This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1857 edition. Excerpt: ...impressions when I first became interested in the subject. Yet, knowing that Poe's miserable story rested wholly upon Griswold's Memoir--that all since him have followed Griswold with the exactness of a Hebrew copyist, trembling at the prophet's curse upon all who should add to or take away one tittle of the text--it did appear to me to be an important and an interesting point, to learn what explanation, if any, Griswold himself had given of the reasons which had determined him to fulfil his painful task. How had he conquered that unwillingness, which the sternest moralist among us might have felt in such a case?--how had he escaped that tender casuistry that might have haunted the best and wisest, to turn them from their purpose? You and I, Sir, have far too much honesty--far too great a reverence for the truth, to flatter the living or the dead; but let us imagine ourselves in Griswold's place, and let us try to conceive what temptations might have beset us to gloss or to suppress. We might havethought of some persons living, who still perhaps remembered him with sorrow, or with an unreasoning affection--some who, knowing him better, or being more closely allied to him than we were, could think of his failings with more compassion than the world could feel--some, perhaps, to whom the truest story we could tell, would for his sake even cause more pain than all the wrongs that he had done them. We might, with a difiidence at other times foreign to our nature, have mistrusted our own judgment, or suspected ourselves of some secret bias----or have nourished an illogical and superstitious notion that it is possible to do a wrong towards the dead, who cannot answer from their graves. We might have fancied that some...