d got himself into great trouble by his remarks on
Edgar A. Poe. Mr. Kimball and others, who knew the Doctor, believed, as
I do, that there was no deliberate evil or envy in those remarks. Poe's
best friends told severe stories of him in those days--_me ipso
teste_--and Griswold, naught extenuating and setting down naught in
malice, wrote incautiously more than he should. These are the words of
another than I. But when Griswold was attacked, then he became savage.
One day I found in his desk, which he had committed to me, a great number
of further material collected to Poe's discredit. I burnt it all up at
once, and told the Doctor what I had done, and scolded him well into the
bargain. He took it all very amiably. There was also much more matter
to other men's discredit--_ascensionem expectans_--awaiting publication,
all of which I burned. It was the result of long research, and evidently
formed the material for a book. Had it ever been published, it would
have made Rome howl! But, as I said, I was angry, and I knew it would
injure Dr. Griswold more than anybody. It is a pity that I had not
always had the Doctor in hand--though I must here again repeat that, as
regards Poe, he is, in my opinion, not so much to blame as a score of
writers have made out. The tales, which were certainly most authentic,
or at least apparently so, during the life of the latter, among his best
friends regarding him, were, to say the least, discreditable, albeit that
is no excuse whatever for publishing them. I have always much disliked
the popular principle of judging men's works entirely by their lives, and
deciding against the literary merit of _Sartor Resartus_ because Carlyle
put his wife's money to his own account _in banco_.

And it is, moreover, cruel that a man, because he has been a poet or
genius or artist, must needs have every weakness (real or conjectured) in
his life served up and grinned at and chatted over, as if he forsooth
were a clergyman or some kind of make-believe saint. However, the more
vulgar a nature is the more it will gloat on gossip; and herein the most
pretentious of the higher classes show themselves no better than the
basest.

I lived at Dan Bixby's, at the corner of Park Place and Broadway, where I
came very near being shot one night by a man who mistook me, or rather my
room, for that of the one below, in which his wife was, or had been, with
another person. Being very tipsy, the injured indiv