Irving

and Philadelphia society; and his letters, par-
ticularly those in 1807 descriptive of the trial of
Aaron Burr, at Richmond, which he attended in
a minor capacity, are admirable transcripts of
life in America during the first decade of the
century. Yet the tranquil, almost shallow flow
of his life now took a sharp turn. While engaged
upon his comic Diedrich Knickerbocker's A
History of New York, he suffered a bereave-
ment which affected him deeply. He loved and
lost in her eighteenth year, his betrothed, Ma-
tilda, the youngest daughter of Judge Josiah 0.
Hoffman [#.z>.]. She died suddenly of tubercu-
losis on Apr. 26, 1809. For weeks, Irving, as he
confessed later, was nearly out of his mind; and
fourteen years later he could write: "She died
in the flower of her youth & of mine but she has
lived for me ever since in all woman kind. I see
her in their eyes—and it is the remembrance of
her that has given a tender interest in my eyes
to everything that bears the name of woman"
(Journal, 1823-24, p. 117). This episode in
Irving's life has been over-sentimentalized, but
there can be no doubt of its sobering and deep-
ening effect upon him, as witnessed, despite later
love-affairs, by his covert but persistent refer-
ences in his journals to Matilda Hoffman and
by her demonstrable influence upon such pas-
sages as those on the deathbed in "Rural Fu-
nerals" in The Sketch Book. He struggled with
the concluding chapters of A History of New
York,an odd anodyne for his grief. This sprawl-
ing burlesque appeared in December 1809, and
may be reasonably called the first great book of
comic literature written by an American. It is
at once rollicking farce and shrewd satire.
Among Irving's targets are Swedes, Yankees,
colonial historians, Dutch settlers in New Am-
sterdam, red-breeched Jefferson and his demo-
crats, English, French, and Spanish literature,
and the quizzical author himself. Although lo-
cal, it has been translated into a half-dozen lan-
guages, and in English has, in spite of prolixity
and subservience to temporal satire, rivaled The
Sketch Book in popularity. For the next six
years Irving was restless, depleting his energies
in such hackwork as his devout edition of the
poetry of Thomas Campbell (1810) ; in the edi-
torship of the Anolectic Magazine (1813-14);
in the New York offices of his brothers; in polit-
ical agencies in Washington, where he became
the friend of Dolly Madison; in society; and in
something very like dissipation. All this he for-
got during the last months of the War of 1812
as aide-de-camp to Gov. Daniel Tompkins [#.?/.],
but disappointed in a plan to accompany his
friend, Commodore Decatur, to Tripoli, he final-

Irving

ly set sail listlessly for Europe, to assist in a
branch of the family business at Liverpool He
was to be gone seventeen years, and was to re-
turn as "Geoffrey Crayon/' the famous Ameri-
can author.

Working in Liverpool with his brother, Peter,
touring England and Wales with James Ren-
wick, of New York, idling in Birmingham, at
the home of his brother-in-law, Henry Van
Wart, his spirits revived. This enchanted Eng-
land, with thatched cottages and ivied castles,
seemed a realization of his dreams in his father's
library. ^Yet the failure of the firm of P. & E.
Irving, in the business depression of the post-
war period, plunged him into fresh despair. For
nearly two years his portion was "anxious days
and sleepless nights," embittered in 1817 by the
news of his mother's death. The necessity of
earning his daily bread drove him, fortunately
for American literature, to writing. In the fall
of 1817 he visited Abbotsford. Scott, in his old
green shooting-coat, with dog-whistle at his
button-hole, talked long with him in walks over
the bare hills along the Tweed, and encouraged
him in his resolve to write. In particular, Scott
spoke of legend and of the rich mine of German
literature. Save the meeting of Emerson and
Carlyle at Craigenputtock in 1833, no literary
encounter between an American writer and an
English has been more seminal. Riveting Ir-
ving's enthusiasm for Campbell, whom he had
just met in London, for Moore, and Byron, Scott
fixed in him also his predilection for legendary
themes. Within a year he had commenced the
study of German, and completed the first draft
of "Rip Van Winkle." The other essays and
stories of The Sketch Book Irving wrote in Bir-
mingham and London, publishing them in New
York in groups of four or five essays during the
years 1819 and 1820, and following these trans-
atlantic installments by the printing in London
(1820) of a complete English edition. The
book's success in both countries was instantane-
ous, and Irving wept tears of joy, finding him-
self almost overnight a distinguished man of
letters. Hazlitt pointed out the debt of The
Sketch Book to outworn literary traditions of
the eighteenth century, and others noted its ob-
ligations to the "village school," but the stric-
tures on its superficial, fragile character were
lost in the chorus of praise from Lockhart, By-
ron, Jeffrey, Scott, and a multitude of other
readers. These sensed the triviality of such pa-
pers as "The Pride of the Village," but felt also
the dignity and tenderness of "Westminster Ab-
bey/' "Stratford-on-Avon," and "The Muta-
bility of Literature/' as well as the deft humor

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