The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Edgar Allan Poe [848]
It will not be supposed, from anything here said, that I myself attach any importance to this series of papers. The public, however, is the best judge of its own taste; and that the spasms of one or two enemies have given the articles a notoriety far surpassing their merit or my expectation — is, possibly, no fault of mine. In a preface their very narrow scope is defined. They are loosely and inconsiderately written — aiming at nothing beyond the gossip of criticism — unless, indeed, at the relief of those “necessities “ which I have never blushed to admit and which the editor of “The Mirror” — the quondam associate of gentlemen — has, in the same manner, never blushed publicly to insult and to record.
But let me return to Mr. English’s attack — and, in so returning, let me not permit any profundity of disgust to induce, even for an instant, a violation of the dignity of truth. What is not false, amid the scurrility of this man’s statements, it is not in my nature to brand as false, although oozing from the filthy lips of which a lie is the only natural language. The errors and frailties which I deplore, it cannot at least be asserted that I have been the coward to deny. Never, even, have I made attempt at extenuating a weakness which is (or, by the blessing of God, was) a calamity, although those who did not know me intimately had little reason to regard it otherwise than as a crime. For, indeed, had my pride, or that of my family permitted, there was much — very much — there was everything — to be offered in extenuation. Perhaps, even, there was an epoch at which it might not have been wrong in me to hint — what by the testimony of Dr. Francis and other medical men I might have demonstrated, had the public, indeed, cared for the demonstration — that the irregularities so profoundly lamented were the effect of a terrible evil rather than its cause. — And now let me thank God that in redemption from the physical ill I have forever got rid of the moral.
It is not, then, my purpose to deny any part of the conversation represented to have been held privately between this person and myself. I scorn the denial of any portion of it, because every portion of it may be true, by a very desperate possibility, although uttered by an English. I pretend to no remembrance of anything which occurred — with the exception of having wearied and degraded myself, to little purpose, in bestowing upon Mr. E. the “fisticuffing” of which he speaks, and of being dragged from his prostrate and rascally carcase by Professor Thomas Wyatt, who, perhaps with good reason, had his fears for the vagabond’s life. The details of the “conversation,” as asserted, I shall not busy myself in attempting to understand. The “celebrated authoress” is a mystery. With the exception, perhaps, of Mrs. Stephens, Mrs. Welby, and Miss Gould — three ladies whose acquaintance I yet hope to have the honor of making — there is no celebrated authoress in America with whom I am not on terms of perfect amity at least, if not of cordial and personal friendship. That I “offered” Mr. English “my hand” is by no means impossible. I have been too often and too justly blamed by those who have a right to impose bounds upon my intimacies, for the weakness of “offering my hand,” without thought of consequence, to any one whom I see very generally reviled, hated, and despised.
Through this mad quixotism arose my first acquaintance with Mr. English, who introduced himself to me in Philadelphia — where, for one or two years, I remained under the impression that his real name was Thomas Done Brown.
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