They are the literature of leisure and retrospection; and already Irving’s gentle elaboration, the refined and slightly artificial beauty of his style, and his persistently genial and sympathetic attitude have begun to pall upon readers who demand a more nervous and accentuated kind of writing.  It is felt that a little roughness, a little harshness, even, would give relief to his pictures of life.  There is, for instance, something a little irritating in the old-fashioned courtliness of his manner toward women; and one reads with a certain impatience smoothly punctuated passages like the following:  “As the vine, which has long twined its graceful foliage about the oak, and been lifted by it into sunshine, will, when the hardy plant is rifted by the thunder-bolt, cling round it with its caressing tendrils, and bind up its shattered boughs, so is it beautifully ordered by Providence that woman, who is the mere dependent and ornament of man in his happier hours, should be his stay and solace when smitten with sudden calamity, winding herself into the rugged recesses of his nature, tenderly supporting the drooping head and binding up the broken heart.”

Irving’s gifts were sentiment and humor, with an imagination sufficiently fertile and an observation sufficiently acute to support those two main qualities, but inadequate to the service of strong passion or subtle thinking, though his pathos, indeed, sometimes reached intensity.  His humor was always delicate and kindly; his sentiment never degenerated into sentimentality.  His diction was graceful and elegant—­too elegant, perhaps; and, in his modesty, he attributed the success of his books in England to the astonishment of Englishmen that an American could write good English.

In Spanish history and legend Irving found a still newer and richer field for his fancy to work upon.  He had not the analytic and philosophical mind of a great historian, and the merits of his Conquest of Granada and Life of Columbus are rather belletristisch than scientific.  But he brought to these undertakings the same eager love of the romantic past which had determined the character of his writings in America and England, and the result—­whether we call it history or romance—­is at all events charming as literature.  His Life of Washington—­completed in 1859—­was his magnum opus, and is accepted as standard authority. Mahomet and His Successors, 1850, was comparatively a failure.  But of all Irving’s biographies his Life of Oliver Goldsmith, 1849, was the most spontaneous and perhaps the best.  He did not impose it upon himself as a task, but wrote it from a native and loving sympathy with his subject, and it is, therefore, one of the choicest literary memoirs in the language.