Moors, or whether in his time the legend itself had migrated to the Hudson Valley, makes no difference. He assumed that it belonged in the Catskills. He placed it, as a little earlier Brockden Brown placed his less significant romances, in a real background; and he infused into it the romantic spirit which was already characteristic of European letters, and soon to be almost more so of American. He enlivened the tale, meanwhile, with a subdued form of such humour as runs riot in the "Knickerbocker History;" and all this modern sentiment, he phrased as he had phrased his first book, in terms modelled on the traditional style of a generation or two before. The peculiar trait of the "Sketch Book," in short, is its combination of fresh romantic feeling with traditional Augustan style.

The passages of the "Sketch Book" which deal with England reveal so sympathetic a sense of old English tradition that some of them, like those concerning Stratford and Westminster Abbey, have become almost classical; just as Irving's later work, "Bracebridge Hall," is now generally admitted to typify a pleasant phase of country life in England almost as well as Sir Roger de Coverley typified another, a century earlier. There are papers in the "Sketch Book," however, which from our point of view are more significant. Take those, for example, on "John Bull" and on "English Writers concerning America." Like the writing of Hopkinson at the time of the American Revolution, these reveal a distinct sense on the part of an able and cultivated American that the contemporary English differ from our countrymen. The eye which observed John Bull in the aspect which follows, is foreign to England:

"Though really a good-hearted, good-tempered old fellow at bottom, yet he is singularly fond of being in the midst of contention. I{ is one of his peculiarities, however, that he only relishes the beginning of an affray; he always goes into a fight with alacrity, but comes out of it grumbling even when victorious; and though no one fights with more obstinacy to carry a contested point, yet, when the battle

is over, and he comes to the reconciliation, he is so much taken up with the mere shaking of hands, that he is apt to let his antagonist pocket all that they have been quarrelling about. It is not, therefore, fighting that he ought so much to be on his guard against, as making friends. It is difficult to cudgel him out of a farthing; but put him in a good humour, and you may bargain him out of all the money in his pocket. He is like a stout ship, which will weather the roughest storm uninjured, but roll its masts overboard in the succeeding calm.

"He is a little fond of playing the magnifico abroad; of pulling out a long purse; flinging his money bravely about at boxing matches, horse races, cock fights, and carrying a high head among 'gentlemen of the fancy;' but immediately after one of these fits of extravagance, he will be taken with violent qualms of economy; talk desperately of being ruined and brought upon the parish; and, in such moods, will not pay the smallest tradesman's bill, without violent altercation. He is in fact the most punctual and discontented paymaster in the world; drawing his coin out of his breeches pocket with infinite reluctance; paying to the uttermost farthing, but accompanying every guinea with a growl.

"With all his talk of economy, however, he is a bountiful provider, and a hospitable housekeeper. His economy is of a whimsical kind, its chief object being to devise how he may afford to be extravagant; for he will begrudge himself a beef-steak and pint of port one day, that he may roast an ox whole, broach a hogshead of ale, and treat all his neighbours on the next."

In "Bracebridge Hall" and the "Tales of a Traveller," works which followed the "Sketch Book," Irving did little more than continue the sort of thing which he had done in the first. Perhaps his most noteworthy feat in all three books is that he made prominent in English literature a literary form in which for a long time to come Americans excelled native Englishmen, the short story. During our century, of course, England has produced a great school of fiction; and except for Cooper and one or two living writers, America can hardly show full-grown novels so good even as those of Anthony Trollope, not to speak of the masterpieces of Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot. Certainly until the time of Robert Louis Stevenson, however, no English-speaking writer out of America had produced many short stories of such merit as anybody can recognise in the work of Hawthorne

and Poe and Irving. In this fact there is something akin to that other fact which we have just remarked, — the formal superiority of Irving's style to that of contemporary Englishmen. The English novel, whatever its merits, runs to interminable length, with a disregard of form unprecedented in other civilised literature. A good short story, on the other hand, must generally have complete and finished form. Now, during the nineteenth century American men of letters have usually had a more conscious sense of form than their English contemporaries. The American conscience, in fact, always a bit overdeveloped, has sometimes seemed evident in our attempts at literary art. No one who lacks artistic conscience can write an effective short story; and it is doubtful whether any one troubled with much artistic conscience can write in less than a lifetime a three-volume novel. The artistic conscience revealed in the finish of Irving's style and in his mastery of the short story, then, may be called characteristic of his country.

