ing, after an illness of four or five days. This announcement, coming so sudden and unexpected, will cause poignant regret among all who admire genius and have sympathies for the frailties too often attending it."
Many accounts from diverse standpoints have been written of the tragic end of Edgar Allan Poe. The evidence given by Bishop Fitzgerald strongly supports the belief that Poe was a victim of robbery and of "cooping" for political purposes—this being a common practice in Baltimore at that day—a view sustained not only by the impossibility of locating his whereabouts from Friday, September 28, to October 3, but the handsome clothing which he wore when leaving Richmond had been changed for poor and dirty garments. Testimony confirming this is given in the letter from William J. Glenn of Richmond. Mr. Glenn was Poe's fellow member in the "Sons of Temperance" and administered the obligations of total abstinence when admitting him early in July of 1849. He states: "During his stay in the city of the next three months or more there was not the slightest intimation that he had failed to live up to his obligation. In October he started to Baltimore . . . . a few days later we heard of his death at a hospital in that city, and the statement was made and too busily circulated that his death was the result of a spree commenced as soon as he reached Baltimore. We of the temperance order to which he belonged exerted ourselves to get at the facts, and concensus of opinion was that he had not been drinking, but had been drugged. A gentleman of the name of Benson, . . . . went to Baltimore, and as he knew Poe and felt much interest in the manner of his death, went
