history and antiquities of that romantic country, and in 1828 published The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus,' in four volumes, written in a less ornate style than his former works, but valuble for the new information it communicates. Next year appeared 'The Conquest of Granada,' and in 1832 The Alhambra,' both connected with the ancient Moorish kingdom of Granada, and partly fictious. Several lighter works afterwards issued from his fertile pen -'Astoria,' a narrative of American adventure; A Tour on the Prairies;' Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey;' Legends of the Conquest of Spain;' Adventures of Captain Bonneville;' a Life of Goldsmith; Mahomet and his Successors;' a Life of Washington;' &c. The principal works of Mr. Irving are his Sketch-book' and 'Bracebridge Hall;' these are the corner-stones of his fame. In all his writings, however, there are passages evincing fine taste, gentle affections, and graceful description. His sentiments are manly and generous, and his pathetic and humorous sketches are in general prevented from degenerating into extravagance by practical good sense and a correct judgment. Modern authors have too much neglected the mere matter of style; but the success of Mr. Irving should convince the careless that the graces of composition, when employed even on paintings of domestic life and the quiet scenes of nature, can still charm as in the days of Addison, Goldsmith, and Mackenzie. The sums obtained by Mr. Irving for his copyrights in England form an interesting item in literary history. Mr. Murray gave £200 for The Sketch-book,' but he afterwards doubled the sum. For Bracebridge Hall,' the same publisher gave 1000 guineas; for Columbus,' 3000 guineas; and for The Conquest of Granada,' £2000. On these last two works, the enterprising publisher lost heavily, but probably the continued sale of the earlier works formed a compensation.

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Mr. Irving was born in New York; his family was originally from the island of Orkney. He died at his country-seat, Sunnyside,' on the banks of the Hudson.

Manners in New York in the Dutch Times.

The houses of the higher class were generally constructed of wood, excepting the gable-end, which was of small black and yellow Dutch bricks, and always faced on the street; as our ancestors, like their descendants, were very much given to outward show, and were noted for putting the best leg foremost. The house was always furnished with abundance of large doors and small windows on every floor; the date of its erection was curiously designated by iron figures on the front; and on the top of the roof was perched a fierce little weatner-cock, to let the family into the important secret which way the wind blew. These, like the weather-cocks on the tops of our steeples, pointed so many different ways, that every man could have a wind to his mind; and you would have thought old olus had set all his bags of wind adrift, pell-mell, to gambol about this windy metropolis; the most staunch and loyal citizens, however, always went according to the weather-cock on the top of the governor's house, which was certainly the most correct, as he had a trusty servant employed every morning to climb up and point it whichever way the wind blew.

In those good days of simplicity and sunshine, a passion for cleanliness was the leading principle in domestic economy, and the universal test of an able housewife; a character which formed the utmost ambition of our unenlightened grandmothers.

t door was rever opened except on marriages, funerals, New-year's days, val of St. Nicho.as, or some such great occasion. It was ornamented with a brass knocker curiously wrought, sometimes into the device of a dog, and es of a lion's head; and was daily burnished with such religious zeal, that it nes worn out by the very precautions taken for its preservation. The whole as constantly in a state of inundation, under the discipline of mops, and and scrubbing-brushes; and the good housewives of those days were a kind ibious animal, delighting exceedingly to be dabbling in water, insomuch that ian of the day gravely tells us that many of his townswomen grew to have fingers like unto a duck; and some of them, he had little doubt, could the e examined into, would be found to have the tails of mermaids; but this I on to be a mere sport of fancy, or, what is worse, a wilful misrepresentation. rand parlour was the sanctum sanctorum, where the passion for cleaning was without control. In this sacred apartment no one was permitted to enter g the mistress and her confidential maid. who visited it once a week for the of giving it a thorough cleaning, and putting things to rights, always taking aution of leaving their shoes at the door, and entering devoutly on their -feet. After scrubbing the floor, sprinkling it with fine white sand, which iously stroked into angles, and curves, and rhomboids, with a broom-after the windows, rubbing and polishing the furniture, and put ing a new bunch greens in the fireplace, the window-shutters were again closed, to keep out and the room carefully locked up until the revolution of time brought round kly cleaning-day.

