As a critic, Mr. Poe was aesthetically deficient.  Unerring in his analysis of dictions, metres, and plots, he seemed wanting in the faculty of perceiving the profounder ethics of art.  His criticisms are, however, distinguished for scientific precision and coherence of logic.  They have the exactness, and at the same time, the coldness of mathematical demonstrations.  Yet they stand in strikingly refreshing contrast with the vague generalisms and sharp personalities of the day.  If deficient in warmth, they are also without the heat of partizanship.  They are especially valuable as illustrating the great truth, too generally overlooked, that analytic power is a subordinate quality of the critic.

On the whole, it may be considered certain that Mr. Poe has attained an individual eminence in our literature, which he will keep.  He has given proof of power and originality.  He has done that which could only be done once with success or safety, and the imitation or repetition of which would produce weariness.

THACKERAY

ROUNDABOUT PAPERS

The shock which was felt in this country at the sudden death of Thackeray was a new proof, if any were wanting, that London is still our social and literary capital.  Not even the loss of Irving called forth so universal and strong an expression of sorrow.  And yet it had been the fashion to call Thackeray a cynic.  We must take leave to doubt whether Diogenes himself, much less any of his disciples, would have been so tenderly regretted.  We think there was something more in all this than mere sentiment at the startling extinction of a great genius.  There was a universal feeling that we had lost something even rarer and better,—­a true man.

Thackeray was not a cynic, for the simple reason that he was a humorist, and could not have been one if he would.  Your true cynic is a sceptic also; he is distrustful by nature, his laugh is a bark of selfish suspicion, and he scorns man, not because he has fallen below himself, but because he can rise no higher.  But humor of the truest quality always rests on a foundation of belief in something better than it sees, and its laugh is a sad one at the awkward contrast between man as he is and man as he might be, between the real snob and the ideal image of his Creator.  Swift is our true English cynic, with his corrosive sarcasm; the satire of Thackeray is the recoil of an exquisite sensibility from the harsh touch of life.  With all his seeming levity, Thackeray used to say, with the warmest sincerity, that Carlyle was his master and teacher.  He had not merely a smiling contempt, but a deadly hatred, of all manner of shams, an equally intense love for every kind of manliness, and for gentlemanliness as its highest type.  He had an eye for pretension as fatally detective as an acid for an alkali; wherever it fell, so clear and seemingly harmless, the weak spot was sure to betray itself.  He called himself a disciple of Carlyle, but would have been the first to laugh at the absurdity of making any comparison between the playful heat-lightnings of his own satire and that lurid light, as of the Divine wrath over the burning cities of the plain, that flares out on us from the profoundest humor of modern times.  Beside that ingenium perfervidum of the Scottish seer, he was but a Pall-Mall Jeremiah after all.