The Complete Works of Washington Irving: Short Stories, Historical Works, Plays, Poems and Autobiographical Writings (Illustrated Edition) E-Book
Washington Irving
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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
In 'The Complete Works of Washington Irving: Short Stories, Historical Works, Plays, Poems and Autobiographical Writings,' readers are invited to explore an extensive array of Irving's literary genius, encompassing his engaging short stories, poignant historical narratives, and reflective autobiographical pieces. Renowned for his masterful storytelling and vivid characterizations, Irving employs a Romantic style that deftly blends humor and pathos, all while illuminating the backdrop of early American society. This illustrated edition enhances the reading experience, providing visual insights into the rich context surrounding Irving'Äôs work and allowing a deeper appreciation of his place within the American literary canon. Washington Irving, often hailed as the father of American literature, was deeply influenced by his experiences in both Europe and America, as well as by the burgeoning national identity of the early 19th century. His travels and varied pursuits'Äîfrom law to writing'Äîendowed him with a unique perspective on cultural themes, as reflected in his celebrated works such as 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow' and 'Rip Van Winkle.' His ability to capture the essence of American folklore and blend it with European sensibilities makes his oeuvre significant in understanding the dynamics of early American literature. For readers seeking a comprehensive understanding of Irving'Äôs contributions to literature, this illustrated collection is essential. It spans a multitude of genres, providing insights into the nuances of his style and thought. Whether you are a seasoned scholar of American literature or a new reader eager to delve into the past, Irving'Äôs complete works promise a delightful journey through storytelling that is rich in historical detail and emotional depth.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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The Complete Works of Washington Irving: Short Stories, Historical Works, Plays, Poems and Autobiographical Writings (Illustrated Edition)
Table of Contents
Introduction
This volume gathers, in a single compass, the most comprehensive survey of Washington Irving’s writings alongside key contemporary responses to his achievement. Anchored by Irving’s own short fiction, sketches, histories, travels, dramas, poems, and letters, and framed by biographical and critical pieces by eminent nineteenth‑century voices, the collection presents the breadth of a career that helped define American literature for international readers. Its purpose is twofold: to trace the evolution of Irving’s craft across forms and decades, and to situate that craft within the cultural conversations of his age. The result is a panoramic edition that lets readers meet the author, his works, and his reception together.
Irving’s reputation rests on his mastery of the sketch and the short tale, the grace of his prose, and his ability to mediate between Old World traditions and New World settings. Writing in the early nineteenth century, he became one of the first American authors to be welcomed abroad, bringing American scenes and subjects into transatlantic favor. His narratives favored mood and manners over sensational incident, and cultivated a reflective humor that made him a model for later essayists and storytellers. This collection allows readers to see not only the iconic tales that entered common memory, but also the quieter pieces that sustained his standing.
The core of the fiction is represented by his celebrated sequences of sketches and stories: The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., Bracebridge Hall, Tales of a Traveller, Wolfert’s Roost and Miscellanies, and The Crayon Papers. These volumes, often presented through the persona of Geoffrey Crayon, juxtapose travel impressions with folklore, scenes of English country life with Dutch‑American traditions, and humorous portraits with meditative essays. They showcase Irving’s preference for the suggestive “sketch” as a flexible form and his deft orchestration of tone—from the gently comic to the atmospherically uncanny. Read together, they reveal an artist refining a distinctly American voice without abandoning cosmopolitan breadth.
Irving’s travel writing extends his art of observation into sustained books that blend recollection, local legend, and descriptive grace. Tales of the Alhambra evokes the Moorish palace and its environs with a romantic attentiveness to place; Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey records visits to the homes of Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron, using setting to illuminate literary character; and A Tour on the Prairies offers an early literary journey onto the American frontier. These works combine curiosity with tact, attentive to custom and landscape alike. Their technique—balancing documentary detail and literary coloring—became a durable model for Anglophone travel literature.
