they entertain an ardent affection for those popular forms of politi cal organization which have so rapidly advanced their own prosperity and happiness, and enabled them, in so short a period, to bring their country, and the hemisphere to which it belongs, to the notice and respectful regard, not to say the admiration, of the civilized world. Nevertheless, the United States have abstained, at all times, from acts of interference with the political changes of Europe. They cannot, however, fail to cherish always a lively interest in the fortunes of nations struggling for institutions like their own. But this sympathy, so far from being necessarily a hostile feeling toward any of the parties to these great national struggles, is quite consistent with amicable relations with them all. The Hungarian people are three or four times as numerous as the inhabitants of these United States were when the American Revolution broke out. They possess, in a distinct language, and in other respects, important elements of a separate nationality, which the AngloSaxon race in this country did not possess; and if the United States wish success to countries contending for popular constitutions and national independence, it is only because they regard such constitutions and such national independence, not as imaginary, but as real blessings. They claim no right, however, to take part in the struggles of foreign powers in order to promote these ends. It is only in defence of his own government, and its principles and character, that the undersigned has now expressed himself on this subject. But when the people of the United States behold the people of foreign countries, without any such interference, spontaneously moving toward the adoption of institutions like their own, it surely cannot be expected of them to remain wholly indifferent spectators.

[From a letter addressed, as Secretary of State, Dec. 21, 1850, to the Chevalier Hülsemann, Chargé d'Affaires of the Emperor of Austria. Works, vol. vi, pp. 494-497.]

WASHINGTON IRVING

[Washington Irving was born in New York City, April 3, 1783, and died at Tarrytown, N.Y., Nov. 28, 1859. Irving spent his early years in New York City. In 1804 he went abroad for his health, travelling in France, Italy, and England. Returning in 1806, he resumed the study of law and was admitted to the bar, but did not practise his profession. In 1815 he went abroad again and passed five years in England, six years in travelling on the continent, and three years in Spain. In 1829 he was appointed Secretary of Legation at the Court of St. James, and remained in England until 1832, when he returned to New York. From 1842 to 1846 he was minister to Spain. The rest of his life was happily spent in New York and at Sunnyside, his little place on the banks of the Hudson at Tarrytown.

In 1802 Irving contributed to the Morning Chronicle a series of letters, signed Jonathan Oldstyle, in the manner of the Tatler and Spectator. In 1807 he joined his brother and Paulding in the production of Salmagundi, a semimonthly publication, also modelled on the Spectator and its followers. In 1809 appeared the satirical History of New York, but it was not until ten years later that reverses of fortune determined Irving to choose the profession of literature. The Sketch-Book (1819-20) achieved a remarkable success both at home and abroad. It was followed by Bracebridge Hall (1822), Tales of a Traveller (1824), and, as fruits of his first residence in Spain, Life and Voyages of Columbus (1828), The Conquest of Granada (1829), and The Alhambra (1832). During the ten years that elapsed before he went to Spain for the second time, he published Crayon Miscellanies (1835), Astoria (1836), and Adventures of Captain Bonneville (1837). His later works were largely biographical and historical: Oliver Goldsmith (1849), Mahomet and his Successors (1849), Wolfert's Roost (1855), and Life of Washington (1855-59). With great generosity he abandoned to Prescott his life-long project of writing the history of the conquest of Mexico.

The text of the extracts from Irving is, with the permission of G. P. Putnam's Sons, the publishers, that of the author's revised edition.]

It is a strange fact that the English language has no exact word for a thing frequent in English literature, one which we are forced to call by an inadequate and inaccurate French phrase vers de société, a kind of poetry more abundantly cultivated in Great Britain and the United States than in France. Mr. Austin Dobson has proposed to adopt Cowper's suggestion, familiar verse, but this is perhaps not comprehensive enough. The late Frederick

Locker-Lampson, selecting the most successful poems of this kind, entitled his enchanting anthology Lyra Elegantiarum. But whatever the name we bestow upon it, the thing itself is readily to be recognized; it is verse such as Pope often wrote, and Prior, and Praed, such as Holmes delighted us with in our own day, and Mr. Locker-Lampson, and Mr. Austin Dobson. It is the poetry of the man of the world, who has a heart, no doubt, but who does not wear it on his sleeve; it is brief and brilliant and buoyant; and it is in verse almost the exact equivalent of the prose essay of Steele and Addison.

