ice to genius; and kindred genius alone will
do it. There have been, no doubt, a great many writers of biography
who had no objection to compensate their feelings for bygone slights
or discourtesies, suffered from some wayward or inattentive
superiority, some stroke of ridicule or malice. Literary antipathies
do not die with the dead. The posthumous impression of Margaret
Fuller Ossoli has been colored by some who sneer at her ways and
pretensions, because there was probably something in her manner which
displeased them in a personal way. She had certainly a very awkward
fashion of blinking her eyes, and also "a mountainous _me_." It is
very probable poor Edgar Poe has had his faults exaggerated by those
who suffered from the critical superiority of his intellect; since
some of those notices of him which tend most to fix his character as
a reprobate, and appear in a laggard way in the English periodicals,
were probably written by some of his own countrymen. It was a painful
consciousness of this literary revenge that made H.W. Herbert, in his
last agony, call on his brother-penmen for mercy on his remains, and
that induces many of our public men to bring out their own memoirs or
encourage others to do so. It looks like vainglory, but it is
not such. The memoirs show a mortal dread of calumny or
misrepresentation. Mr. Barnum, for instance, was more just to himself
than anybody else would be. He showed that his doings were only of a
piece with those of thousands around him in society; and this not
unreasonable extenuation is one that few of his critics are apt to
make use of in commenting on him and his dexterities of living. As
for Shelley, he might have shunned or slighted or overlooked Mr.
Trelawny in some painful or preoccupied moment, or offended the
robust man of the world by the mere delicate shyness of his look; he
might also have puzzled and bewildered Mr. Hogg, being, perhaps,
puzzled and bewildered himself, by some subtile mental
speculation,--unconscious that for these things he was yet to be brought
to judgment and turned into ridicule, for the coming generation, by
these familiar men,--these drilled and pipe-clayed familiar men. He
might have tossed up a paradox or two to keep the muscles of his mind
in exercise on a cold day, and his rapid intellect may have run away
from his hearer, trampling on the conventions and platitudes in its
course; but Mr. Hogg does not think he had fixed notions concerning
anythi