Irving

court of Lindaraxa, he composed the engaging
stories and sketches of The Alhambra. This col-
lection, not published until his return to Amer-
ica, three years later (1832), is more than
"a Spanish Sketch Book." Translated sixteen
times into Spanish, it is a record not only of the
most significant period of Irving's stay in Spain,
but an important item in the bibliography of
Granada's history. This and the eloquent but
diffuse Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada
(London, 1829), identify Irving as an impor-
tant nineteenth-century interpreter of Spanish
legend and culture.

The over-vigilant, far-reaching, protective in-
fluence of his brothers, still uneasy about his
protracted dilettantism, had now procured for
him the post of secretary of the United States
legation in London. Regretfully, and, it would
seem, unwisely, Irving terminated abruptly his
stay in Spain, and took up in October 1829 his
duties under Louis McLane, then minister to
England. Letters of McLane, Martin Van Bu-
ren, and others indicate his reluctant efficiency
in this post, but in 1832 he returned to America.
His appearance in New York was triumphal.
His was the story that Americans of his genera-
tion loved, the story of obscure youth achieving
fame, and especially in that field wherein a sense
of national inferiority persisted, the province of
literature. The New York Evening Post (May
31, 1832) describes in detail the toasts and eulo-
gies of the grandiose dinner of welcome, attend-
ed by three hundred eminent citizens of the na-
tion. In a halting, but tactful speech Irving as-
sured his countrymen of his unchanging love for
them and for America. He was, however, rest-
less; and in 1832, with Charles Joseph Latrobe,
he joined Commissioner Henry L. Ellsworth
iq.vJ\ on his expedition to the land of the Osages
and Pawnees. He was yielding to the wide-
spread demand for a book from his pen on
American themes, and was renewing at the same
time his youthful interest in the frontier. The
story of this pilgrimage, during which he forded
turbulent streams, slept in the open air, and shot
buffalo, he told in A Tour on the Prairies, the
first volume of a series, The Crayon Miscellany
(1835), which also included other exuviae of
his notebooks, "Abbotsford" and "Newstead
Abbey" in one volume, and Legends of the Con-
guest of Spain. Once more, he profited from
popular literary fashions. The Tour, the suc-
ceeding Astoria (1836), and The Adventures of
Captain Bonnevflle, U. S. A., (1837), appeased
the contemporary hunger for books from him on
1jie western frontier. Simultaneously they sub-
murmurs against him as the Tory, an-

Irving

glophile author of Bracebridge Hall Yet all
Irving's compositions on Western themes were
commonplace, defining him still more sharply,
indirectly, as an urban writer and as a born
dweller in cities. Astoria, which he revised
from papers furnished by the fur-merchant and
set in order by his nephew, Pierre Munro Irving
[q.vJ], and The Adventures of Captain Bonne-
ville, are frank hackwork.

In fact, either because his work was done, as
some of the rising generation of writers hinted,
or because, as may be deduced from discreet
hints in the letters, he loathed the "mire" of its
politics, and the bareness of its culture, Irving's
readjustment to American life, after the seven-
teen years in Europe, was, in a sense, imperfect.
He entered into New York society; he estab-
lished with his nieces his patriarchal home at
"Sunnyside," near Tarrytown, on the Hudson;
he accepted tributes to himself, even from Poe,
as a kind of dictator of American letters; yet
there is evidence that he had informed Webster
that he would not be indifferent to a foreign dip-
lomatic post. The announcement, therefore, of
his appointment in 1842, as minister to Spain
could hardly have been the shock which it ap-
peared to those who understood him imperfectly.
It was a happy appointment. In Spain, though
he had been attacked there in 1838 for his casual
trick of offering virtual translations as originals,
he was more than favorably known; and anxiety
concerning his attitude in the Anglo-French
struggle for domination in the Peninsula was
softened by the increasing reputation of his
Spanish writings. The Alhambra, in particular,
was to be a passport to the good graces of all
Madrid. In his sixtieth year, then, his eyes fell
again upon the old scenes, but now he lived,
surrounded by secretaries, within a stone's throw
of the palace, and was plunged at once into the
intrigues surrounding the Regent, Maria Chris-
tina, the dictator, Espartero, and the little queen
Isabella II. Under the stress of the tangled dip-
lomatic life, which brought him incidentally the
friendships of such men as the statesman, Ar-
guelles, and the novelist, Martinez de la Rosa,
and the English minister, Sir Henry Bulwer,
and under the burden of that old illness which
had begun long ago in London, his literary en-
deavor ceased. He merely worked fitfully at the
biography of Washington, which he had con-
ceived in 1825. But in the task of representing
a democratic country, whose diplomatic ambi-
tions were still regarded by older nations with
amusement, he was competent. The hundreds
of official letters in Madrid and Washington
show him effective, chiefly through the native

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