A comparison of the Lyra Elegantiarum of Mr. Locker-Lampson with an equally skilfully edited volume, the Eighteenth Century Essays of Mr. Austin Dobson, reveals the fact that the prose form which we are forced to call the eighteenth century essay is a literary genre quite as distinct as the verse form which we are forced to call vers de société. Neither form has yet a name of its own, but each has an independent existence. Essay is a word of wide meaning; it may include a mere medley of pithy reflections by Montaigne or Bacon or Emerson, and it may designate also an elaborate exhibition of quaint humor by Lamb, or an ebullition of pungent wit by Lowell. The eighteenth century essay, as Steele devised it and as Addison improved it, owed something to Walton's Conversations, something to La Bruyère's Characters, and something to Horace's Epistles, but despite these predecessors, the papers of the Tatler and the Spectator were essentially original in form. No one had ever before sketched men and manners from just that point of view, and with just that easy touch. What Steele and Addison had done spontaneously and naturally, many another writer coming after them laboriously reproduced, taking their papers as his pattern, and imitating his model as closely as he could. Dr. Johnson, for example, toiled mightily to repeat the success of the Spectator, and failed lamentably; as Goldsmith suggested, Johnson could not help making little fishes talk like whales. Goldsmith himself was the sole heir of Steele and Addison; and in his hands the eighteenth century essay was as free, as graceful, and as natural as in theirs.

Irving is often accused of being a mere copyist of Goldsmith. The charge is unjust and absurd. Irving was no more an imitator

of Goldsmith than Goldsmith was an imitator of Steele and Addison. He had a kindred talent with theirs and he was the heir of their tradition. The eighteenth century essay was the form in which he expressed himself most easily; and for him to have sought another mode would have been to thwart his natural inclination. He is the nineteenth century writer who has possessed most of the qualities that must combine to give the eighteenth century essay its essential charm; and he is the only nineteenth century writer who found in the eighteenth century essay a form wholly satisfactory and exactly suited to his own development. The sketches of Geoffrey Crayon are as inevitable a revelation of the author as are the lucubrations of Isaac Bickerstaff or the Chinese letters of the Citizen of the World, and they show "that happy mingling of the lively and severe, which Johnson envied but could not emulate " to quote from Mr. Austin Dobson. "That charm of simplicity and grace, of kindliness and gentle humor, which," so Mr. Dobson tells us in another place, we recognize as Goldsmith's special property," seems somehow to have passed by inheritance to Irving as next of kin.

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The eighteenth century essay is a definite form- but it contained also the beginnings of several other forms. It is not fantastic to find in the Spectator the precursor of the modern magazine, with its varied table of contents, since we can pick out from its pages not only the brisk disquisition upon the topics of the time, but also the character sketch, the short story, the theatrical criticism, the book-review, the obituary notice, and even the serial story, for what else is the succession of papers in which Sir Roger de Coverley appears and reappears? Midway between the modern magazine and the Spectator stands the Sketch-Book ; and the first of the eight numbers in which it was originally issued had ample variety, containing, as they did, papers as dissimilar as the Author's Account of Himself, the Voyage, the essay on Roscoe, the two tales of the Wife and Rip Van Winkle, and the still unheeded warning to English Writers on America.

For nothing is the American magazine now more noted than for its short stories, and one of the tales in the first number of the Sketch-Book has been the parent of an innumerable progeny. Rip Van Winkle is not only one of the best short stories in our lan

guage; it is also the earliest attempt in America at local fiction. Rip Van Winkle and the Legend of Sleepy Hollow (both contained in the Sketch-Book, issued in 1819-20) showed how the realities of our life here could best be made available in romance. In these stories Irving set an example to the New England group of storytellers and to the later men and women who have since explained to us also the South and the West by frank and direct tales of the way people live in the one section and the other. Irving was first in the field now cultivated so carefully by Miss Jewett and Miss Wilkins, by Mr. Cable, Mr. Harris, and Mr. Page, by Mr. Garland and Mr. Wistar.

On other authors also has Irving's influence made itself felt, on Dickens, for one, as may be detected at once by a comparison of the Dingley Dell chapters of the Pickwick Papers, with the corresponding humorously realistic pages of the Sketch-Book and Bracebridge Hall; and for another, on Longfellow, who came under the pensive and romantic charm of Irving's earlier writings, and who took Irving's prose as the model of his own in Outre Mer and Kavanagh. Hawthorne also and Poe followed in Irving's footsteps, and their short stories often disclose their indebtedness to him. Scott appreciated highly all that Irving wrote, and more especially the tales in which the eerie was adroitly fused with the ironic; and in his paper On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition he praised the ludicrous sketch of The Bold Dragoon as the only instance of the fantastic then to be found in the English language. The one story of this sort that Scott himself wrote, Wandering Willie's Tale (introduced into Redgauntlet), appeared about the same time as the Tales of a Traveller, and later therefore than Irving's ghostly stories. "At any rate," Irving wrote to a friend, "I have the merit of adopting a line for myself, instead of following others."

Perhaps there is no better test of originality and power than this, - that an author's influence upon his fellow-craftsmen shall both broaden and endure. In the variegated garden of American story-telling "all can grow the flower now, for all have got the seed"; but it was Irving who showed how the soil should be cultivated and who brought the first blooms to perfection. His art seems so simple, his attitude is so modest, the man himself is so