one. He is often claimed already as the creator or at any rate the pioneer of the supernatural, the exotic, and the grotesque element in the short story. We used to attribute the renaissance of wonder and terror in this medium to Walpole and Radcliffe, Maturin and Monk Lewis; but this may well have all been altered during the past few years by the infant Hercules of comparative literature. It would need a long essay to discuss this subject even in cursory fashion. I would only point out how inseparable the qualities of weirdness and horror were deemed from the great majority of all the short stories of that and the preceding period, witness 'Frankenstein' in England, La Motte Fouqué's stories in Germany, Scott's Wandering Willie's Tale,' the early stories of Mérimée (the greatest master in my opinion that the short story has ever had), from Mateo Falcone' and Tamango' in 1829, down to the very Poe-like Lokis' and Vénus d'Ille,' not to speak of Hoffmann and De Maistre. The short stories of Pickwick' even have a grim and grotesque element. There were plenty of routes by which the short story was pretty certain to develop, but as it has developed there can be little doubt that Maupassant (in such a story as 'Le Horla '), Schwob, Jules Verne, Arthur Machen, Rudyard Kipling, and even the delectable Erckmann-Chatrian of our youth, owe a considerable debt to Poe. Like Poe's fame, I fully expect that this debt will go on growing and that a hundred and fifty years hence our eulogies and comments of 1909 will appear quite comically commonplace and inadequate. The pendulum, says a recent writer, with perfect truth and a strong American accent, has swung back and forth, and in spite of Mr. George E. Woodberry's attempt more than twenty years ago to stop it on centre, it continues to swing up to the present day.'

A private opinion on literary values is to my thinking a singularly worthless thing, except in so far as its expression is interesting, or as representing the frank belief of a certain group, college set, social impress, or course of reading or training. It would be disingenuous, however, in me not to confess that the glow of enthusiasm about Poe's writings which seems at the moment so ardent and so universal leaves me all but utterly cold. Instead of growing with my age in increasing admiration for Poe, my interest in and admiration for his work seem to be appreciably diminishing. In college days, though my knowledge of his writings was regrettably superficial, I discerned Poe in a violet halo from which he was never dissociated in my imagination. I actually know his work far better now, but I seem to want to know it far less. Not being

a French poet, and no longer a young man, Poe seems to have no power to waylay me. My inability to appreciate him more astonishes me mainly in view of the ecstatic praise lavished upon his verses and tales by contemporaries with some of whom, upon ordinary questions of literary opinion or debate, I should probably agree substantially upon three questions out of four. I presume that my failure must be due in large measure to my total lack of Irish lineage. I recognise, of course, that such stories as The Gold Bug,' "The Purloined Letter,' The Pit and the Pendulum,' and' The Fall of the House of Usher' (which I take to be among the very best) are admirable in their way. But stories about piratical treasures and scraps of paper seem to possess less glamour for me than they had formerly. The point about the master in 'The Gold Bug' going about in dread of a thrashing from his negro slave has always interested me for its daring; but could it be justified historically any more than the details of Kidd's treasure? The dialect seems very tentative. The logical ingenuity of The Purloined Letter ' is excellent, but the ' pure algebra ' in it seems made to be skipped. The Inquisition machinery of Le Puits et le Pendule,' as Baudelaire calls it, is an uncanny mixture of fun and horror. Historically it is as grotesque as Hugo's Wapentake. The House of Usher,' again, is too obviously built of painted cardboard, and its lack of character-interest compares badly with Mérimée's 'Lokis.' With Poe's figures it is inevitably a case of out of plot out of mind. As for the most magnificent verses in the English language' they remind one in turn of Sir W. S. Gilbert, of Calverley, of Barham, of Bayley, of Southey, and Moore, and not least of Colman's marrowbone-and-cleaver symphony: at their very best of Hood (For Annie') and of Landor ( To Helen'). Judged by such standards as I can understand, these last very artificial but very beautiful verses, upon the perfection of which he was working from a first draft in 1829 down to 1845, mark the height of his poetical achievement.

Helen, thy beauty is to me

Like those Nicèan barks of yore
That gently, o'er a perfumed sea
The weary, way-worn wanderer bore
To his own native shore.

On desperate seas long wont to roam,
Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
Thy Naiad airs have brought me home
To the glory that was Greece,
And the grandeur that was Rome. .

Among the makers of his own age the god of Poe's idolatry was admittedly Tennyson, and this veritable thing of beauty was manifestly obtained by strict Tennysonian methods. Many need no conviction, but it would need a pit and a pendulum to convince me that in his happy Runic Rhyme'

To the rolling of the bells-
Of the bells, bells, bells-
To the tolling of the bells
Of the bells, bells, bells, bells—