Equally characteristic of America, in the somewhat different manner foreshadowed by "Bracebridge Hall" and the "Tales of a Traveller," are the series of Irving's writings, between 1828 and 1832, which deal with Spain. He was first attracted thither by a proposition that he should translate a Spanish book concerning Columbus. Instead of so doing, he ended by writing his "Life of Columbus," which was followed by his "Conquest of Granada." and his "Tales of the Alhambra." For Americans, Spain has sometimes had more romantic charm than all the rest of Europe put together. In the first place, as the very name of Columbus should remind us, its history is inextricably connected with our own. In the second place, at the very moment when this lasting connection between Spain and the New World declared itself, the eight hundred years' struggle between Moors and Spaniards had at length ended in the triumph of the Christians; and no other conflict of the whole European past involved a contrast

of life and of ideals more vivid, more complete, more varied, or more prolonged. In the third place, the decline of Spain began almost immediately; so in the early nineteenth century Spain had altered less since the middle ages than any other part of Europe. Elsewhere an American traveller could find traces of the picturesque, romantic, vanished past. In Spain he could find a state of life so little changed from olden time that he seemed almost to travel into that vanished past itself.

Now, as the American character of the nineteenth century has declared itself, few of its æsthetic traits are more marked than eager delight in olden splendours. Such delight, of course, has characterised the nineteenth century in Europe as well as among ourselves. A modern Londoner, however, who can walk in a forenoon from Westminster Abbey to the Temple Church and so to the Tower, can never dream of what such monuments mean to an imagination which has grown up amid no grander relics of antiquity than King's Chapel or Independence Hall, than gray New England farmhouses and the moss-grown gravestones of Yankee buryinggrounds. To any sensitive nature, brought up in nineteenthcentury America, the mere sight of anything so immemorially human as a European landscape must have in it some touch of that stimulating power which the Europe of the Renaissance found in the fresh discovery of classical literature and art. Americans can still feel the romance even of modern London or Paris; and to this day there is no spot where our starved craving for human antiquity can be more profusely satisfied than amid the decaying but not vanished monuments of Christian and of Moorish Spain. No words have ever expressed this satisfaction more sincerely or more spontaneously than the fantastic stories of old Spain which Irving has left us.

His later work was chiefly biographical. His "Life of Goldsmith" and his "Life of Washington" alike are written with all his charm and with vivid imagination. Irving, how

ever, was no trained scholar. He was far even from the critical habit of the New England historians, and further still from such learning as is now apt to make history something like exact science. It may be doubted whether Irving's Goldsmith or his Washington can be accepted as the Goldsmith or the Washington who once trod the earth; yet his Goldsmith and Washington, and the other personages whom he introduced into their stories, are at least living human beings. His work is perhaps halfway between history and fiction; imaginative history is perhaps the best name for it. As usual, he was preoccupied almost as much with a desire to write charmingly as with a purpose to write truly; but in itself this desire was beautifully true. Throughout, one feels, Irving wrote as well as he could, and he knew how to write better than almost any contemporary Englishman.

No doubt a great deal of English work contemporary with Irving's is of deeper value. Our hasty glance at his literary career has perhaps shown what this first of our recognised men of letters- the first American who in his own lifetime established a lasting European reputation really accomplished. His greatest merits, which nothing can abate, are pervasive artistic conscience, admirable and persistent sense of form, and constant devotion to his literary ideals. If we ask ourselves, however, what he used his admirable style to express, we find in the first place a quaintly extravagant sort of humour growing more delicate with the years; next we find romantic sentiment set forth in the beautifully polished phrases of a past English generation whose native temper had been rather classical than romantic; then we find a deeply lasting delight in the splendours of an unfathomably romantic past; and finally we come to pleasantly vivid romantic biographies. One thing here is pretty clear: the man had no message. From beginning to end he was animated by no profound sense of the mystery of existence. Neither the solemn eternities which stir philosophers and theologians, nor the actual lessons as dis