importance, or condoned as the result of bad habits. At all events, the
statement that the revels on that occasion would be conducted by Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle was quite enough to prove that it was the prose
writer of "The Black Cat" and "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," and not
the verso writer of "Ulalume" and "Annabel Lee" who would be the centre
of attention. On that side of Poe's genius, therefore, although it is
illustrated by such masterpieces of sullen beauty as "The Fall of the
House of Usher" and such triumphs of fantastic ingenuity as "The Gold
Bug," I feel it needless to dwell here, the more as I think the
importance of these tales very slight by the side of that of the best
poems. Edgar Poe was, in my opinion, one of the most significant poetic
artists of a century rich in poetic artists, and I hold it to be for
this reason, and not because he wrote thrilling "detective" stories,
that he deserves persistent commemoration.

The dominance of Poe as an important poetic factor of the nineteenth
century has not been easily or universally admitted, and it is only
natural to examine both the phenomena and the causes of the objections
so persistently brought against it. In the first instance, if the fame
of Browning and Tennyson advanced slowly, it advanced firmly, and it
was encouraged from the beginning by the experts, by the cultivated
minority. Poe, on the other hand, was challenged, and his credentials
were grudgingly inspected, by those who represented the finest culture
of his own country, and the carpings of New England criticism are not
quite silent yet. When he died, in 1849, the tribunal of American
letters sat at Cambridge, in the neighbourhood of Boston, and it was
ill-prepared to believe that anything poetical could deserve salvation
if it proceeded from a place outside the magic circle. Edgar Poe, the
son of Irish strolling players, called "The Virginia Comedians," settled
in the South and was educated in England. By an odd coincidence, it now