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Indebtedness and Influence 69 of his contemporaries, as James and Bulwer and Disraeli and Macaulay. It has been proved also that he knew the German romancer, E. T. A. Hoffmann, if not in the original, at least in translation, and that he caught his manner and appropriated his themes. ' For the rest, he drew for his materials largely on the magazines and newspapers of his day, finding in a famous newspaper sensation of the forties the suggestion of his Mystery of Marie Rogtt (as he had found in another sensation, of the twenties, the plot of his Politian), and taking advantage of certain contemporary fads in his myth-making about 'mesmer- ism, ballooning, premature burial, and the like; and he boldly pilfered from government reports, scientific treatises, and works of reference such material as he found serviceable in some of his tales of adventure. Hence his originality may be said to consist rather in combination and ada^ation than in more obviously inventive exercises of the fancyT} [Poe's influence has been far-reachingl As poet, he has had many imitators both in his own country and abroad, but especially in France and England.^ As romancer he has probably wielded a larger influence than any English writer since Scott. And as critic it is doubtful whether any other of his countrymen has contributed so much toward keepingjhe balance right between art-for-art's-sake and didacticism. His fame abroad is admittedly larger than that of any other Ameri- can write r^ a nd his vogue has been steadily growing among his own peopled ' Palmer Cobb, The Influence ofE. T. A. Hoffmann on the Tales of Edgar Allan Poe. Woodberry, Life of Poe, vol. I, pp. 379-381, and passim. "In the view of Edmund Gosse, "there is hardly one [of the later English poets] whose verse-music does not show traces of Poe's influence" {Questions at Isstte, p. 90). On Poe's influence and vogue in Prance, see L. P. Betz, Edgar Poe in der franzoesischen Litteratur: Stiidien zur vergleichenden Litteraturgeschichte der neueren Zdl (1902), pp. 16-82; C. H. Page in The [New York] Nation for 14 January, 1909; and G. D. Morris, Fenimore Cooper et Edgar Poe, pp. 67 f. (Paris, 1912).