Among the many cultural enterprises to which Junius Macready had devoted himself during the height of his prosperity was the ownership and management of the now-defunct Majestick Theatre on Albermarle Street, This splendid auditorium (since converted into a tobacco warehouse) still stands as a sacred shrine within the precincts of my heart, having been the site of a triumphant performance by the beautiful, ill-fated woman to whose existence I owed the gift of my own. I refer, of course, to my sweet, long-departed mother, the actress Eliza Poe, who shuffled off her mortal coil at the all-too-tender age of twenty-four, less than three years following my birth. To this very day, one of my most treasured possessions is a yellowed clipping from the Baltimore Daily Gazette, lauding her brilliant characterization of Lydia Languish in Sheridan’s The Rivals.

Having passed Mrs. Macready’s boarding house during my numerous perambulations about the city, I knew it to be located in a tranquil neighborhood, remote from the bustle of the city’s main commercial district This fact, combined with the earliness of the hour— which had not yet reached eight—caused me to believe that Howard Street would be largely, if not entirely, deserted when I arrived. It was to my great surprise, therefore, that, as I rounded the corner, I immediately perceived a considerable crowd gathered directly in front of the hostelry—as though the public had been notified of my pending encounter with Crockett, and an audience had assembled to witness the proceedings!

How like Crockett it was, I reflected, to convert a private affair into a vulgar spectacle—much as he had transformed himself from an obscure backwoodsman into the self-proclaimed “King of the Wild Frontier.” For Crockett’s genius—if we may employ the term so loosely—resided less in his capacities as a statesman (a rôle for which he had displayed only meagre aptitude) than in his natural gifts as a showman. His appetite for celebrity—to say nothing of his willingness to cater to the crude tastes of the masses—appeared limitless. I need scarcely add that—for all of his pretensions to authorial dignity—such an appetite was in direct contradistinction to the character of the true man of literature, whose glory derives in no small measure from his readiness, not merely to struggle in solitude with the demands of his art, but to endure—often throughout the course of a lengthy career—the utter indifference, if not outright scorn, of a dull and incomprehending public.