It is an odd fact that after Griswold two of the more authoritative biographers of Poe did not like him. One was Richard Henry Stoddard; the other, Mr. George E. Woodberry. Neither one, I suspect, chose Poe as a congenial, or even as an interesting subject. The task of writing his biography seems to have fallen to both men as a literary chore; to Stoddard as an official critic who knew Poe, and to Mr. Woodberry as a rising young man of literary talent who thirty years ago was selected by the editor of the "American Men of Letters" to write the life of Poe. Of course, Mr. Woodberry is a competent workman. When, in the year of Poe's centennial, he enlarged his "Life" to two volumes, he put together in a judicial, objective style probably all the facts that we need to know. But his aesthetic judgments are at best unsympathetic. It may be that the lyric "To Helen" has been overpraised, though it is difficult to understand how there can be too much praise for a masterpiece. And when Mr. Woodberry says of our American writers that they were concerned "not with the transitory, but the eternal; and, excepting Poe, they were all artists of the beautiful," we seem to have an example of that sort of moralistic aesthetics which sounds lofty but is only bosh. "If Poe was not an artist of the beautiful," Professor Smith asks, "what was he an artist of?" That is a good, sensible question and Professor Smith's answer, if not as eloquent as some things that have been written by Poe's European admirers, is sound and appreciative. If it be an American tendency to overrate our national men of genius, we have certainly not displayed that tendency in relation to the American writer who more than any other has captured the imagination of Europeans, for undoubtedly the finest criticism of Poe has come from our brethren overseas. Stoddard had but a grudging sense of Poe's merits and ends his account with a remark which contains a partial truth but which, although it is quoted from Dr. Johnson, is a flat anti-climax: "All that can be told with certainty is that he was poor." There seems to be a good deal more to tell than that, and, indeed, the implications of Poe's poverty, as it affected the artist, are better expressed by Stoddard himself when he says that Poe "wrote with fastidious difficulty, and in a style too much above the popular level to be well paid."