o the family, they always entered in at the gate, and most generally lived in the To have seen a numerous household assembled around the fire, one would agined that he was transported back to those happy days of primeval simwhich float through our imaginations like golden visions. The fire-places f a truly patriarchal magnitude, where the whole family, old and young, and servant, black and white, nay, even the very cat and dog, enjoyed a comof privilege, and had each a prescriptive right to a corner. Here the old r would sit in perfect silence, puffing his pipe, looking in the fire with halfes, and thinking of nothing for hours together; the goede vrouw on the oppoe would employ herself diligently in spinning her yarn or knitting stockings. ung folks would crowd around the hearth listening with breathless attention e old crone of a negro who was the oracle of the family, and who, perched like in a corner of the chimney would croak forth for a long winter afternoon a of incredible stories about New England witches, grisly ghosts, horses withads, and hairbreath escapes, and bloody encounters among the Indians. hose happy days a well-regulated family always rose with the dawn. dined at and went to bed at sundown. Dinner was invariably a private meal, and the burghers shewed incontestable symptoms of disapprobation and uneasiness ig surprised by a visit from a neighbour on such occasions. But though our y ancestors were thus singularly ave se to giving dinners, yet they kept up the bonds of intimacy by occasional banquetings, called tea-parties. ese fashionable parties were generally confined to the higher classes or noblesse is to say, such as kept their own cows and drove their own wagons. The comcommonly assembled at three o'clock, and went away about six, unless it was ter-time, when the fashionable hours were a little earlier, that the ladies might me before dark. I do not find that they ever treated their company to iced is, jellies, or syllabubs, or regaled them with musty almonds, mouldy raisins, ir oranges, as is often done in the present age of refinement. Our ancestors fond of more sturdy substantial fare. The tea-table was crowned with a huge en dish well stored with slices of fat pork, fried brown, cut up into morsels, and ming in gravy. The company being seated around the genial board, and each shed with a fork, evinced their dexterity in launching at the fattest pieces of mighty dish, in much the same manner as sailors harpoon porpoises at sea. d ndians spear salmon in the lakes. Sometimes the table was graced with ime apple-pies, c: saucers full of preserved peaches and pears; but it was always to boast of an enormous dish of balls of sweetened dough fried in hog's fat, and d dough-nuts, or oly koeks; a delicious kind of cake, at present scarce known in city, except in genuine Dutch families.

The tea was served out of a majestic delf tea-pot, ornamented with paintings of fat little Dutch shepherds and shepherdesses, tending pigs-with boats sailing in the air, and houses built in the clouds, and sundry other ingenious Dutch fantasies. The beaux distinguished themselves by their adroitness in replenishing this pot from a huge copper tea-kettle, which would have made the pigmy macaronies of these degenerate days sweat merely to look at it. To sweeten the beverage, a lump of sugar was laid beside each cup, and the company alternately nibbled and sipped with great decorum, until an improvement was introduced by a shrewd and economic old lady, which was, to suspend a large lump directly over the tea-table by a string from the ceiling, so that it could be swung from mouth to mouth-an ingenious expedient, which is still kept up by some families in Albany, but which prevails, without exception, in Communipaw, Bergen, Flat-Bush, and all our uncontaminated Dutch villages.

At these primitive tea-parties the utmost propriety and dignity of deportment prevailed. No flirting nor coquetting-no gambling of old ladies, nor hoyden chattering and romping of young ones-no self-satisfied struttings of wealthy gentlemen with their brains in their pockets; nor amusing conceits and monkey divertisements of smart young gentlemen with no brains at all. On the contrary, the young ladies seated themselves demurely in their rush-bottomed chairs and knit their own woollen stockings: nor ever opened their lips, excepting to say, 'Yah, Mynheer,' or ' Yah, ya Vrouw,' to any question that was asked them; behaving in all things like decent well-educated damsels. As to the gentlemen, each of them tranquilly smoked his pipe, and seemed lost in contemplation of the bite and white tiles with which the fireplaces were decorated; wherein sundry passages of Scripture were piously portrayed: Tobit and his dog figured to great advantage; Haman swung conspicuously on his gibbet; and Jonah appeared most manfully bouncing out of the whale, like Harlequin through a barrel of fire.

The parties broke up without noise and without confusion. They were carried home by their own carriages-that is to say, by the vehicles nature had provided them, excepting such of the wealthy as could afford to keep a wagon. The gentlemen gallantly attended their fair ones to their respective abodes, and took leave of them with a hearty smack at the door; which, as it was an established piece of etiquette, done in perfect simplicity and honesty of heart, occasioned no scandal at that time, nor should it at the present: if our great-grandfathers approved of the custom, it would argue a great want of reverence in their descendants to say a word against it.

