lieved to have been born in Boston and although that city is the home of almost every sect known to man, I have yet to hear of the erection of a Poe shrine in the place of his nativity. What are we to think of this divergence? Shall we merely shrug our shoulders and ejaculate "De gustibus non est disputandum—There is simply no arguing about tastes"? Probably this is the most prudent method of procedure, but it is much more certain that it is the laziest and perhaps the most cowardly, and I somehow do not like to take it.
Perhaps in considering the case against Poe it will be well to revert for a moment to the parallel between him and Byron with which we began. The standing of both poets has been considerably lowered with their respective countrymen, indeed with the entire Anglo-Saxon reading public, by features of their characters and careers which have not greatly counted with Continental readers. We may say, if we choose, that many Englishmen and Americans have judged Byron and Poe by Puritanical standards, or we may say that a sound instinct of moral self-preservation has led the British and the American public to withhold its allegiance, in whole or in part, from men and writers whose examples and whose works scarcely seemed to make for individual or collective righteousness and happiness. Let us comment on the phenomenon as we please, but let us not blink it. Byron and Poe have been and are constantly judged by moral standards, and they have suffered in consequence both as men and as writers. But they have been judged at the same time by literary standards, and here the parallel seems to break down. Criticism adverse to Byron tends to center in the charge
