He had now written his most acute criticisms and his most admirable tales.  Of tales, beside those to which I have referred, he had produced “The Descent into the Maelstroem,” “The Premature Burial,” “The Purloined Letter,” “The Murders of the Rue Morgue,” and its sequel, “The Mystery of Marie Roget.”  The scenes of the last three are in Paris, where the author’s friend, the Chevalier Auguste Dupin, is supposed to reveal to him the curiosities of his experience and observation in matters of police.  “The Mystery of Marie Roget” was first published in the autumn of 1842, before an extraordinary excitement, occasioned by the murder of a young girl named Mary Rogers, in the vicinity of New York, had quite subsided, though several months after the tragedy.  Under the pretense of relating the fate of a Parisian grisette, Mr. Poe followed in minute detail the essential while merely paralleling the inessential facts of the real murder.  His object appears to have been to reinvestigate the case and to settle his own conclusions as to the probable culprit.  There is a great deal of hair-splitting in the incidental discussions by Dupin, throughout all these stories, but it is made effective.  Much of their popularity, as well as that of other tales of ratiocination by Poe, arose from their being in a new key.  I do not mean to say that they are not ingenious; but they have been thought more ingenious than they are, on account of their method and air of method.  In “The Murders of the Rue Morgue,” for instance, what ingenuity is displayed in unraveling a web which has been woven for the express purpose of unraveling?  The reader is made to confound the ingenuity of the supposititious Dupin with that of the writer of the story.  These works brought the name of Poe himself somewhat conspicuously before the law courts of Paris.  The journal, La Commerce, gave a feuilleton in which “The Murders of the Rue Morgue” appeared in translation.  Afterward a writer for La Quotidienne served it for that paper under the title of “L’Orang-Otang.”  A third party accused La Quotidienne of plagiary from La Commerce, and in the course of the legal investigation which ensued, the feuilletoniste of La Commerce proved to the satisfaction of the tribunal that he had stolen the tale entirely from Mr. Poe,[A] whose merits were soon after canvassed in the “Revue des Deux Mondes,” and whose best tales were upon this impulse translated by Mme. Isabelle Meunier for the Democratic Pacifique and other French gazettes.

[Footnote A:  The controversy is wittily described in the following extract from a Parisian journal, L’Entr*ficte, of the 20th of October, 1846: