the discussion of style in reference to this work superfluous.  Another writer might have made a more brilliant performance:  descriptions sparkling with antitheses, characters projected into startling attitudes by the use of epithets; a work more exciting and more piquant, that would have started a thousand controversies, and engaged the attention by daring conjectures and attempts to make a dramatic spectacle; a book interesting and notable, but false in philosophy and untrue in fact.

When the “Sketch-Book” appeared, an English critic said it should have been first published in England, for Irving was an English writer.  The idea has been more than once echoed here.  The truth is that while Irving was intensely American in feeling he was first of all a man of letters, and in that capacity he was cosmopolitan; he certainly was not insular.  He had a rare accommodation of tone to his theme.  Of England, whose traditions kindled his susceptible fancy, he wrote as Englishmen would like to write about it.  In Spain he was saturated with the romantic story of the people and the fascination of the clime; and he was so true an interpreter of both as to earn from the Spaniards the title of “the poet Irving.”  I chanced once, in an inn at Frascati, to take up “The Tales of a Traveller,” which I had not seen for many years.  I expected to revive the somewhat faded humor and fancy of the past generation.  But I found not only a sprightly humor and vivacity which are modern, but a truth to Italian local color that is very rare in any writer foreign to the soil.  As to America, I do not know what can be more characteristically American than the Knickerbocker, the Hudson River tales, the sketches of life and adventure in the far West.  But underneath all this diversity there is one constant quality,—­the flavor of the author.  Open by chance and read almost anywhere in his score of books,—­it may be the “Tour on the Prairies,” the familiar dream of the Alhambra, or the narratives of the brilliant exploits of New World explorers; surrender yourself to the flowing current of his transparent style, and you are conscious of a beguilement which is the crowning excellence of all lighter literature, for which we have no word but “charm.”

The consensus of opinion about Irving in England and America for thirty years was very remarkable.  He had a universal popularity rarely enjoyed by any writer.  England returned him to America medalled by the king, honored by the university which is chary of its favors, followed by the applause of the whole English people.  In English households, in drawing-rooms of the metropolis, in political circles no less than among the literary coteries, in the best reviews, and in the popular newspapers the opinion of him was pretty much the same.  And even in the lapse of time and the change of literary fashion authors so unlike as Byron and Dickens were equally warm in admiration of him.  To the English indorsement America added