The latest author of “uncanny” tales to suffer from the ready reckoner’s short cut to the solution of the problem of literary merit, the ever-serviceable comparison with Edgar Allan Poe, is Mr. W. C. Morrow. Doubtless he had hoped that this cup might pass by him—had implored the rosy goddess Psora, who enjoys the critic’s person and inspires his pen, to go off duty, but it was not to be; that diligent deity is never weary of ill doing and her devotees, pursuing the evil tenor of their way, have sounded the Scotch fiddle to the customary effect. Mr. Morrow’s admirable book, _The Ape, the Idiot and Other People_, is gravely ascribed to the paternity of Poe, as was Miss Dawson’s before it, and some of mine before that. And until Gabriel, with one foot upon the sea and the other upon the neck of the last living critic, shall swear that the time for doing this thing is up, every writer of stories a little out of the common must suffer the same sickening indignity. To the ordinary microcephalous bibliopomps—the book-butchers of the newspapers—criticism is merely a process of marking upon the supposed stature of an old writer the supposed stature of a new, without ever having taken the trouble to measure that of the old; they accept hearsay evidence for that. Does one write “gruesome stories”?—they invoke Poe; essays?—they out with their Addison; satirical verse?—they have at him with Pope—and so on, through the entire category of literary forms. Each has its dominant great name, learned usually in the district school, easily carried in memory and obedient to the call of need. And because these strabismic ataxiates, who fondly fancy themselves shepherding auctorial flocks upon the slopes of Parnassus, are unable to write of one writer without thinking of another, they naturally assume that the writer of whom they write is affected with the same disability and has always in mind as a model the standard name dominating his chosen field—the impeccant hegemon of the province. II