think better of him when you meet him.” Lowell, however, refused to be convinced. “The Rev. Mr. Griswold,” he said petulantly, “is an ass, and, what’s more, a knave, and even if he had said anything against Poe, I should not have believed it. But neither he nor any one else ever did. I remain of my old opinion about the allusion to Mrs. Longfellow. I remain of my old opinion about Poe, and I have no doubt that Poe estimates Longfellow’s poetical abilities more highly than I do perhaps, but I nevertheless do not like his two last articles. I still think Poe an invaluable contributor, but I like such articles as his review of Miss Barrett better than these last.” Up to this time Lowell appears to have known Poe only through correspondence.[49] A few weeks later, when he was returning from Philadelphia to Cambridge, he called upon him, but the interview gave little satisfaction, due to the fact, mentioned by Mr. Briggs, that Poe was tipsy at the time. A few weeks later Lowell defended himself, in a letter to Briggs, against a charge of plagiarism made by Poe, and summed up his impressions as follows: “Poe, I am afraid, is wholly lacking in that element of manhood which, for want of a better name, we call character. It is something quite distinct from genius,--though all great geniuses are endowed with it. Hence we always think of Dante Alighieri, of Michelangelo, of Will Shakespeare, of John Milton,--while of such men as Gibbon and Hume we merely recall the works, and think of them as the author of this and that. As I prognosticated, I have made Poe my enemy by doing him a service.... Poe wishes to kick down the ladder by which he rose. He is welcome. But he does not attack me at a weak point. He probably cannot conceive of anybody’s writing for anything but a newspaper reputation or for posthumous fame, which is much the same thing magnified by distance. I have quite other aims.” Finally, Briggs himself lost all patience with Poe, and replied to this letter: “You have formed a correct estimate of Poe’s characterless character. I have never met a person so utterly deficient of high motive. He cannot conceive of anybody’s doing anything except for his own personal advantage; and he says, with perfect sincerity and entire unconsciousness of the exposition which it makes of his own mind and heart, that he looks upon all reformers as madmen; and it is for this reason that he is so great an egoist; he cannot conceive why the world should not feel an interest in whatever interests him, because he feels no interest himself in what does not personally concern him.” In all his critical writing after this time, Lowell never discussed Poe. His offhand characterization in “A Fable for Critics,” “Three fifths of him genius and two fifths sheer fudge, * * * * * Who has written some things quite the best of their kind, But the heart somehow seems all squeezed out by the mind,”