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808.58 R36

rignand

10-22-33

THE POE

CENTENARY.

AUTHORS' CLUB, March 1st (for Jan. 19th), 1909.

From THE LONDON TIMES, March 2.

Under the auspices of the Authors' Club a dinner was given last night at the Hotel Métropole in memory of Edgar Allan Poe. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle presided, having on his immediate right and left Mr. Whitelaw Reid, the guest, and Mrs. Humphry Ward; and among the company, which numbered about 250, were Admiral Charles H. Stockton (American delegate to the Naval Conference), Mr. J. Ridgely Carter, Secretary to the American Embassy, Captain Poe, Mr. Humphry Ward, Mrs. George Cornwallis West, Mr. E. Marshall Fox, Mr. Herbert Trench, Mr. Douglas Freshfield, Mr. G. Herbert Thring (Secretary of the Incorporated Society of Authors) and Mrs. Thring, Mr. Newton Crane, Mr. F. C. Van Duzer (Secretary of the American Society in London), Mr. and Mrs. Edmund Gosse, Mr. R. N. Fairbanks and Mrs. Fairbanks (President of the Society of American Women in London), Sir Arthur and Lady Trendell, the Rev. Henry C. de Lafontaine, the Hon. Mrs. Alfred Felkin (“Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler "), Lady Abinger, Lady Lister Kaye, Mr. and Mrs. Reginald Smith, Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Dashwood, Mr. A. Laurence Felkin, Mr. Robert J. Wynne (Consul-General, U.S.A.), Mr. J. Arthur Barratt, Mr. Isaac N. Ford, Mr. G. J. Codrington Ball and Mrs. Ball (née Poe), Mr. Justin McCarthy, Mr. Webster Glynes and Mrs. Glynes ("Ella Dietz"), Mr. W. Archer, Mr. E. Price Bell, Mr. George A. Mower, Mr. Thomas L. Feild

(President American Society in London) and Mrs. Feild, Mr. Edward Morton, Mr. J. T. Grein, Dr. Ashley Bird, Dr. G. E. Herman, Mr. Francis Gribble, Commander Claud Harding, Mr. John H. Ingram, Mr. Ernest Brain, Mr. J. Newton Beach, Dr. F. Hewitt, Mr. Sidney Low and Mrs. Low, Mr. Kingsley Conan Doyle, Sir John and Lady Brickwood, Captain Acheson, Mr. Franklin Lieber, Mr. Harold Hartley, Mr. James Purefoy Poe, Mr. T. Cato Worsfold, Mr. Charles Garvice (Chairman of Committee) and Mrs. Garvice, Mr. Algernon and Mrs. Rose, Dr. Bernard Hollander, Mr. Duncan Irvine (Secretary of the Arts Club), Dr. P. W. Ames (Secretary of the Royal Society of Literature), Mr. Robert Machray, Mr. Henry Longman, Dr. S. Stephenson, Mr. St. John Lucas, Mr. Morley Roberts, Mr. Horace Wyndham, Dr. E. Law, Sir Bruce and Lady Seton, Mr. Percy White, Mr. Albert Gray, K.C., Dr. Stanton Coit, Mr. John Lane and Mrs. Lane, Mr. B. Van Praagh, and Dr. J. Todhunter. In the recess at the rear of the chairman was an enlargement of a medallion portrait of Poe, executed by Mr. Albert Bruce Joy, supported by the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes. The tables and walls were decorated with American and British emblems, and at the top of the table, in front of the chairman, was the American eagle. The work of organizing the celebration entailed much labor and correspondence, the greater part of which devolved upon Mr. Algernon Rose, the honorary secretary of the Club, who is to be congratulated on the success which attended the occasion. Mr. Whitelaw Reid, who was cordially greeted, said :

It is quite true that my countrymen ought to have the first interest in the very noteworthy centenary you celebrate. But this is far from implying that their official representative in this country is at all entitled to the place your partiality has assigned him; or that America

in general has shown adequate appreciation in the past for this son of hers whose memory you have met to honor.

The celebration to-night is a little late, for reasons well known and quite sufficientover a month after the actual date, a hundred years ago, on which Edgar Allan Poe entered upon his troubled life. The fact itself is quite in keeping with his career. Everything came to him too late, in life as in death, especially in his own country. Even when good fortune seemed ready to press itself upon him more than once during his life, his temperamental waywardness, heedlessness, irresponsibility, kept him from appreciating the opportunity until too late. Now, long after his unhappy death, and long after your English and French literary tribunals have accepted him as one of the immortals, his countrymen yet wait, even beyond the century, still hesitating to place him with their other literary figures, some surely far smaller, in their Hall of Fame.

Few of them indeed would to-day go so far in his honor as do some of your British authorities. They would pause, for instance, at the decision of one that "Poe is the most interesting figure in American literature"; and they would be almost startled at the further dictum that "few English writers of the nineteenth century are likely to have a more enduring fame." Americans confronted with that verdict would be apt to recall the great Georgian and Victorian roll of English writers, and would then reflect that they had themselves a writer named Nathaniel Hawthorne, and another named Ralph Waldo Emerson, and another named Benjamin Franklin. In fact, my countrymen for once have been slow (laughter), unusually slow, to think well of the native American product. There is still a higher estimate of this one American writer by England and France than has been conceded even yet, in his own land. His genius, so promptly and generously recognized abroad, is of course no longer

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