than a thousand years in giving to the Rhine its high position in that realm; but Irving in a little more than a

decade made the Hudson almost its peer.

In such unique environment, Irving passed his boyhood. Unlike his brothers, he did not go to Columbia College, but like Charles Brockden Brown studied law, and like him never seriously practiced the profession. Under the pen name of "Jonathan Oldstyle," he was writing, at the age of nineteen, newspaper letters, modeled closely after Addison's Spectator. Ill health drove Irving at twenty-one to

take a European trip, which lasted two years. His next appearance in literature after his return was in connection with his brother, William Irving, and James K. Paulding. The three started a semi-monthly periodical called Salmagundi, fashioned after Addison's Spectator and Goldsmith's Citizen of the World. The first number was published January 24, 1807, and the twentieth and last, January 25, 1808. "In Irving's contributions to it," says his biographer, "may be traced the germs of nearly everything he did afterwards."

The year 1809 was the most important in Irving's young life. In that year Matilda Hoffman, to whom he was engaged, died in her eighteenth year. Although he out

lived her fifty years, he remained a bachelor, and he carried her Bible with him wherever he traveled in Europe or America. In the same year he finished one of his masterpieces, Diedrich Knickerbocker's History of New York. Even at this time he had not decided to follow literature as a profession.

In 1815 he went to England to visit his brother, who was in business there. It was not, however, until the failure of his brother's firm in 1818 that Irving determined to make literature his life work. While in London he wrote the Sketch Book (1819), which added to his fame on both sides of the Atlantic. This visit abroad lasted seventeen years. Before he returned, in 1832, he had finished the greater part of the literary work of his life. Besides the Sketch Book, he had written Bracebridge Hall, Tales of a Traveller, Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, The Conquest of Granada, The Companions of Columbus, and The Alhambra. He had been secretary of the American legation at Madrid and at London. He had actually lived in the Alhambra.

Soon after his return, he purchased a home at Tarrytown (now Irvington) in the Sleepy Hollow district on the Hudson. He named his new home "Sunnyside." With the exception of four years (1842-1846), when he served as minister to Spain, Irving lived here, engaged in literary work, for the remainder of his life. When he died in 1859, he was buried in the Sleepy Hollow cemetery, near his home.

Long before his death he was known on both sides of the Atlantic as America's greatest author. Englishmen who visited this country expressed a desire to see its two wonders, Niagara Falls and Irving. His English publishers alone paid him over $60,000 for copyright sales of his

books in England. Before he died, he had earned more than $200,000 with his pen.

Irving's personality won him friends wherever he went. He was genial and kindly, and his biographer adds that it was never Irving's habit to stroke the world the wrong way. One of his maxims was, "When I cannot get a dinner to suit my taste, I endeavor to get a taste to suit my dinner."

Knickerbocker's History of New York. The New York Evening Post for December 28, 1809, said: "This work was found in the chamber of Mr. Diedrich Knickerbocker, the old gentleman whose sudden and mysterious disappearance has been noticed. It is published in order to discharge certain debts he has left behind." This disguise, however, was too thin to deceive the public, and the work

was soon popularly called Irving's Knickerbocker's History of New York.

Two hundred years before its publication, Hendrick Hudson, an explorer in the service of Holland, had sailed into New York Bay and discovered Manhattan Island and the Hudson River for the Dutch. They founded the city of New Amsterdam and held it until the English captured it in 1664. Irving wrote the history of this settlement during the Dutch occupation. He was led to choose this subject, because, as he tells us, few of his fellow citizens were aware that New York had ever been called New Amsterdam, and because the subject, "poetic from its very obscurity," was especially available for an American author, since it gave him a chance to adorn it with legend and fable. He states that his object was "to embody the traditions of our city in an amusing form" and to invest it "with those imaginative and whimsical associations so seldom met with in our country, but which live like charms and spells about the cities of the old world."

Irving achieved his object and produced an entertaining compound of historical fact, romantic sentiment, exaggeration, and humor. He shows us the contemplative Dutchmen on their first. voyage in the Half Moon, sailing into New York Bay, prohibited by Hudson "from wearing more than five jackets and six pair of breeches." We see the scrupulously "honest" Dutch traders buying furs from the Indians, using an invariable scale of avoirdupois weights, a Dutchman's hand in the scale opposite the furs weighing one pound, his foot

THE OFFICIAL WEIGHT

two pounds. We watch the puzzled Indians trying to account for the fact that the largest bundle of furs never weighed more than two pounds. We attend a council of

burghers at Communipaw, called to devise

means to protect their town from an English expedition. While they are thoughtfully smoking, the English sail by without seeing the smoke-enveloped town. Irving shows us the Dutchmen estimating their distances and time by the period consumed in smoking a pipe, Hartford, Connecticut, being two hundred pipes distant. He allows us to watch a housewife emptying her pocket in her search for a wooden ladle and filling two corn baskets with the He takes us to a tea party attended by "the higher classes or noblesse, that is to say such as kept their own cows and drove their own wagons," where we can see the damsels knitting their own woolen stockings and the vrouws serving big apple pies, bushels of doughnuts, and pouring tea out of a fat Delft teapot. He draws this picture of Wouter Van Twiller, Governor

A ONE-PIPE JOURNEY

contents.

"The person of this illustrious old gentleman was formed and proportioned as though it had been moulded by the hands of some cunning Dutch statuary, as a model of majesty and lordly grandeur. He was exactly five feet six inches in height, and six feet five inches in circumference. His head was a perfect sphere. .

WOUTER VAN TWILLER

"His habits were as regular as his person. He daily took his four stated meals, appropriating exactly an hour to each; he smoked and doubted eight hours, and he slept the remaining twelve of the four-and-twenty."