Irving’s satirical current flows strongly through his earliest and most buoyant inventions. The mock‑heroic Knickerbocker’s History of New York, issued under the persona Diedrich Knickerbocker, parodies antiquarian chronicles while giving New York an enduring civic mythology. The Letters of Jonathan Oldstyle, Gent., composed as urbane newspaper pieces, skewer fashion and manners with light touch and metropolitan wit. Across these works he experiments with pseudonymity, playfully staging the author as editor, historian, or correspondent. The humor is genial rather than caustic, yet pointed enough to map the foibles of a young republic. Together, they register how sharply he understood satire as a social art.
Equally central are Irving’s historical narratives and biographies, which marry archival diligence to narrative clarity. Astoria chronicles a commercial enterprise and the fur trade’s reach across the continent; The Adventures of Captain Bonneville draws on frontier exploration; Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada recounts a decisive chapter in Iberian history; Life of Oliver Goldsmith offers a sympathetic portrait of a fellow man of letters; and the multi‑volume Life of George Washington stands as his most ambitious historical undertaking. The Student’s Life of Washington presents a concise adaptation. In each case, Irving favors lucid storytelling, aiming to make the past intelligible without sacrificing fidelity to sources.
His ventures for the stage and his poetry complete the picture of a versatile craftsman. The dramatic pieces The Wild Huntsman and Abu Hassan, and a body of poems ranging from meditative lyrics to occasional verse, reveal habits of musical phrasing already audible in his prose. Poems such as Echo and Silence, On Passaic Falls, and various songs and addresses display ease with cadence, humor, and sentiment. These works are rarely programmatic; rather, they function as laboratories for tone, image, and voice. Read beside the fiction and histories, they show an author attentive to performance and to the lyric possibilities of language.
The inclusion of correspondence between Washington Irving and Edgar Allan Poe opens a compact window onto professional exchange in the period. Without rehearsing private detail, these letters help chart the networks, courtesies, and practical concerns that connected major American writers as they navigated magazines, publishers, and reputation at home and abroad. They also underscore the diversity of early American literary practice: Irving’s urbane classicism in friendly proximity to Poe’s distinct sensibility. As documentary materials, the letters supplement the works by anchoring them in lived literary history, reminding readers that careers are made through conversation as well as composition.
Context is further enriched by contemporary voices who assessed Irving within and beyond his lifetime. Charles Dickens’s speech delivered in New York on February 18, 1842 testifies to the esteem in which Irving was held during his career. Charles Dudley Warner’s Washington Irving offers a sympathetic nineteenth‑century biography. Essays by George William Curtis, William Hazlitt, Richard Garnett, James Russell Lowell, and George Parsons Lathrop situate Irving among peers and successors, weighing his style and influence. Together these materials supply a reception history in miniature: transatlantic, multigenerational, and attentive to the qualities that made Irving a touchstone for readers and critics alike.
Across modes and decades, several themes bind Irving’s work. He is drawn to memory and manners, to the consolations of home and the allure of travel, to the threshold where the everyday brushes the legendary. Old World and New World continually echo each other in his pages—English hearths and Hudson River farms, Moorish courts and American plains—each scene measuring character against custom. He favors the moral of civility over the moral of severity, finding comedy in human frailty without contempt. History and imagination meet not as adversaries but as partners, each lending the other depth, color, and a humane scale.
Stylistically, Irving’s hallmarks are unmistakable: poised sentences, a conversational yet cultivated voice, and an eye for the picturesque. He employs framing narrators—Geoffrey Crayon, Diedrich Knickerbocker, Jonathan Oldstyle—both as masks and as organizing principles, allowing him to shift registers from documentary to fabular with ease. The sketch, with its light architecture and polished finish, is his favored instrument; description carries plot, and atmosphere carries meaning. Humor is tempered, irony is mild, and cadence matters. Even in history, he privileges clarity over complication. These traits account for his accessibility and for the enduring charm that readers have recognized across generations.
Assembled here, Irving’s oeuvre can be followed as a coherent arc: from urban satire to travel and tale, from playful pseudonymity to major biography, from local folklore to national narrative. The accompanying letters, essays, speech, and biography allow readers to see how contemporaries read him and how later critics located his legacy. For students, this is a syllabus in one volume; for general readers, a portable library; for scholars, a reliable point of reference. The illustrated presentation further enhances orientation and atmosphere. Above all, the collection affirms why Irving remains essential: he helped teach American prose how to be graceful, companionable, and worldly.
