The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Edgar Allan Poe [853]
EDGAR A. POE.
PINAKIDIA
Under the head of "Random Thoughts," "Odds and Ends," "Stray Leaves," "Scraps," "Brevities," and a variety of similar titles, we occasionally meet, in periodicals and elsewhere, with papers of rich interest and value — the result, in some cases, of much thought and more research, expended, however, at a manifest disadvantage, if we regard merely the estimate which the public are willing to set upon such articles. It sometimes occurs that in papers of this nature may be found a collective mass of general, but more usually of classical erudition, which, if dexterously besprinkled over a proper surface of narrative, would be sufficient to make the fortunes of one or two hundred ordinary novelists in these our good days, when all heroes and heroines are necessarily men and women of "extensive acquirements." But, for the most part, these "Brevities," &c. are either piecemeal cullings at second hand, from a variety of source hidden or supposed to be hidden, or more audacious pilferings from those vast storehouses of brief facts, memoranda, and opinions in general literature, which are so abundant in all the principal libraries of Germany and France. Of the former species, the Koran of Lawrence Sterne is, at the same time, one of the most consummately impudent and silly; and it may well be doubted whether a single paragraph of any merit in the whole of it may not be found, nearly verbatim, in the works of some one of his immediate cotemporaries. If the Lacon of Mr. Colton is any better, its superiority consists altogether in a deeper ingenuity in disguising his stolen wares, and in that prescriptive right of the strongest which, time out of mind, has decided upon calling every Napoleon a conqueror, and every Dick Turpin a thief. Seneca; Machiavelli; Balzac, the author of "La Maniere de bien Penser;" Bielfeld, the German, who wrote, in French, "Les Premiers Traits de L'Erudition Universelle;" Rochefoucault; Bacon; Bolingbroke; and especially Burdon, of "Materials for Thinking" memory, possess, among them, indisputable claims to the ownership of nearly every thing worth owning in the book.
Of the latter species of theft, we see frequent specimens in the continental magazines of Europe, and occasionally meet with them even in the lower class of periodicals in Great Britain. These specimens are usually extracts, by wholesale, from such works as the "Bibliothlque des Memorabilia Literaria," the "Recueil des Bons Pensecs," the "Lettres Edifiates et Cucieuses," the "Literary Memoir," of Sallengre, the "Melanges Literaires" of Suard and Andre, or the "Pieces Interressantes et peu Connues" of La Place. D'Israeli's "Curiosities of Literature," "Literary Character," and "Calamities of Authors," have, of late years, proved exceedingly convenient to some little American pilferers in this line, but are now becoming, too generally known to allow much hope of their good things being any longer appropriated with impunity.
Such collections, as those of which we have been speaking, are usually entertaining in themselves, and, for the most part, we relish every thing about them save their pretensions to originality. In offering, ourselves, something of the kind to the readers of the Messenger, we wish to be understood as disclaiming, in a great degree, every such pretension. Most of the following article is original, and will be readily recognized as such by the classical and general reader — some portions of it, may have been written down in the words, or nearly in the words, of the primitive authorities. The whole is taken from a confused mass of marginal notes, and entries in a common-place-book. No certain arrangement