Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete eBook
Washington Irving
For his lively spirits and quick fancy could not easily
be subdued. He would get out of his bed-room
window at night, walk along a coping, and climb over
the roof to the top of the next house, only for the
high purpose of astonishing a neighbor by dropping
a stone down his chimney. As a young school-boy
he came upon Hoole’s translation of Ariosto,
and achieved in his father’s back yard knightly
adventures. “Robinson Crusoe” and
“Sindbad the Sailor” made him yearn to
go to sea. But this was impossible unless he
could learn to lie hard and eat salt pork, which he
detested. He would get out of bed at night and
lie on the floor for an hour or two by way of practice.
He also took every opportunity that came in his way
of eating the detested food. But the more he tried
to like it the nastier it grew, and he gave up as
impracticable his hope of going to sea. He fastened
upon adventures of real travelers; he yearned for travel,
and was entranced in his youth by first sight of the
beauties of the Hudson River. He scribbled jests
for his school friends, and, of course, he wrote a
school-boy play. At sixteen his schooling was
at an end, and he was placed in a lawyer’s office,
from which he was transferred to another, and then,
in January, 1802, to another, where he continued his
clerkship with a Mr. Hoffman, who had a young wife,
and two young daughters by a former marriage.
With this family Washington Irving, a careless student,
lively, clever, kind, established the happiest relations,
of which afterwards there came the deep grief of his
life and a sacred memory.
Washington Irving’s eldest brothers were beginning
to thrive in business. A brother Peter shared
his frolics with the pen. His artist pleasure
in the theater was indulged without his father’s
knowledge. He would go to the play, come home
for nine o’clock prayers, go up to bed, and climb
out of his bed-room window, and run back and see the
after-piece. So come evasions of undue restraint.
But with all this impulsive liveliness, young Washington
Irving’s life appeared, as he grew up, to be
in grave danger. When he was nineteen, and taken
by a brother-in-law to Ballston springs, it was determined
by those who heard his incessant night cough that he
was “not long for this world.” When
he had come of age, in April, 1804, his brothers,
chiefly his eldest brother, who was prospering, provided
money to send him to Europe that he might recover
health by restful travel in France, Italy and England.
When he was helped up the side of the vessel that
was to take him from New York to Bordeaux, the captain
looked at him with pity and said, “There’s
a chap who will go overboard before we get across.”
But Washington Irving returned to New York at the beginning
of the year 1806 with health restored.
What followed will be told in the Introduction to
the of her volume of this History of New York, by
Diedrich Knickerbocker.