Feelings of an American on First Arriving in England.-- From 'Brace

bridge Hall.

England is as classic ground to an American as Italy is to an Englishman, and old London teems with as much historical association as mighty Rome.

But what more especially attracts his notice, are those peculiarities which distinguish an old country, and an old state of society, from a new one. I have never yet grown familiar enough with the crumbling monuments of past ages, to blunt the infense interest with which I at first beheld them. Accustomed always to scenes where history was, in a manner, in anticipation; where everything in art was new and progressive, and pointed to the future rather than the past; where, in short, the works of man gave no ideas but those of young existence and prospective improvementthere was something inexpressibly touching in the sight of enormous piles of architecture, gray with antiquity, and sinking to decay. I cannot describe the mute but deep-felt enthusiasm with which I have contemplated a vast monastic ruin like Tintern Abbey, buried in the bosom of a quiet valley, and shut up from the world, as though it had existed merely for itself; or a warrior pile, like Conway Castle, standing in stern loneliness on its rocky height, a mere hollow yet threatening phantom of departed power. They spread a grand and melancholy, and, to me, an unusual charm over the landscape. I for the first time beheld signs of national old age and empire's decay; and proofs of the transient and perishing glories of art, amidst the everspringing and reviving fertility of nature.

But, in fact, to me everything was full of matter; the footsteps of history were everywhere to be traced; and poetry had breathed over and sanctified the land. I experienced the delightful feeling of freshness of a child to whom everything is new,

to myself a set of inhabitants and a mode of life for every habitation that om the aristocratical mansion, amidst the lordly repose of stately groves ary parks, to the straw-thatched cottage, with its scanty garden and cherodbine. thought I never could be sated with the sweetness and freshness try so completely carpeted with verdure; where every air breathed of the sture and the honeysuckled hedge. I was continually coming upon some cument of poetry in the blossomed hawthorn, the daisy, the cowslip, the -, or some other simple object that has received a supernatural value from The first time that I heard the song of the nightingale, I was intoxicated the delicious crowd of remembered associations than by the melody of its nd I shall never forget the thrill of ecstasy with which I first saw the lark ost from beneath my feet, and wing its musical flight up into the morning

..

Rural Life.-From The Sketch-book.'

ral occupation there is nothing mean and debasing. It leads a man forth scenes of natural grandeur and beauty; it leaves him to the workings of his ad, operated upon by the purest and most elevating of external influences. of refinement, therefore, finds nothing revolting in an intercourse with the ders of rural life, as he does when he casually mingles with the lower orders He lays aside his distance and reserve, and is glad to waive the distinctions and to enter into the honest heartfelt enjoyments of common life. Indeed amusements of the country bring men more and more together, and the of hound and horn blend all feelings into harmony. I believe this is one ason why the nobility and gentry are more popular among the inferior orders and than they are in any other country; and why the latter have endured so xcessive pressures and extremities, without repining more generally at the distribution of fortune and privilege.

his mingling of cultivated and rustic society may also be attributed the rural that runs through British literature; the frequent use of illustrations from e: those incomparable descriptions of nature which abound in the British hat have continued down from The Flower and the Leaf' of Chaucer, and rought into our closets all the freshness and fragrance of the dewy landscape. storal writers of other countries appear as if they had paid Nature an occavisit, and become acquainted with her general charms; but the British poets ved and revelled with her-they have wooed her in her most secret hauntsve watched her minutest caprices. A spray could not tremble in the breeze, could not rustle to the ground, a diamond drop could not patter in the stream, ance could not exhale from the humble violet, nor a daisy unfold its crimson the morning, but it has been noticed by these impassioned and delicate ob5, and wrought up into some beautiful morality.

