he moral truth. He who
should insist, in a case of this kind, on the improbability of the
facts, would find himself in the same position as that hapless critic
who, standing before the bronze statue of Canning, then lately erected
at Westminster, remarked, that "Mr Canning was surely not so tall as
he is there represented;" the proportions, in fact, approaching to the
colossal. "No, nor so green," said the wit to whom the observation had
been unhappily confided. When the artist made a bronze statue, eight
feet high, of Mr Canning, it was evidently not his stature nor his
complexion that he had designed to represent.

Amongst the tales of Mr Poe are several papers which, we suppose, in
the exigency of language, we must denominate philosophical. They have
at least the merit of boldness, whether in the substratum of thought
they contain, or the machinery employed for its exposition. We shall
not be expected to encounter Mr Poe's metaphysics; our notice must be
here confined solely to the narrative or inventive portion of these
papers. In one of these, entitled "Mesmeric Revelations," the reader
may be a little startled to hear that he has adopted the mesmerised
patient as a vehicle of his ideas on the nature of the soul and of its
immortal life; the entranced subject having, in this case, an
introspective power still more remarkable than that which has hitherto
revealed itself only in a profound knowledge of his anatomical
structure. As we are not yet convinced that a human being becomes
supernaturally enlightened--in mesmerism more than in fanaticism--by
simply losing his senses; or that a man in a trance, however he got
there, is necessarily omniscient; we do not find that Mr Poe's
conjectures on these mysterious topics gather any weight whatever from
the authority of the spokesman to whom he has intrusted them. We are
not quite persuaded that a cataleptic patient sees very clearly what
is going on at the other side of our own world; when this has been
made evident to us, we shall be prepared to give him credit for
penetrating into the secrets of the next.

In another of these nondescript papers, "The Conversation of Eiros and
Charmion," Mr Poe has very boldly undertaken to figure forth the
destruction of the world, and explain how that great and final
catastrophe will be accomplished. It is a remarkable instance of that
species of imaginary matter of fact description, to which we have
ventured to think that the Americ