The genius of each day was upon me distinctly during the whole of it, affecting my appetite, spirits, etc. The phantom of the next day, with the dreary five to follow, sat as a load upon my poor Sabbath recreations. What charm has washed that Ethiop white? What is 5 gone of Black Monday? All days are the same. Sunday itself,—that unfortunate failure of a holiday, as it too often proved, what with my sense of its fugitiveness, and overcare to get the greatest quantity of pleasure out of it, is melted down into a week-day. 10 I can spare to go to church now, without grudging the huge cantle which it used to seem to cut out of the holiday. I have Time for everything. I can visit a sick friend. I can interrupt the man of much occupation when he is busiest. I can insult over him with an 15 invitation to take a day's pleasure with me to Windsor this fine May morning. It is Lucretian pleasure to behold the poor drudges, whom I have left behind in the world, carking and caring; like horses in a mill, drudging on in the same eternal round-and what is it 20 all for? A man can never have too much Time to himself, nor too little to do. Had I a little son, I would christen him NOTHING-TO-DO; he should do nothing. Man, I verily believe, is out of his element as long as he is operative. I am altogether for the 25 life contemplative. Will no kindly earthquake come and swallow up those accursed cotton-mills? Take me that lumber of a desk there, and bowl it down

I am no longer

As low as to the fiends.

clerk to the Firm of, etc. 30

I am Retired Leisure. gardens. I am already come to be known by my vacant stare and careless gesture, perambulating at no fixed pace, nor with any settled purpose. I walk 5 about; not to and from. They tell me, a certain cum dignitate air, that has been buried so long with my other good parts, has begun to shoot forth in my perI grow into gentility perceptibly. When I take up a newspaper, it is to read the state of the opera. 10 Opus operatum est. I have done all that I came into this world to do. I have worked task-work, and have the rest of the day to myself.

I am to be met with in trim

son.

II. WASHINGTON IRVING.

(1783-1859.)

LIFE. Washington Irving was born in New York City, April 3, 1783. He was named in honor of the national hero who had just brought to its triumphal end the American Revolution. His father was a Scotch Presbyterian, by occupation a merchant. On coming of age Irving went abroad for two years on account of ill-health. On his return he was admitted to the bar, but soon abandoned it for literature. The years from 1815 to 1832 Irving spent abroad. The failure in 1818 of the Irving Brothers' mercantile house, in which Washington Irving was somewhat involved, drove him in earnest to literary work for his support. On his return to America in 1832 he was greeted with national honor. He built a house called "Sunnyside" on the Hudson, where he lived until his appointment as minister to Spain in 1842. In 1846 he returned to “Sunnyside," and there died of heart disease, Nov. 28, 1859.

Like Lamb, Irving is his own best historian. Geoffrey Crayon is to the Sketch Book what Elia is to the Essays of Elia. In The Author's Account of Himself, Irving reveals his own tastes : "I was always fond of visiting new scenes, and observing strange characters and manners." To him “ Europe held forth the charms of storied and poetical association." "The shifting scenes of life" he studied not "with the eye of a philosopher, but rather with the sauntering gaze with which humble lovers of the picturesque stroll from the window of one print-shop to another: caught sometimes by the delineations of beauty, sometimes by the distortions of caricature, and sometimes by the loveliness of landscape." Underneath the lines of The Broken Heart is the sad current of Irving's own disappointed love. In other sketches Irving wanders in revery in the "hallowed silence" of

Westminster Abbey, or threads with the antiquary's zest the lanes of Little Britain, or celebrates the joys of the English Yuletide.

Again, as with Lamb, these personal sketches where the author shows himself behind the thin mask of his hero, are best supplemented by his letters.

66

WRITINGS.-In 1802, when only nineteen, Irving printed in his brother's newspaper, the Morning Chronicle, some papers signed 'Jonathan Oldstyle. The "oldstyle" was unmistakably that of the "Spectator." Five years later he joined his brother William, and James K. Paulding in the authorship of a series of local satires, the Salmagundi papers.

In 1809, the publication of Knickerbocker's History of New York laid the firm foundation of Irving's reputation. Begun merely as a burlesque of a consequential guide-book account of the city's history, the work grew into a full-length caricature of the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam. In the field of light literature it was the first American book to win international fame.

The first number of the Sketch Book, appeared in May, 1819. Largely through the good offices of Walter Scott, the English publisher, Murray, after first declining, at length brought out a collected edition of the work. In 1822 came Bracebridge Hall, a sketch of English rural life, and in 1824 the Tales of a Traveller. The Life of Columbus (1828), the Conquest of Granada (1829), and the Alhambra (1832) show that in history Irving sought chiefly the picturesque and romantic. Three months before his death Irving completed his longest work, the Life of Washington.

LITERARY QUALITIES.-Irving's earliest literary master was Addison, and an Addisonian Irving remained always. His sympathetic Life of Oliver Goldsmith proves another of his literary devotions. In Irving, as in Lamb, humor blends with sentiment. Irving cares most for legend and romance and the picturesqueness of the past. In birth and patriotism an American, Irving was English in his literary tastes and inspiration. In him there is not the surging human passion of the Elizabethans, but the quiet of English refinement.

Scott was one of the first Europeans to recognize the genius of Irving. "I have never," he said, " read anything so closely resembling the style of Dean Swift as the annals of Diedrich Knickerbocker. . . . . I think, too, there are passages which indicate that the author possesses power of a different kind, and has some touches which remind me of Sterne." Irving was distinctly a gentleman of letters. Scott, Moore, Dickens, and Thackeray were not merely literary, but personal friends. Thackeray's Nil Nisi Bonum in the Roundabout Papers is his tribute to Irving and Macaulay, who died but a month apart―" the Goldsmith and the Gibbon of our time." In this "first ambassador whom the New World of Letters sent to the Old," Thackeray saw not only the author, but the "exemplar of goodness, probity, and pure life."

Literary prophecy is dangerous, but Irving's fame seems secure. Some of his works, Astoria for example, are already neglected, others are steadily declining toward the same limbo of books forgotten; but the original comic genius of Knickerbocker and the blended sentiment and humor of the Sketch Book contain a promise of literary immortality. Good instances of Irving's influence upon later American writers are found in Donald G. Mitchell's Dream Life and Reveries of a Bachelor and George William Curtis's Easy Chair essays.

RIP VAN WINKLE.-The first number of The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., was published simultaneously in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore in May, 1819. It contained a Prospectus, The Author's Account of Himself, The Voyage, Roscoe, The Wife, and Rip Van Winkle-in all, ninetythree octavo pages. The detailed account of the publication of the later numbers and Murray's rejection and subsequent tardy publication of the collected Sketch Book is to be read in the first two volumes of The Life and Letters of Washington Irving, by his nephew, Pierre M. Irving.

Rip Van Winkle is set down as A Posthumous Writing of Diedrich Knickerbocker. The name Knickerbocker became connected with Irving by a novel method of advertising, before publication, his History of New York. Late in October, 1809, appeared in the Evening Post this paragraph: