brought but five hundred guineas, and thence forward, though he received a thousand guineas for the "Alhambra," Irving hardly belonged to the highly-paid coterie. In 1832 he returned to America, which he had not for an instant ceased to call his home, though he had been absent more than half a generation. He was welcomed with honor, and indeed with enthusiasm.

Travel.

The quality of Irving's work for the next seventeen years was inferior to that of the books which he Works of had previously produced. He had scarcely returned, and become settled in his old State of New York, when he undertook what was at that time an elaborate American journey. Timothy Dwight, half a century before, had devoted no less than four volumes to his "Travels in New England and New York"; Irving pushed his explorations much further westward, visiting Missouri, Arkansas, and New Orleans. The record of this journey was called "A Tour on the Prairies,"-which, though not lacking in picturesque descriptions, does not show the art of Irving's European chronicles, and has shared the usual fate of books of travel. This was issued as the first volume of the "Crayon Miscellanies"; the second was devoted to "Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey," and the third to "Legends of Spain,"-describing the downfall of Roderick the Goth, and the Moorish conquest. The three volumes were issued in Philadelphia in 1835. Another work of travel appeared in the same city the next year with the title of "Astoria." John Jacob Astor, the founder of the Astor fortunes, wanted some one to "write up" his

Astoria colony on the Columbia River, in Oregon, and asked Irving to do so. Irving politely suggested that his nephew, Pierre M. Irving, might prepare the materials, and that he himself would retouch them and give the benefit of his name. The two worked together at a country house of Mr. Astor, near New York; they were well paid; and they duly manufactured two volumes which pleased Mr. Astor and won some critical praise. But on the whole they lowered the author's reputation. Literary work for a patron, done to order, is fortunately uncommon in the United States. At Mr. Astor's house Irving met Captain Bonneville, U. S. A., who had had a romantic career on the Western border. Purchasing Bonneville's materials, and making them into shape, the author of "The Sketch-Book" appeared in 1837 as the author of "The Adventures of Captain Bonneville"-a subject more suitable for Cooper than for himself. In 1841 his good nature led him to prepare a memoir of Margaret Miller Davidson, a deceased poet of the "infant phenomenon" order. After this, new editions of "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" appeared, and Irving edited "The Book of the Hudson." All this literary work was not contemptible, but it certainly was not commanding. Irving was living on his past

renown.

Minister

to Spain.

Meanwhile, however, Irving had generously resigned to the historian Prescott a plan for a history of the Spanish conquest of Mexico, and this generous courtesy was deemed to come from the man who stood at the very forefront of American

literature. Hawthorne's fame and Emerson's were as yet undeveloped, and Longfellow's highest achievements were still unwrought. Irving's best writing was, with two exceptions, all in existence, and it was widely popular. The United States felt that he had done the nation a service which could never-and need never-be repeated. Personal, literary, and even civic honors were heaped upon him; he declined a nomination for the mayoralty of New York, and the secretaryship of the navy under Van Buren. He accepted, however, an appointment as Minister to Spain under the same administration from which Poe vainly sought some little office. During the necessary European tour Irving renewed old acquaintances among the world's famous people, and made new ones, but his absence had little literary result. His four years at Madrid were busied with diplomatic duties, in the troublous times when Queen Isabella was a child in the hands of regents.

The closing years of Irving's life were marked by renewed and loftier literary productiveness. In 1849 appeared his "Life of Oliver Goldsmith," based upon a sketch he had prepared some years before, but now rounded into completion. It is one of the best biographies in the whole range of English literature, Irving's just, full, brilliant. It forms a counterpart to Biographies. Boswell's "Johnson"; no one whose idea of Goldsmith has been formed by Boswell can afford to neglect Irving's presentation of the Irish poet and novelist. In spirit and style this small book is worthy to stand on the shelf with its author's choicest works. Larger and more ambitious in every way, but really

less praiseworthy, is that two-volume life of "Mahomet and his Successors," which appeared in 1850, and which Irving meant to make one of his greatest productions. It is, however, an unimportant work. Though it is interesting and abounding in touches of romance, it is radically defective in the lack of philosophic analysis of the character, work, and times of the founder of Islam. Between 1855 and 1859 appeared, in five volumes, the elaborate "Life of Washington," upon which Irving had been thinking or working for thirty years. Here, although Irving's defects as a biographer and historian are occasionally evident, his success is unquestionable. His calmness, serenity, and optimism put him into sympathy with Washington, and his studies of the Revolutionary period are full and accurate, so that an impartial picture of a great man is offered. This quiet and just presentation of Washington's character is probably the one that will endure; certainly there seems no immediate necessity to re-write the story. Of all the historical characters delineated by Irving, the two most strongly brought before the reader's eye are the superficial and tenderly impulsive Goldsmith, and the grave and stately, but not wholly sanctified, Washington.

A collection of miscellaneous papers from The Knickerbocker Magazine was made in 1855, under the title of "Wolfert's Roost"; and two volumes of Spanish Papers" were put together in 1866, after the author's death. Irving died in 1859, the year made memorable by the departure of two other noted historians, Prescott and Macaulay.

Estimate of

Irving's writings fall, in order of merit, under five classes: essays (including the humorous works), stoCritical ries, biographies, histories, and travels. Writings. It is as an essayist that his rank is highest. Nineteenth-century literature has nothing better of the kind to show than Irving's essays: gentle, winsome, pathetic, delicately humorous, neatly descriptive, and artistic. They have not the wit of Lamb's, but they have more humor, and their literary style is more evenly finished. Their old-fashioned flavor, as though they had been taken from the drawers of an ancient secretary, scented with faded rose-leaves, gives them an added charm. The single volume by Irving which is most certain to live is undoubtedly "The Sketch-Book." In it, besides the author's best essays, are his most original and imaginative stories: "Rip van Winkle" and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." The service done to feeble American literature by this remarkable book is not easily to be overestimated; nor has its place been taken in the following years. Inferior to this, but of genuine merit, are those stories-of which "The Alhambra" shows the most picturesqueness and the "Tales of a Traveller" the most skill-which we shall study in a later volume of this work. Of the biographical writings the winsome and lovely "Life of Goldsmith" and the symmetrical "Life of Washington" of course stand out in clear light. The historical works have deservedly fallen in public esteem; the genial historian is not always a safe guide, and even the romantic chronicler must see to it that his romance is sternly guided by pitiless accuracy and