reminded him closely of Swift, and had touches resembling Sterne.  It is not necessary to claim for Irving’s little masterpiece a place beside Gulliver’s Travels and Tristram Shandy.  But it was, at least, the first American book in the lighter departments of literature which needed no apology and stood squarely on its own legs.  It was written, too, at just the right time.  Although New Amsterdam had become New York as early as 1664, the impress of its first settlers, with their quaint conservative ways, was still upon it when Irving was a boy.  The descendants of the Dutch families formed a definite element not only in Manhattan, but all up along the kills of the Hudson, at Albany, at Schenectady, in Westchester County, at Hoboken, and Communipaw, localities made familiar to him in many a ramble and excursion.  He lived to see the little provincial town of his birth grow into a great metropolis, in which all national characteristics were blended together, and a tide of immigration from Europe and New England flowed over the old landmarks and obliterated them utterly.

Although Irving was the first to reveal to his countrymen the literary possibilities of their early history it must be acknowledged that with modern American life he had little sympathy.  He hated politics, and in the restless democratic movement of the time, as we have described it, he found no inspiration.  This moderate and placid gentleman, with his distrust of all kinds of fanaticism, had no liking for the Puritans or for their descendants, the New England Yankees, if we may judge from his sketch of Ichabod Crane in the Legend of Sleepy Hollow.  His genius was reminiscent, and his imagination, like Scott’s, was the historic imagination.  In crude America his fancy took refuge in the picturesque aspects of the past, in “survivals” like the Knickerbocker Dutch and the Acadian peasants, whose isolated communities on the lower Mississippi he visited and described.  He turned naturally to the ripe civilization of the Old World, He was our first picturesque tourist, the first “American in Europe.”  He rediscovered England, whose ancient churches, quiet landscapes, memory-haunted cities, Christmas celebrations, and rural festivals had for him an unfailing attraction.  With pictures of these, for the most part, he filled the pages of the Sketch Book and Bracebridge Hall, 1822.  Delightful as are these English sketches, in which the author conducts his reader to Windsor Castle, or Stratford-on-Avon, or the Boar’s Head Tavern, or sits beside him on the box of the old English stage-coach, or shares with him the Yule-tide cheer at the ancient English country-house, their interest has somewhat faded.  The pathos of the Broken Heart and the Pride of the Village, the mild satire of the Art of Book-Making, the rather obvious reflections in Westminster Abbey are not exactly to the taste of this generation.