cry—and the dagger dropped gleaming upon the sable carpet, upon which, instantly afterwards, fell prostrate in death the Prince Prospero. Then summoning the wild courage of despair, a throng of revellers at once threw themselves into the black apartment, and, seizing the mummer, whose tall figure stood erect and motionless within the shadow of the ebony clock, gasped in unutterable horror at finding the grave cerements and corpse-like mask which they handled with so violent a rudeness, untenanted by any tangible form.

"And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripod expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all."

The same might be said of the most of Poe's "Tales." Poe has had numerous imitators, especially in the line of the detective story, who have shown at least how dangerous it is to walk the narrow way which he chose to tread, keeping himself by careful steps from toppling over into the depths of ludicrous bathos. Such followers have not been born to be mystics, alchemists, and jugglers in the black art like Poe, in whose mind, as in the seven chambers of his Prospero's castellated abbey, there stalked a multitude of weird dreams in the carnival of the "Red Death." But if one wishes now and then to get far out of the highways of literature into the land which lies next to the unseen and the unknown, whither only one or two in a century have gone and returned with even a plausible account of what they have seen, then this gloomy, wayward, but second-sighted spirit will be the most satisfactory guide.

As a Critic.

No man has been so diversely understood, and therefore abused and lauded by turns. Almost everything has been charged upon him except immorality and unkindness to his family. Possibly if his biography had never been written, especially by Rufus Griswold, and his works published without comment, they would now be rated more nearly for what they are worth. Above all, if his slashing criticisms of contemporaries had never been printed, the opinion of him which his fellow authors naturally formed would have been more just, for it was as a critic that he was most notorious in his time. In the scarcity of home-born judges, and in the hatred of foreign censorship upon the early writers of the century, Poe himself saw that there was a vacancy to be filled and believed that he was the man to fill it. Aside from a certain bitterness acquired with what he was pleased to consider his hard luck in life, his teachers in criticism were of the British swashbuckler school of a hundred years ago, of whom only an occasional imitator can be found at the present day. But in Poe's time the later and better mode had not appeared. Accordingly he set up one and put down another, following his own likes and dislikes. Bryant was declared to be a genius, Longfellow without originality. His soul revolts at any depreciation of Bayard Taylor's poems, but he says that Cooper is remarkably inaccurate as a general rule. Commending Hawthorne in essentials, he thinks that his "monotone" will deprive him of popular appreciation, and that William Ellery Channing has been inoculated with virus from Tennyson and Carlyle. Those sometime neighbors of his, the "Literati of New York," some of them his benefactors, are served freely with his opinions about themselves. Willis,

who did him many good turns, is told that, whatever may be thought about his talents, he has made a good deal of noise in the world; that he has failed as an essayist, and has by no means the readiness which the editing of a newspaper demands, and that vacillation is the leading trait of his character-as, the critic ought to have added, ingratitude is of mine. If he could say these things of one who had found a place for him in the days when he was wandering from magazine to journal and from newspaper offices to the street, what might not be expected to fall on those who had placed him under no obligations to themselves? That depended upon his caprice, and this in turn upon his spirits, and these again upon circumstances over which he is said to have had no control, and with which an outline of his literary career has little to do, if the final product was not affected. It is this sum of his work in poems, stories and criticism, that has a value of its own for those who will appropriate it without too much consideration of what one and another assert for or against one of the ablest and most original of American authors. It is time to estimate him by his works alone.

The Value of Contemporary Fame.

In the volume which contains his critiques it is interesting to note the list of authors who were deemed worthy of his notice, and how few of them are now among the number with which a well-read person is expected to be familiar. After giving his opinion of a few English writers, including Mrs. Browning, Macaulay, and Dickens, he soon takes up Bryant, Hawthorne, and Bayard Taylor, but in their company are Rufus Dawes, William Lord, Henry B. Hirst, Robert Walsh, and others of equal promise in their day. Not far from Lowell and Longfellow are the names of Margaret

more.

Fuller, Lucretia Davidson, William Wallace, Estelle Anna Lewis, and Francis Osgood. Then the "Literati of New York" who were considered as sufficiently eminent to deserve his strictures - what other chance of future celebrity did some of them have? George Bush, Ralph Hoyt, Freman Hunt, Anna Cora Mowatt, Laughton Osborn, Ann S. Stephens, Richard A. Locke and a dozen and a half Of them all Willis, Halleck, and Margaret Fuller are the best known after threescore years. It is a comment on the value of contemporary criticism, at least by a single critic, that Poe had no sure word of prophecy for the survivors of a group which has passed into oblivion. Hawthorne did not much outshine Amelia Welby, nor Longfellow Stella Lewis in Poe's pages, although his stars were apt to be of the feminine gender. And yet Poe was nothing if not critical, and was a leader in this branch of literature, in spite of his assertion that Mr. William A. Jones "is our most analytic, if not our best critic (Mr. Whipple, perhaps, excepted)." And of these two the last lingered longest. A question which suggests two answers is, whether the men and women who in their lifetime enjoyed the praise of contemporaries did not receive as great a portion of comfort as those who were appreciated no more then, but are now recognized as preeminent. Was George P. Morris less fortunate than Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Christopher Pease Cranch than Lowell, and Thomas Dunn English than Longfellow? If not, let the hundredthousand edition writers of to-day make hay while the sun shines, and before night and oblivion come, and posterity with its unforeseen standards of measurement. How is it, Milton? Have you ever received more than the pittance of five pounds for "Paradise Lost"? And,

Shakespeare, was the competence you gained in London with some applause and some hisses all the comfort you have got out of manuscripts now missing? And Spenser and Chaucer, Dante, Virgil, and Homer, what is the value to you of appreciation for generations? Does it offset the abuse and neglect some of you received in your lifetime?

In fine, are you at all conscious, or all unconscious, of the praise of posterity and of your literary immortality?