If there is any thing on earth I hate, it is a genius. Your geniuses are all arrant asses—the greater the genius the greater the ass—and to this rule there is no exception whatever. Especially, you cannot make a man of business out of a genius, any more than money out of a Jew, or the best nutmegs out of pine-knots.
The story is a parody of and reflection upon thd anti-intellectualism of Poe's era, and an humorous attack on thd myth of the self-made man.