Author Biography
Washington Irving (1783–1859) was an American author, essayist, and historian whose career bridged the early republic and the mid-nineteenth century. Widely regarded as a pioneer of the American short story and among the first U.S. writers to achieve international fame, he helped define a national literary voice while engaging European forms and traditions. Publishing under personas such as Geoffrey Crayon and Diedrich Knickerbocker, he blended humor, sketch-writing, folklore, and historical narrative. His most enduring tales, commonly anthologized, became touchstones of American cultural memory and contributed to the global image of U.S. letters during a formative period of the nation’s literary development.
Born in New York City, Irving was educated in local schools and read law in a New York office, gaining admission to the bar though he practiced only intermittently. As a young writer he contributed satirical letters under the pseudonym Jonathan Oldstyle and helped launch the periodical Salmagundi, which lampooned city fashions and popularized 'Gotham' as a nickname for New York. His breakthrough in comic history arrived with A History of New York (1809), presented as the work of 'Diedrich Knickerbocker,' a persona that soon became synonymous with old New York. Early travel in Europe broadened his reading and sharpened his interest in transatlantic literary models.
After 1815 Irving spent extended years in Britain, initially tied to family business matters before turning decisively to literature. Encouraged by encounters with leading writers, including Sir Walter Scott, he adapted the genteel essay-sketch, modeled on periodical essayists such as Addison and Oliver Goldsmith, and drew on folklore he encountered or read in translation. The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819–1820) established his reputation on both sides of the Atlantic, introducing 'Rip Van Winkle' and 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.' Readers praised his polished style, picturesque scenes, and genial tone, while some critics noted a nostalgic bent. Subsequent collections, such as Bracebridge Hall and Tales of a Traveller, continued his blend of travel writing and fiction.
In the later 1820s Irving relocated to Spain, where access to historical archives deepened his turn toward narrative history and romance-inflected scholarship. There he produced The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada, and Voyages and Discoveries of the Companions of Columbus, works that combined documentary sources with a literary sensibility. The Alhambra gathered legends and sketches inspired by his residence near the palace complex. He also held a diplomatic posting at the U.S. legation in London around this period, broadening his public service and cultural connections. By the early 1830s he returned to the United States with an international reputation.
Back in America, Irving traveled widely and turned to the nation’s frontier and commercial expansion for subjects. Astoria recounted John Jacob Astor’s Pacific enterprise, and The Adventures of Captain Bonneville drew on western exploration. He settled at Sunnyside, his home on the Hudson River near the Tarrytown-Sleepy Hollow area, and became a prominent man of letters. His earlier Old Christmas essays helped revive interest in holiday customs, and his transatlantic standing fostered exchanges with visiting authors, including Charles Dickens, who admired him. Though sometimes viewed as genteel or nostalgic, Irving’s sketches and tales were seen as adaptable, shaping an American idiom compatible with European literary tastes.
Irving returned to diplomacy in the 1840s, serving as United States minister to Spain for several years. In his final decades he concentrated on biography and national history, culminating in the five-volume Life of George Washington, published in the 1850s. Throughout, he favored a graceful narrative style that prioritized readability and character over exhaustive archival apparatus. Historians later debated the romantic coloring of his historical works, yet readers valued their narrative drive and accessibility. As a figure in American Romanticism, he balanced Old World settings and legends with New World subjects, helping to naturalize the short story, the sketch, and the travelogue in American letters.
Irving died in the late 1850s at Sunnyside and was buried in Sleepy Hollow, a fitting resting place for the author whose tales fixed the region in literary memory. His legacy endures in classrooms and popular culture: 'Rip Van Winkle' and 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow' remain staples, while his pseudonym 'Knickerbocker' long signified New York identity. Scholars continue to reassess his travel writing, Christmas sketches, and historical narratives for their role in shaping a national literary tradition. As one of the earliest American writers to earn a living from his pen and to win broad European readership, he helped legitimize American authorship.