A Rainy Sunday in an Inn.-From 'Bracebridge Hall.'

vas a rainy Sunday in the gloomy month of November. I had been detained course of a journey by a slight indisposition, from which I was recovering: vas still feverish, and was obliged to keep within doors all day, in an inn of the town of Derby. A wet Sunday in a country inn! whoever has had the luck to ence one, can alone judge of my situation. The rain pattered against the case, the bells toiled for church with a melancholy sound. I went to the windows st of something to amuse the eye, but it seemed as if I had been placed comout of the reach of all amusement. The windows of my bedroom looked out tiled roofs and stacks of chimneys. while those of my sitting-room comed a full view of the stable-yard. I know of nothing more calculated to make sick of this world than a stable-yard on a rainy day. The place was littered wet straw that had been kicked about by travellers and stable-boys. In one coras a stagnant pool of water surrounding an island of muck; there were several rowned fowls crowded together under a cart, among which was a miserable fallen cock, árenched out of all life and spirit, his drooping tail matted, as it into a single feather, along which the water trickled from his back; near the was a half-dozing cow chewing the cnd, and standing patiently to be rained on, wreaths of vapour rising from her reeking hide; a wall-eyed horse, tired of the

loneliness of the stable, was poking his spectral head out of a window, with the rain dripping on it from the eaves; an unhappy cur, chained to a dog-house, hard by, uttering something every now and then between a bark and a yelp; a drab of a kitchen wench tramped backwards and forwards through the yard in pattens, looking as sulky as the weather itself: everything, in short, was comfortless and torlorn, excepting a crew of hard-drinking ducks, assembled like boon-companions round a puddle, and making a riotous noise over their liquor.

I sauntered to the window, and stood gazing at the people picking their way to church, with petticoats hoisted mid-leg high, and dripping umbrellas. The bells ceased to toll, and the streets became silent. I then amused myself with watching the daughters of a tradesman opposite, who, being confined to the house for fear of wetting their Sunday firery, played off their charms at the front windows, to fascinate the chance tenants of the inn. They at length were summoned away by a vigilant vinegar-faced mother, and I had nothing further from without to amuse me.

The day continued lowering and gloomy; the slovenly, ragged, spongy clouds drifted heavily along; there was no variety even in the rain; it was one dull, contined, monotonous paiter, patter, patter, excepting that now and then I was enlivened by the idea of a brisk shower, from the ratting of the drops upon a passing umbrel a. It was quite refreshing-if I may be allowed a hackneyed phrase of the day-when in the course of the morning a horn blew, and a stage-coach whirled through the street with outside passengers stuck all over it, cowering under cotton umbrellas, and seethed together, and reeking with the steams of wet box-coats and upper benjamins. The sound brought out from their lurking-places a crew of vagabond boys and vagabond dogs, and a carroty-headed hostler and that nondescript animal yclept Boots, and all the other vagabond race that infest the purlieus of an inn; but the bustle was transient; the coach again whirled on its way; and boy and dog, and hostler and Boots, all slunk back again to their holes; the street again became silent, and the rain continued to rain on.

The evening gradually wore away. The travellers read the papers two or three times over. Some drew round the fire, and told long stories about their horses, about their adventures. their overturns, and breakings-down. They discussed the credits of different merchants and different inns, and the two wags told several choice anecdotes of pretty chamber-maids and kind landladies. All this passed as they were quietly taking what they called their nightcaps-that is to say. strong glasses of brandy and water or sugar, or some other mixture of the kind; after which they one after another rang for Boo s and the chamber-maid, and walked off to bed in old shoes cut down into marve lously uncomfortable slippers. There was only one man left-a short-legged, long-bodied, plethoric fellow, with a very large, sandy head. He sat by himself with a glass of port-wine negus and a spoon, sipping and stirring, and meditating and sipping, until nothing was left but the spoon. He gradually fell asleep bolt upright in his chair, with the empty glass standing before him; and the candle seemed to fall asleep too, for the wick grew long and black, and cabbaged at the end, and dimmed the little light that remained in the chamber. The gloom that now prevailed was contagious. Around hung the shapeless and almost spectral box. coats of departed travelers, long since buried in deep sleep. I only heard the ticking of the clock, with the deep-drawn breathings of the sleeping toper, and the drippings of the rain-drop, drop, drop-from the eaves of the house.

JAMES KIRKE PAULDING.

Associated with Washington Irving in the Salmagundi' papers was JAMES KIRKE PAULDING (1778-1860), a voluminous writer. In 1819, Mr. Paulding commenced a second series of Salmagundi' essays, but without much success. His novels of The Dutchman's Fireside' (1831) and Westward Ho !' (1832) are said to contain faithful historical sketches of the early settlers of New York and Kentucky of the former, six editions were published within a year. Among the other works of Mr. Paulding are The Diverting History of John Bull and Brother Jonathan' (1813); 'Letters from the South'