those who have so relentlessly endeavored to ruin me. It needed only some such trials as I have just undergone to make me what I was born to be by making me conscious of my own strength.' This and a protest against the charge of indifference to moral obligations so often urged against him, which I permitted Mr. Gill to extract for publication from a long letter filled with eloquent and proud remonstrance against the injustice of such a charge, are the only passages of which I have authorized the publication. Other letters have been published without my consent. I have endeavored to reconcile myself to the unauthorized use of private letters and papers, since the effect of their publication has been on the whole regarded as favorable to Poe." It was Mrs. Whitman who first attempted to trace Edgar Poe's descent from the old Norman family of Le Poer, which emigrated to Ireland during the reign of Henry II. of England. Lady Blessington, through her father, Edmund Power, claimed the same illustrious descent. The Le Poers were distinguished for being improvident, daring and reckless. The family originally belonged to Italy, whence they passed to the north of France, and went to England with William the Conqueror. In a letter dated January 3, 1877, Mrs. Whitman says: "For all that I said on the subject I _alone_ am responsible. A distant relative of mine, a descendant, like myself, from Nicholas le Poer, had long ministered to my genealogical proclivities by stories which from my childhood had vaguely haunted and charmed my imagination. When I discovered certain facts of Poe's history of which he had previously made little account, he seemed greatly impressed by my theory of our relationship. Of course I endowed him with my traditional heirlooms. John Savage, who wrote some fine papers on Poe, which I _think_ appeared in the _Democratic Review_, perhaps in 1858, said to a friend of mine that the things most interesting and valuable to him in my little book (_Poe and his Critics_) were its genealogical hints."