Page:Edgar Allan Poe - how to know him.djvu/69

Rh what we choose to denominate encouragement is thus, by its general application, rendered precisely the reverse. In a word, so far from being ashamed of the many disgraceful literary failures to which our own inordinate vanities and misapplied patriotism have lately given birth, and so far from deeply lamenting that these daily puerilities are of home manufacture, we adhere pertinaciously to our original blindly conceived idea, and thus often find ourselves involved in the gross paradox of liking a stupid book the better, because, sure enough, its stupidity is American."

But subserviency to mere rank, to inherited wealth or social position, was an outrage to Poe's Americanism more deeply resented than subserviency to foreign criticism. Deploring the popularity of Charles O'Malley's Irish Dragoon, Poe pays his respects to the base sycophancy of the book in words that still flame and warn:

"There is a disgusting vulgarism of thought which pervades and contaminates this whole production, and from which a delicate or lofty mind will shrink as from a pestilence. Not the least repulsive manifestation of this leprosy is to be found in the author's blind and grovelling worship of mere rank. Of the Prince Regent, that filthy compound of all that is bestial—that lazarhouse of all moral corruption—he scruples not to speak in terms of the grossest adulation—sneering at Edmund Burke in the same villainous breath in which he extols the talents, the graces, and the virtues of George the Fourth! That any man, to-day, can be found so degraded in heart as to style this reprobate,