Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, on the 19th of January, 1809. He was named Allan after a wealthy and intimate friend of the family, and when both his parents died his godfather, who, although long married, was childless, adopted the little orphan, then only six years old. Even at this early age Poe was noted for his precocity as well as for his beauty, and Mr. Allan appears to have been extremely proud of his youthful protege, and to have treated him in many respects as his own son. The boy is stated to have been made quite a show-child of by his adopted father; a tenacious memory and a musical ear, we are informed, enabling him to learn by rote, and declaim to the evening visitors assembled at Mr. Allan's house, the finest passages of English poetry with great effect. "The justness of his emphasis, and his evident appreciation of the poems he recited," we learn, made a striking impression upon his audience, "while every heart was won by the ingenuous simplicity and agreeable manner of the pretty little elocutionist." Gratifying as these exhibitions may have been to his godfather's vanity, the probable consequence of such a system of recurring excitements upon