at home would have been intolerable but for the more lovingly demonstrative and impulsive character of the mother, whose gentle nature and fine intellect won the tender veneration of her children.  Of the father they stood in awe; his conscientious piety failed to waken any religious sensibility in them, and they revolted from a teaching which seemed to regard everything that was pleasant as wicked.  The mother, brought up an Episcopalian, conformed to the religious forms and worship of her husband but she was never in sympathy with his rigid views.  The children were repelled from the creed of their father, and subsequently all of them except one became attached to the Episcopal Church.  Washington, in order to make sure of his escape, and feel safe while he was still constrained to attend his father’s church, went stealthily to Trinity Church at an early age, and received the rite of confirmation.  The boy was full of vivacity, drollery, and innocent mischief.  His sportiveness and disinclination to religious seriousness gave his mother some anxiety, and she would look at him, says his biographer, with a half mournful admiration, and exclaim, “O Washington! if you were only good!” He had a love of music, which became later in life a passion, and great fondness for the theatre.  The stolen delight of the theatre he first tasted in company with a boy who was somewhat his senior, but destined to be his literary comrade,—­James K. Paulding, whose sister was the wife of Irving’s brother William.  Whenever he could afford this indulgence, he stole away early to the theatre in John Street, remained until it was time to return to the family prayers at nine, after which he would retire to his room, slip through his window and down the roof to a back alley, and return to enjoy the after-piece.

Young Irving’s school education was desultory, pursued under several more or less incompetent masters, and was over at the age of sixteen.  The teaching does not seem to have had much discipline or solidity; he studied Latin a few months, but made no other incursion into the classics.  The handsome, tender-hearted, truthful, susceptible boy was no doubt a dawdler in routine studies, but he assimilated what suited him.  He found his food in such pieces of English literature as were floating about, in “Robinson Crusoe” and “Sinbad;” at ten he was inspired by a translation of “Orlando Furioso;” he devoured books of voyages and travel; he could turn a neat verse, and his scribbling propensities were exercised in the composition of childish plays.  The fact seems to be that the boy was a dreamer and saunterer; he himself says that he used to wander about the pier heads in fine weather, watch the ships departing on long voyages, and dream of going to the ends of the earth.  His brothers Peter and John had been sent to Columbia College, and it is probable that Washington would have had the same advantage if he had not shown a disinclination to methodical study.