her own enthusiasm, which was as universal.  His readers were the million, and all his readers were admirers.  Even American statesmen, who feed their minds on food we know not of, read Irving.  It is true that the uncritical opinion of New York was never exactly re-echoed in the cool recesses of Boston culture; but the magnates of the “North American Review” gave him their meed of cordial praise.  The country at large put him on a pinnacle.  If you attempt to account for the position he occupied by his character, which won the love of all men, it must be remembered that the quality which won this, whatever its value, pervades his books also.

And yet it must be said that the total impression left upon the mind by the man and his works is not that of the greatest intellectual force.  I have no doubt that this was the impression he made upon his ablest contemporaries.  And this fact, when I consider the effect the man produced, makes the study of him all the more interesting.  As an intellectual personality he makes no such impression, for instance, as Carlyle, or a dozen other writers now living who could be named.  The incisive critical faculty was almost entirely wanting in him.  He had neither the power nor the disposition to cut his way transversely across popular opinion and prejudice that Ruskin has, nor to draw around him disciples equally well pleased to see him fiercely demolish to-day what they had delighted to see him set up yesterday as eternal.  He evoked neither violent partisanship nor violent opposition.  He was an extremely sensitive man, and if he had been capable of creating a conflict he would only have been miserable in it.  The play of his mind depended upon the sunshine of approval.  And all this shows a certain want of intellectual virility.

A recent anonymous writer has said that most of the writing of our day is characterized by an intellectual strain.  I have no doubt that this will appear to be the case to the next generation.  It is a strain to say something new even at the risk of paradox, or to say something in a new way at the risk of obscurity.  From this Irving was entirely free.  There is no visible straining to attract attention.  His mood is calm and unexaggerated.  Even in some of his pathos, which is open to the suspicion of being “literary,” there is no literary exaggeration.  He seems always writing from an internal calm, which is the necessary condition of his production.  If he wins at all by his style, by his humor, by his portraiture of scenes or of character, it is by a gentle force, like that of the sun in spring.  There are many men now living, or recently dead, intellectual prodigies, who have stimulated thought, upset opinions, created mental eras, to whom Irving stands hardly in as fair a relation as Goldsmith to Johnson.  What verdict the next generation will put upon their achievements I do not know; but it is safe to say that their position and that of Irving as well will depend largely upon the affirmation or the reversal of their views of life and their judgments of character.  I think the calm work of Irving will stand when much of the more startling and perhaps more brilliant intellectual achievement of this age has passed away.