Whatever else Edgar Poe wrote, he continued to pour out through the editorial columns of Graham’s Magazine a steady stream of criticism of current books.  While entertaining or amusing the public as far as power to do so in him lay, he did not for a moment permit anything to come between him and the duties of his post as Defender of Purity of Style in American Letters.  He was unsparing in the use of his pruning hook upon the work of his contemporaries and the height of art to which by his fearless, candid and, at times, cruel criticism, he sought to bring others, he exacted of himself.  In spite of the amount of work he produced, each sentence that dropped from his pen in this time of his maturity—­his ripeness—­was the perfection of clear and polished English.

But the evidences of this conscientiousness in his own work did not make the little authors one whit less sore under his lash.  Privately they writhed and they squirmed—­publicly they denounced.  All save one—­an ex-preacher, Dr. Rufus Griswold—­himself a critic of ability, who would like to have been, like The Dreamer, a poet as well as a critic.

When Edgar Poe praised the prose writings of Dr. Griswold, but said he was “no poet,” Dr. Griswold like the other little authors writhed and squirmed secretly—­very secretly—­but openly he smiled and in smooth, easy words professed friendship for Mr. Poe—­and bided his time.

As for Poe himself, he had by close and devoted study of the rules which govern poetic and prose composition—­rules which he evolved for himself by analysis of the work of the masters—­so added to his own natural gifts of imagination and power of expression, so perfected his taste, that crude writing was disgusting to his literary palate.  He had made Literature his intellectual mistress, and from the day he had declared his allegiance to her he had served her faithfully—­passionately—­and he could brook no flagging service in others.

Both his growing power of analysis and his highly developed artistic feeling were brought into full play in this review work.  Under his guidance the writings of his contemporaries, whether they were the little authors or the giants such as, in England, Tennyson (who was a prime favorite with him), Macauley, Dickens, Elizabeth Barrett, or in America, Longfellow, Lowell, Hawthorne, Irving, Emerson, stood forth illumined—­the weak spots laid bare, the strong points gleaming bright.

He unfalteringly declared his admiration of Hawthorne (then almost unknown) in which the future so fully justified him.  The tales of Hawthorne, he declared, belonged to “the highest region of Art—­an Art subservient to genius of a very lofty order.”

Even the work of the little authors was indebted to him for many a good word, but the little authors hated him and returned the brilliant sallies his pungent pen directed toward their writings with vollies of mud aimed at his private character.