Nor can any unbiassed person who reads, for purpose of comparison, the “Astronomical Discoveries” and “Hans Pfaall” suspect that Locke based his hoax on the story of the Rotterdam debtor who blew his creditors to bits and sailed to the moon in a balloon. Chalk and cheese are much more alike than these two products of genius. Poe may have intended to fall back upon “a style half plausible, half bantering,” as he described it, but there is not the slightest plausibility about “Hans Pfaall.” It is as near to humour as the great, dark mind could get. “Mere banter,” as he later described it, is better. The very episode of the dripping pitcher of water, used to wake _Hans_ at an altitude where even alcohol would freeze, is enough proof, if proof at all were necessary, to strip the tale of its last shred of verisimilitude. No child of twelve would believe in _Hans_, while Locke’s fictitious “Dr. Grant” deceived nine-tenths--the estimate is Poe’s--of those who read the narrative of the great doings at the Cape of Good Hope. Locke had spoiled a promising tale for Poe--who tore up the second instalment of “Hans Pfaall” when he “found that he could add very little to the minute and authentic account of Sir John Herschel”--but the poet took pleasure, in later years, in picking the _Sun’s_ moon story to bits. “That the public were misled, even for an instant,” Poe declared in his critical essay on Locke’s writings, “merely proves the gross ignorance which, ten or twelve years ago, was so prevalent on astronomical topics.” According to Locke’s own description of the telescope, said Poe, it could not have brought the moon nearer than five miles; yet Sir John--Locke’s Sir John--saw flowers and described the eyes of birds. Locke had an ocean on the moon, although it had been established beyond question that the visible side of the moon is dry. The most ridiculous thing about the moon story, said Poe, was that the narrator described the entire bodies of the man-bats, whereas, if they were seen at all by an observer on the earth, they would manifestly appear as if walking heels up and head down, after the fashion of flies on a ceiling. And yet the hoax, Poe admits, “was, upon the whole, the greatest hit in the way of sensation--of merely popular sensation--ever made by any similar fiction either in America or Europe.” Whether Locke intended it as satire or not--a debatable point--it was a hoax of the first water. It deceived more persons, and for a longer time, than any other fake ever written: and, as the _Sun_ pointed out, it hurt nobody--except, perhaps, the feelings of Dr. Dick, of Dundee--and it took the public mind away from less agreeable matters. Some of the wounded scientists roared, but the public, particularly the New York public, took the exposure of Locke’s literary villainy just as Sir John Herschel accepted it--with a grin.