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If I say that he made personally the same impression that his works make, you can easily see the man. As you read the story of his life you feel its constant gayety and cheerfulness. It was the life of a literary man and a man of society–a life without events, or only the events of all our lives, except that it lacks the great event of marriage. In place of it there is a tender and pathetic romance. Irving lived to be seventy-six years old. At twenty-six he was engaged to a beautiful girl, who died. He never married; but after his death, in a little box of which he always kept the key, was found the miniature of a lovely girl, and with it a braid of fair hair, and a slip of paper on which was written the name Matilda Hoffman, with some pages upon which the writing was long since faded. That fair face Irving kept all his life in a more secret and sacred shrine. It looks out, now and then, with unchanged loveliness from some pensive passage, which he seems to write with wistful melancholy of remembrance. That fond and immortal presence constantly renewed the gentle humanity, the tenderness of feeling, the sweet healthfulness and generous sympathy which never failed in his life and writings.

He was born in the city of New York in 1783, the year in which the Revolution ended in the acknowledgment of American independence. The British army marched out of the city, and the American army, with Washington at the head, marched in. “The patriot’s work is ended just as my boy is born,” said the patriotic mother, “and the boy shall be named Washington”. Six years later, when Washington returned to New York to be inaugurated President, he was one day going into a shop when the boy’s Scotch nurse democratically stopped the new republican chief magistrate and said to him, “Please your honor, here’s a bairn was named for you”. The great man turned and looked kindly on his little namesake, laid his hand upon his head, and blessed his future biographer.

The name of no other American has been so curiously confused with Washington’s as that of Irving. Many a young fellow puzzles over the connection which the name seems vaguely to imply, and in other lands the identity of the men is confounded. When Irving first went to Europe, a very young man, well-educated, courteous, with great geniality of manner and charm of conversation, he was received by Prince Torlonia, the banker, in Rome, with unusual and flattering civility. His travelling companion, who had been treated by the prince with entire indifference, was perplexed at the warmth of Irving’s welcome. Irving laughingly said that it only proved the prince’s remarkable discrimination. But the young travellers laughed still more when the prince unconsciously revealed the secret of his attentions by taking his guest aside, and asking him how nearly he was related to General Washington.

Many years afterwards, when he had become famous, an English lady and her daughter paused in an Italian gallery before a bust of Washington. “And who was Washington, mamma?” asked the daughter. “Why, my dear, I am surprised at your ignorance,” answered the mother, “he was the author of the Sketch Book.” Long ago in Berlin I was talking with some American friends one evening at a cafe, and observed a German intently listening to our conversation as if trying his ability to understand the language. Presently he said to me, politely, “You are English, no?” But when I replied “No, we are Americans”–“Americans!” he exclaimed enthusiastically, grasping my hand and shaking it warmly, “Americans, ach! we all know your great General Washington Irving.”

Irving’s father was a Presbyterian deacon, in whose heart the sterner traditions of the Covenanters lingered. He tried hard to teach his son to contemn amusement, and to impale his youth upon the five points of Calvinism, rather than to play ball. But it was John Knox trying to curb the tricksy Ariel. Perhaps from some bright maternal ancestor the boy had derived his sweet gayety of nature which nothing could repress. His airy spirits bubbled like a sunny fountain in that some-what arid household. He read at ten a translation of the Orlando Furioso, and his father’s yard, doubtless trim and well kept as beseemed a deacon’s yard, became at once a field of chivalry. Candles were forbidden him in his chamber, but when he made the acquaintance of Robinson Crusoe and Sindbad the Sailor, he secreted lights to illuminate his innocent revels with those immortal playmates.