Page:Edgar Poe and his critics.djvu/36

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Edgar Poe and his Critics.

from its balance by the abnormal preponderance of the analytical and imaginative faculties. It was to this very disproportion that we are indebted for some of those marvellous intellectual creations, which, as we shall hope to prove, had an important significance and an especial adaptation to the time.

A very intolerant article on Mr. Poe has recently been republished in this country from the Edinburgh Review for April 1858, in which the most injurious anecdotes of Dr. Griswold’s memoir have been patiently copied and italicised, and their enormities enhanced by the gratuitous suppositions and assumptions of the writer.

As an instance of the inconsequent reasoning in which the reviewer sometimes indulges, we quote a single passage from the article in question. “It is,” says the Edinburgh critic, “a curious example of Poe’s superficial acquaintance with the literature of other lands, that in recapitulating the titles of a mysterious library of books in ‘the House of Usher’ he quotes