own taste.  When I get in the midst of it, it is too apt to lose its charm, and then there is the trouble and ennui of being obliged to take an active part in the farce; but to be a mere spectator is amusing.  I am glad, therefore, that I brought no letters to Prague.  I shall leave it with a favorable idea of its society and manners, from knowing nothing accurate of either; and with a firm belief that every pretty woman I have seen is an angel, as I am apt to think every pretty woman, until I have found her out.”

In July, 1823, Irving returned to Paris, to the society of the Moores and the fascinations of the gay town, and to fitful literary work.  Our author wrote with great facility and rapidity when the inspiration was on him, and produced an astonishing amount of manuscript in a short period; but he often waited and fretted through barren weeks and months for the movement of his fitful genius.  His mind was teeming constantly with new projects, and nothing could exceed his industry when once he had taken a work in hand; but he never acquired the exact methodical habits which enable some literary men to calculate their power and quantity of production as accurately as that of a cotton mill.

The political changes in France during the period of Irving’s long sojourn in Paris do not seem to have taken much of his attention.  In a letter dated October 5, 1824, he says:  “We have had much bustle in Paris of late, between the death of one king and the succession of another.  I have become a little callous to public sights, but have, notwithstanding, been to see the funeral of the late king, and the entrance into Paris of the present one.  Charles X. begins his reign in a very conciliating manner, and is really popular.  The Bourbons have gained great accession of power within a few years.”

The succession of Charles X. was also observed by another foreigner, who was making agreeable personal notes at that time in Paris, but who is not referred to by Irving, who for some unexplained reason failed to meet the genial Scotsman at breakfast.  Perhaps it is to his failure to do so that he owes the semi-respectful reference to himself in Carlyle’s “Reminiscences.”  Lacking the stimulus to his vocabulary of personal acquaintance, Carlyle simply wrote:  “Washington Irving was said to be in Paris, a kind of lion at that time, whose books I somewhat esteemed.  One day the Emerson-Tennant people bragged that they had engaged him to breakfast with us at a certain cafe next morning.  We all attended duly, Strackey among the rest, but no Washington came.  ’Couldn’t rightly come,’ said Malcolm to me in a judicious aside, as we cheerfully breakfasted without him.  I never saw Washington at all, but still have a mild esteem of the good man.”  This ought to be accepted as evidence of Carlyle’s disinclination to say ill-natured things of those he did not know.