said Mrs. Allan one day to a visitor, after Edgar's return from the University; "Mr. Gilliet, what do you think of Edgar? His father has just paid an enormous sum for his debts in Charlotteville, and now here is a bill for quantities of champagne, and seventeen broadcloth coats, which he has gambled away." "Yes," answered Edgar. "I went to see how much of the old man's money I could spend, and I have done it." There must have been some redeeming qualities in the young gentleman of whom this anecdote is related, or he would speedily have found himself outside of the house of his adopted parents. That it was not calculated to promote his worldly interests, the most worldly must allow that it was ungrateful is certain. Whether it produced an open rupture in his relations with the Allans is not stated, but it is more than probable that such was the case; for about this time there occurs a hiatus in his biography which is not easily bridged over. His biographers have attempted it, and with considerable success. The period was a turbulent one, they have told us, and he was a young man of the period. The Greeks were fighting against the Turks he would go and fight against them too. Byron had done so, and had died at Missolonghi two or three years before, and public honours had been decreed to his memory. Campbell was shouting, "Again to the battle, Achaians !" and Fitz-Greene Halleck, nearer home, was raising a monument to Marco Bozzaris in his martial verse : "Strike! till the last armed foe expires, Strike! for the green graves of your sires, God, and your native land !" There was a comical side to all this enthusiasm, and Byron had been sharp enough to see it, when it was too late but Poe was not. : "The glory that was Greece, He believed in And the grandeur that was Rome;" but he was not destined to see either. There is an old proverb which says, "The furthest way round is the nearest way home," and experience occasionally proves its truth. At any rate Poe found it true for instead of proceeding post-haste to Greece, where he might have added to the number of the slain, he turned up in some unaccountable way at St. Petersburgh. He got into difficulties with the authorities there, and, it is hinted, came near adding to his acquirements a knowledge of the knout and Siberia; but Mr. Henry Middleton, of South Carolina, United States Minister to Russia, interceded in his behalf, and sent him back to America after an absence of about a year. This romantic adventure, which is repeated by all Poe's biographers, and which-if not sanctioned by Poe's assent, was at least sanctioned by his silence, lacks but one thing to render it credible-truth. It might have happened, no doubt, and, perhaps, it ought to have happened; but unfortunately it did not. He never left the United States after his return from school at Stoke Newington; but he had a brother who did so, William Henry Leonard Poe, of whose erratic life the adventure, or something like it, was an episode. He is described by those who knew him as possessing great personal beauty, and as much genius as Edgar. He wrote verses, which were printed in the "Minerva," a small weekly paper published in Baltimore he was a clerk in a Lottery Office in that city; and he was not averse to the flowing bowl. This last circumstance, joined to his rejection as a lover, was probably the cause of his going to sea, and his subsequent "sailor's scrape" at St. Petersburgh— for it was no more-out of which the dangerous and desperate adventure of his famous brother was manufactured. That Poe was not discarded after his return from college was partly due to Mrs. Allan, who loved him in spite of his waywardness, and partly, no doubt, to himself. He was clever enough to feign repentance, if he did not feel it, and ambitious enough to cultivate his mind for its own sake. He had written doggerel when a schoolboy: he now began to write what by a stretch of courtesy might be considered poetry. His first volume, "Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems," was published at Baltimore in 1829. I call this his first volume, but if we may credit an advertisement prefixed to “Tamerlane,” that poem was printed for publication in Boston two years before, but suppressed through circumstances of a private nature. What these were it is idle to conjecture now. Mr. Allan must have paid for the publication of this little pamphlet, which by the aid of extra fly-leaves, bastard titles, &c., is spaced out to seventy-one pages, and must consequently have believed in the promise that it contained. It does not strike me as being a remarkable production for a young gentleman of twenty: it certainly is not a precocious one. It is not to be compared, for example, with the first collection of Mr. Tennyson's verse published in the following year. How it was received, we are not told, but it is safe to say that it could not have attracted much attention. There was but little criticism in America then, and that little was as conventional as possible. Poe had now reached the age when it was necessary for him to choose a profession, if he was to have one, |