Historical Context
Washington Irving (1783–1859) matured with the early United States, his career spanning from the post-Revolutionary Republic to the eve of the Civil War. Born in New York City, he cultivated transatlantic audiences during the age of Romanticism, writing under personas such as Geoffrey Crayon and Diedrich Knickerbocker. His short fiction, travel sketches, satires, histories, biographies, dramas, poems, and letters reflect a world transformed by the Napoleonic aftermath, the War of 1812, industrialization, and expanding print culture. The collection’s breadth—from The Sketch Book and Knickerbocker’s History of New York to Astoria and the Life of George Washington—shows an author translating national experience into literary forms prized in both London and New York.
Irving’s formative milieu was New York’s shift from Dutch-rooted mercantile town to modern metropolis. The city’s colonial past—New Amsterdam, the Hudson Valley patroons, and Dutch folklore—provided the antiquarian texture for Diedrich Knickerbocker’s mock-epic chronicle (1809) and later Hudson River tales. The rise of partisan newspapers, urban theatres, and literary clubs in the 1790s and early 1800s fostered his early “Jonathan Oldstyle” pieces and stage experiments. This bustling port, shaped by commerce, immigration, and municipal politics, let Irving model American satire on British precedents while localizing it. The city’s rapid growth before and after the Erie Canal’s opening in 1825 haunts his affectionate nostalgia and comic urban portraits.
The War of 1812 unsettled American-British relations while paradoxically consolidating a transatlantic literary marketplace. Irving edited the Analectic Magazine in Philadelphia (1812–1814), engaging naval history and criticism as the nation asserted its cultural voice. After his family’s New York business faltered, he settled in Britain (1815–1832), navigating London’s publishers and reviews. There he forged the Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819–1820), a collection that courted British taste yet affirmed American scenes and folklore. The success with John Murray in London and Carey & Lea in Philadelphia made Irving the first U.S. author to live by his pen, modeling a professional authorship later debated by Dickens and Poe.
Irving’s Geoffrey Crayon persona fused Romantic sensibility with genteel travel, antiquarian curiosity, and the picturesque. In Bracebridge Hall (1822), he reimagined English country traditions—Christmas customs, old manor rituals—amid a broader British revival of medieval pageantry associated with Sir Walter Scott. The miscellany form—sketches, essays, and tales, lightly linked by a narrator—suited a transatlantic periodical culture that prized portability, sentiment, and anecdote. His urbane tone, framed by historical allusion and local color, exemplified early nineteenth-century efforts to reconcile modernity with recovered custom. This habit of affectionately chronicling the past, without forsaking contemporary society, became a signature across his short stories and later regional gatherings.
Tales of a Traveller (1824) and subsequent miscellanies extended Irving’s fascination with the uncertainties of mobility—credit, identity, rumor—during a volatile Atlantic economy after the Panic of 1819. Wandering narrators encounter spectral anecdotes, gamblers, banditti, and salon gossip, echoing anxieties about risk in commerce and reputation in letters. The frame-tale structure mirrored the social networks of inns, stagecoaches, and salons in Britain and the Continent. These pieces were also shaped by the evolving economics of publishing—copyright ambiguities, transatlantic reprints, and serial formats—in which authors blended entertainment with moralized observation. The narrative fluidity of travellers’ tales allowed Irving to cross genres while testing public appetite for gothic, comic, and sentimental modes.
Irving’s Spanish period in the late 1820s and early 1830s brought archival labor and Romantic historicism together. Invited to Madrid, he worked in the Biblioteca Nacional and royal archives under Minister Alexander H. Everett, immersing himself in late medieval and early modern chronicles. From this research emerged the Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada (1829) and, relatedly, the Alhambra legends. Spain’s Bourbon restoration and shifting European diplomacy made Madrid a nexus for Anglo-American writers, diplomats, and antiquaries. Irving’s diplomatic postings in Madrid and London provided access to materials and circles that fed both travel sketches and historical writing, connecting scholarly inquiry with the broader public’s hunger for chivalric and Moorish Spain.
Romantic medievalism and Orientalism mark Irving’s Spanish works, where the Alhambra at Granada—residence of Nasrid sultans—became a living archive. In 1829 he lodged within the palace precincts, absorbing folklore of Boabdil, Ferdinand, and Isabella and the 1492 capitulation. The Tales of the Alhambra (1832) mingle legend, topography, and anecdote, reflecting a period when European travelers sought the “picturesque” borderlands between Christian and Islamic pasts. Irving renders Spain as a liminal East within the West, an imaginative geography that appealed to British and American readers. His balance of archival citation and fireside storytelling typified Romantic historiography, which dignified sentiment and scene as carriers of historical truth.
