Page:Edgar Poe and his critics.djvu/16

14 He confesses that a history so strange as that of Edgar Poe should prompt us to new and more searching methods of critical as well as moral analysis. But before such analysis can be instituted we must have fuller, more dispassionate, and more authentic records of the phenomena to be analysed. The well written, but very brief memoir prefixed to the Illustrated Poems, and the various sketches that have, from time to time, appeared in the French and English periodicals, are all based on the narrative of Dr. Griswold, a narrative notoriously deficient in the great essentials of candor and authenticity. “It is a rare accomplishment,” says one of our most original writers, “to hear a story as it is told; still rarer to remember it as heard, and rarest of all to tell it as it is remembered.”

If Dr. Griswold’s Memoir of Edgar Poe betrays the want of any, or all, of these accomplishments—if its remorseless violations of the trust confided to him are such as to make the unhallowed act of Trelawney towards the enshrouded form of the dead Byron seem