Irving

[J. F. Kemp, in Engineering and Mining Journal,
Aug.* 10, 1918, and in Bull. Am. Inst. Mining Engineers,
Sept. 1918, with photograph, and bibliography of Ir-
ving's writings; letter from Maj. Evarts Tracy, Ibid.,
Oct. 1918, p. xxv; Waldemaj Lindgren, in Econ. Geol.,
Sept. 1918; L. V. Pirsson, in Bull. Mining and Metal-
lurgical Soc. of America, Aug. 31, 1918; Ibid., Oct. 31,
1918; Who's Who in America, 1916-17.] B.A.R.

IRVING, JOHN TREAT (Dec. 2, i8i2-Feb.
27, 1906), author, was the son of Judge John
Treat Irving and Abby Spicer (Furman) Irving,
and a nephew of Washington Irving [q.v.']. Born
in New York, he was graduated from Columbia
College at sixteen. In 1833 he accompanied
Henry L. Ellsworth [g.^.], the government com-
missioner whom Washington Irving had accom-
panied the year before on a journey to make
treaties with the Pawnee Indians. This expedi-
tion resulted in John Treat Irving's Indian
Sketches (1835, 1888). After his return to New
York, he studied law under Daniel Lord; was
admitted to the New York bar; and was for a
time a law partner of Gardiner Spring. From
1835 to 1837 he traveled widely in Europe, and
on June 5, 1838, he married Helen Schermer-
horn, whose family name occurs frequently in
the letters of all the Irvings of this period. He
began practising law in 1834, when his name
first appears as attorney in Longworth's . . .
New York Directory, and ostensibly continued
in the profession for many years; but his inter-
est in the law seems to have been nominal, and
there were brief periods when he conducted a
brokerage and real-estate business (see Trow*s
New York City Directory, 1869, 1873, 1874).
Whether or not, as has been said, he retired from
business in 1887, it is certain that much of his
life he devoted to his own special interests—the
Protestant Episcopal Church, the Authors and
Century clubs, the New York Chess Club, the
St. Nicholas Society, the Institute for the Blind,
of which he was president, and literature.

It is probably through the last-named interest
that John Treat Irving will retain his slender
hold on posterity. Although he was excelled by
more gifted authors, his writings reflect the lit-
erary passions of his age to a degree which
makes them part of the subsoil of American lit-
erature. Indian Sketches and The Hunters of
the Prairie, or The Hawk Chief: A Tale of the
Indian Country (1837) were expressions of that
gentlemanly and urban concern for the frontier
which so interested Washington Irving on his
return from Europe in 1832 and was responsible
for so many books which, as Philip Hone once
said, a New Yorker could read comfortably in
the evening before a fireplace, sitting in bath
gown and slippers by his astral lamp. It was the

Irving

record of an excursion "fraught with novelty and
pleasurable excitement," conveying "an idea of
the habits and customs of the Indian tribes . . .
who, at that time, lived in their pristine simplic-
ity, uncontaminated by the vices of the lawless
white men" (Indian Sketches, Dedication, 1835,
and Preface, 1888).

In the same way Irving echoed tastes of his
epoch in his contributions to magazines and mis-
cellanies ("A Chronicle of Nieuw Amsterdam,"
United States Magazine and Democratic Review,
February 1840; "Rulif Van Pelt: A Legend of
Westchester County," idem, December 1845, re-
printed in the Van Gelder Papers; "Zadoc Town:
A Legend of Bosons," Knickerbocker Gallery,
1855). The Van Gelder Papers, and Other
Sketches (1887,1895) obviously owe their origin
to the current enthusiasm for indigenous Amer-
ican subjects through the Dutch tradition, a
fashion inaugurated by the greater Irving. Some
of these sketches suggest strongly the influence
of Part IV of Washington Irving's Tales of a
Traveller. Likewise in John Treat Irving's The
Attorney (1842), the story of a rascally lawyer,
and Harry Harson; or the Benevolent Bachelor
(1844?), both of which appeared originally in
The Knickerbocker under the heading "The
Quod Correspondence," John Quod, a kind of
Diedrich Knickerbocker, a whimsical old gentle-
man in a haunted house, is alleged to have writ-
ten the novels. Such books, which have now
chiefly an antiquarian interest, reveal John Treat
Irving as a minor man of letters borne along on
the wave of .pre-Civil War literary tastes.

[.Memorial Cyc. of the Twentieth Century (1906) ;
information from Walter V. Irving, grandson of John
Treat Irving; obituary notice in Columbia Univ. Quart.,
June 1906; P. M, Irving, The Life and Letters of
Washington Irving (1863-64), HI, 69, 73; The Knick-
erbocker Gallery (1855) ; review of The Attorney in
The Knickerbocker, Oct. 1842; C. E. Fitch, Encyc. of
Biog. of N. Y., vol. Ill (1916); Richard Schermer-
horn, Schermerhorn Geneal. and Family Chronicles
(1914); N. Y. Times, Feb. .28, 1906.] S.T W

N.F.A.

IRVING, PETER (Oct. 30, I77i-Jtme 27,
1838), writer, third surviving son of William
and Sarah (Sanders) Irving, was born in New
York. His brothers included William Irving
[#.#.], the poet and politician, and Washington
Irving [#.#.], to whom he was bound through-
out his life by the strongest ties of devotion. He
was educated in the private schools of the city
and studied medicine at Columbia, graduating in
1794, but, like his more distinguished brother,
early displayed talents for literature. Records
of the "Calliopean Society" show him to have
been an important member, declaiming on one
occasion the "speech of Coriolanus to the Ro-

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