All that is necessary is to find the dog a bad name.  The world will see that he never loses it.  In this regard the oft-reiterated confidence of the dead in the justice of posterity is one of the most pathetic of illusions.  “Posterity will see me righted,” cries some poor victim of human wrong, as he goes down into the darkness; but of all appeals, the appeal to posterity is the most hopeless.

What posterity relishes is rather new scandals about its immortals than tiresome belated justifications.  It prefers its villains to grow blacker with time, and welcomes proof of fallibility and frailty in its immortal exemplars.  For rehabilitation it has neither time nor inclination, and it pursues certain luckless reputations beyond the grave with a mysterious malignity.

Such a reputation is that of Edgar Allan Poe.  One would have thought that posterity would be eager to make up to his shade for the criminal animus of Rufus Griswold, his first biographer.  On the contrary, it prefers to perpetuate the lying portrait; and no consideration of the bequests of Poe’s genius, or of his tragic struggles with adverse conditions, no editorial advocacy, or documentary evidence in his favour, has persuaded posterity to reverse the unduly harsh judgment of his fatuous contemporaries.

Fortunately, it all matters nothing to Poe now.  It is only to us that it matters.

Saddening, surely, it is, to say the least, to realize that the humanity of which we are a part is tainted with so subtle a disease of lying, and so depraved an appetite for lies.  Under such conditions, it is surprising that greatness and goodness are ever found willing to serve humanity at all, and that any but scoundrels can be found to dare the risks of the high places of the world.  For this social disease of gossip resembles that distemper which, at the present moment, threatens the chestnut forests of America.  It first attacks the noblest trees.  Like it, too, it would seem to baffle all remedies, and like it, it would seem to be the work of indestructible microscopic worms.

It is this vermicular insignificance of the gossip that makes his detection so difficult, and gives him his security.  A great reputation may feel itself worm-eaten, and may suddenly go down with a crash, but it will look around in vain for the social vermin that have brought about its fall.  It is the cowardice of gossip that its victims have seldom an opportunity of coming face to face with their destroyers; for the gossip is as small as he is ubiquitous—­

          Not half so big as a round little worm
          Prick’d from the lazy finger of a maid.

In all societies, there are men and women who are vaguely known as gossips; but they are seldom caught red-handed.  For one thing, they do not often speak at first hand.  They profess only to repeat something that they have heard—­something, they are careful to add, which is probably quite untrue, and which they themselves do not believe for a moment.