Bells, bells, bells

To the moaning and the groaning of the bells

he easily surpassed his master's own ' Ring out, wild bells.' Of his other verse it seems to me it might be said indifferently that it has the tune without the touch of the born poet, that it appeals to the ear, but rarely if ever to the heart. Hazlitt's criticism, which applies so remorselessly and unanswerably to the early work of Shelley, before his second sojourn abroad, applies with far less qualification to the whole of Poe's verse. Take 'Ulalume,' for instance, in the case of which so discerning a critic as Mr. Macy expresses doubt as to whether the limit reached in it be the limit of beauty or the limit of sanity, what could be a fitter dwelling for the bloodless vampires and poor pale shrieking ghosts' of Hazlitt's delineation than its 'dank tarns' and 'ghoul-haunted woodlands'? Nothing could be more chaste in expression, it is perfectly true, than Poe's ardours, nothing could be more unexceptionable than the weird touch of his revenantes; but quality and sentiment are alike to be found in The Cane-bottomed Chair,' which, as poetry, appears to me superior to the claptrap of Quoth the Raven, Nevermore.' In my Pantheon I must still regard the Raven as sacred to Charles Dickens. Poe, by the way, was a generous admirer of the great novelist, and I put his appreciation and analysis of Barnaby Rudge,' along with the four stories already noted, the two poems, and the essay on poetry and the poetic principle, as forming the main contents of the slim volume under his arm' with which this poor Edgar' may hope (with that other poor drugshadowed waif of the magazines who had been in hell') to enter the company of the immortals.

THOMAS SECCOMBE.

AN IMPRESSION OF MR. TAFT.

DURING a sojourn in the Far East, three years ago, it was my good fortune to come within the orbit of the then Secretary of War at Washington, Mr. Taft, who is to-day, as then all Americans confidently predicted he would be, the President of the United States. It was during one of his several progresses through the scenes of his former reign as Governor of the Philippine Islands that I saw him, the first occasion being on August 15, 1905, at a reception of welcome in Iloilo, the second town of importance in that archipelago. Of his motives, politics, and hopes then or at any other time I do not now speak, as the man himself is the subject of these brief recollections, with an attempt to describe the kind of impression he would be likely to make upon the average Briton. It is difficult for us to appreciate correctly an American politician whose manner, aims, methods must be so utterly different from British ideals. Where Englishmen ask for a certain solemn dignity, American electors look for violent gestures; shouting, popular phrases; unbounded physical energy; and even slang to rouse their admiration. The man to please that complex nation must be the rare mixture of the races he is called on to represent. He must be shrewd but sentimental; humorous but one-sided; lavish but prudent, a man of the great world and a man of the hearth . . These and many more conflicting characteristics are demanded by a nation which dates but one generation, and seldom by so much, from the Scotch, German, Irish, Saxon, Italian immigrants who are so quickly swallowed up and identified by the magic of the Stars and Stripes. Their President must look to the bawbee; shout 'hoch' for his 'heimath'; dance a jig and crack a joke with the best; administer impartial justice; be full of ready, cheerful courtesy to all men, as each of these nations would expect. The marvel is that such beings are found, for Mr. Roosevelt was certainly one of them, and, if I may judge by my own impressions, Mr. Taft is his worthy follower.

To begin with the physique of the man, his size and girth are now so well known that it seems unnecessary to refer to them;

nevertheless I must say that I do not think I ever saw any one quite so vast; and I remember ineradicably the large crowd of men and women of all shades of white, yellow, and brown-Filipinos, Eurasians, Americans, English, Swiss-assembled upon a broad verandah-balcony of the court house of the little tropical town, and towering above the heads of all Mr. Taft, a huge, fairhaired, fair-complexioned giant, quite six foot four in height, and, I was told by an American, 'three hundred and fifty pounds in weight,' which is, being translated, twenty-five stone, and certainly he looked every ounce of it. He had a large, clever face, that creased up into an amiable smile for which I believe he was and is famous, a natural asset which has helped him enormously in a career filled with difficult situations. In curious contrast to the genial manner and the engaging smile were his eyes, small, light-coloured, rather closely placed together, and very shrewd in expression. He had a quick, cold, sharp way of looking at things and people, which seemed to me quite the opposite of what one would have expected from anyone so stout and with such a pleasant smile. When he was serious it was, indeed, a strong, rather harsh face, and not, I must confess, very prepossessing, but when he smiled the Taft smile' it altered from cold sternness to the utmost bonhomie, and he really looked charming.

In the more formal reception that followed the crush upon the balcony Mr. Taft and his party, which included Senators and Representatives since become famous even to European ears, and Miss Alice Roosevelt-lent' to the party as a guarantee of her father's goodwill towards the projects of his friend-assembled upon the daïs of the big hall of justice, while all of us guests sat in the body of the hall, a big apartment decorated for the occasion with branches of palm and paper flowers in the Filipino fashion and draped with Stars and Stripes. On the daïs were placed two or three rows of Vienna cane chairs, those for the important people for with all their strivings to establish equality the people of the United States cannot keep these distinctions from creeping in-being placed in front and having arms to them. In these sat the Governor of the Philippines (at that time Mr. Luke E. Wright, who now occupies the post at Washington then filled by Mr. Taft), his wife, and 'Miss Alice.' Next to the latter Mr. Taft took the seat assigned to him, into which he wedged himself with infinite trouble; but the arm-chair at once broke to pieces. At this every one, I recollect, laughed very much, Mr. Taft most heartily of all,