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124 marriage is missing, and this individual turns up at last in the brother of that very Charles De Burgh Smith, with whom so perfectly accidental an intimacy has already been established. The wronged heir proceeds at random to look for a lawyer, and stumbles at once upon the precise one who had figured before in the story, and who knows all about previous investigations. Setting out in search of Liancourt, the first person he sees is that gentleman himself. Entering a horse-bazaar in a remote portion of the country, the steed up for sale at the exact moment of his entrance is recognized as the pet of his better days. Now our quarrel with these coincidences is not that they sometimes, but that they everlastingly, occur, and that nothing occurs besides. We find no fault with Philip for chancing, at the identically proper moment, upon the identical men, women, and horses necessary for his own ends and the ends of the story, but we do think it excessively hard that he should never happen upon any thing else.

[ Barnaby Rudge by Charles Dickens, reviewed in Graham's Magazine, February, 1842. If this penetrating review is not creative criticism, it is re-creative in a unique sense. In all that pertains to plot, to structure, to suspense, to the masterly handling of convergent details, Poe shows here a genius far beyond that of Dickens. Sir Robertson Nicoll, in The Problem of Edwin Drood, doubts whether Poe or any one else wrote for The Saturday Evening Post, of Philadelphia, May 1, 1841, the "prospective notice" of Barnaby Rudge