“Thirdly: I felt myself in communication with a man of original character, disputing many of the received doctrines and dogmas of the day; but only original in so far as to dispute them, altogether regardless of consequences to himself or the umbrage he gave to his adversaries.
“Fourthly: I saw before me a man to whom vulgar rumour had attributed those personal graces supposed to attract the admiration of women. This is the usual description given of him in biographical sketches. And why, I cannot tell, unless it has been done to round off a piquant paragraph. His was a face purely intellectual. Women might admire it, thinking of this; but it is doubtful if many of them ever fell, or could have fallen, in love with the man to whom it belonged. I don’t think many ever did. It was enough for one man to be beloved by one such woman as he had for his wife.
“Fifthly: I feel satisfied that Edgar Allan Poe was not, what his slanderers have represented him, a rake. I know he was not; but in truth the very opposite. I have been his companion in one or two of his wildest frolics, and can certify that they never went beyond the innocent mirth in which we all indulge when Bacchus gets the better of us. With him the jolly god sometimes played fantastic tricks—to the stealing away his brain, and sometimes, too, his hat—leaving him to walk bareheaded through the streets at an hour when the sun shone too clearly on his crown, then prematurely bald.
“While acknowledging this as one of Poe’s failings, I can speak truly of its not being habitual; only occasional, and drawn out by some accidental circumstance—now disappointment; now the concurrence of a social crowd, whose flattering friendship might lead to champagne, a single glass of which used to affect him so much that he was hardly any longer responsible for his actions, or the disposal of his hat.
“I have chronicled the poet’s crimes, all that I ever knew him to be guilty of, and, indeed, all that can be honestly alleged against him; though many call him a monster. It is time to say a word of his virtues. I could expatiate upon these far beyond the space left me; or I might sum them up in a single sentence by saying that he was no worse and no better than most other men.
“I have known him to be for a whole month closeted in his own house—the little ‘shanty’ supported against the gable of the rich Quaker—all the time hard at work with his pen, poorly paid, and hard driven to keep the wolf from his slightly-fastened door, intruded on only by a few select friends, who always found him, what they knew him to be, a generous host, an affectionate son-in-law and husband; in short, a respectable gentleman.
“In the list of literary men, there has been no such spiteful biographer as Dr Rufus Griswold, and never such a victim of posthumous spite as poor Edgar Allan Poe.”
Mayne Reid left Philadelphia in the spring of 1846, spending the summer at Newport, Rhode Island, as correspondent to the New York Herald, under the name of “Ecolier.” In September of the same year he was in New York, and had secured a post on Wilkes’ Spirit of the Times, but in November he abandoned the pen for the sword.
The following extract from a letter of Mayne Reid to his father tells something of his life in Philadelphia:
“Headquarters, U.S. Army,