- Théophile Gautier
Gautier was not pure dreamer. Though the world of his art was as far from the world of Paris, as the world of Mr. Yeats from the world of London or Dublin, he was not a seer, or a poet between whom and reality hung a veil of dreams. He was a solid man, one of whose proudest memories was a blow that registered five hundred and thirty-two pounds on an automatic instrument, the result of daily washing down five pounds of gory mutton with three bottles of red Bordeaux. - Sir Walter Scott
Scott was a part of this revivified world, and his importance in it is not that of its inventor, but of the man who brought so many of its qualities into the art of story-telling that his novels became a secondary inspiration, and moved men as different as Hugo, Balzac, and Dumas, to express themselves in narrative. - Edgar Allan Poe
Perhaps Poe's technique is more easily examined in those of his tales in which the same faculties that planned the construction supplied also the motive. The three great detective stories, The Purloined Letter, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, and The Mystery of Marie Roget, are made of reasoning and built on curiosity, the very mainspring of analysis.