Irving’s British friendships situate him within Romantic-era celebrity culture. His visits to Sir Walter Scott’s Abbotsford and to Newstead Abbey, once home to Lord Byron, contributed to later essays that read domestic spaces as charters of literary personality. The preservation and display of manuscripts, armor, chapels, and libraries mirrored nineteenth-century efforts to patrimonialize culture amid accelerating industrial change. Railways, suburban growth, and urban renovation remapped Britain in the 1830s, intensifying nostalgia for chivalric relics and poetic lineage. Irving’s portraits of Scott’s hospitality and Byron’s legend fuse travel writing with critical homage, tracing how private estates became public shrines to authorship across the British Isles.
Irving returned to the United States in 1832, just as Andrew Jackson’s presidency, market expansion, and the Indian Removal Act (1830) recast the nation’s geography. His journey into the “Indian Territory” of present-day Oklahoma yielded A Tour on the Prairies (1835), a work that registers military escorts, dispossessed Native nations, and frontier intermediaries. The narrative predates the 1834 U.S. Dragoons expedition yet shares its atmosphere of reconnaissance and uncertainty. Irving’s depiction of hunting camps, river crossings, and diplomatic parley resonates with later western histories in this collection, offering a literary ethnography of contact zones while reflecting the ethical ambiguities of American expansion.
Astoria (1836) and The Adventures of Captain Bonneville (1837) treat the continental contest for the Pacific Northwest. Drawing on John Jacob Astor’s papers and Capt. Benjamin L. E. Bonneville’s journals (1832–1835), Irving situates trappers, Indigenous nations, and rival British and American companies within the Oregon Country. The Pacific Fur Company’s 1810–1813 venture and Fort Astoria’s wartime transfer to the North West Company illustrate commerce under imperial pressure during the War of 1812. Rendezvous culture, overland trails, and riverine logistics emerge as protagonists, making these narratives early syntheses of business history, exploration literature, and geopolitical reporting in an era edging toward Manifest Destiny.
After transcontinental travels, Irving settled at Sunnyside near Tarrytown on the Hudson (purchased 1835), a retreat emblematic of regional identity-making. The Hudson River School of landscape art—Thomas Cole and Asher B. Durand—paralleled his literary pastoral, while steamboats, canals, and railroads altered river life. Wolfert’s Roost and other late miscellanies revisit Dutch farms, Revolutionary sites, and village lore, foregrounding memory as civic resource. New York’s Great Fire (1835), immigration surges, and nativist tensions formed a backdrop to Irving’s gently retrospective tone. His localism was not insular; it functioned as a counterpoint to imperial-scale narratives, holding the domestic landscape within a global frame.
Irving’s Life of Oliver Goldsmith (1840) entered debates about authorship’s precarious economy from Grub Street to Broadway. Goldsmith’s eighteenth-century struggles, sociability, and mixed genres mirrored Irving’s own negotiated respectability in a commercial book market. By 1840, international copyright remained unsettled, leaving American and British authors vulnerable to unremunerated reprints. The biography’s tactful portraiture promoted a moral-aesthetic ideal of the man of letters, mediating between marketplace and patronage. It also consolidated Irving’s authority as a biographer, bridging his genteel essayist persona and his documentary work in Spanish archives, and preparing readers for grander historical syntheses that would culminate at Sunnyside in the following decade.
The five-volume Life of George Washington (1855–1859), with the abridged Student’s Life of Washington, was Irving’s capstone amid antebellum sectional strain. Drawing on Mount Vernon papers and Revolutionary sources, he fashioned a national narrative that emphasized character, prudence, and republican virtue. While contemporaries argued over slavery and sovereignty, Irving presented a unifying founder, suited to civic pedagogy and the family library. The project’s longue durée—conceived earlier, executed in late life—reflects nineteenth-century confidence in documentary authenticity and narrative harmony. Published by George Palmer Putnam, the work aligned with a culture of illustrated national histories and memorial tourism that linked archives, monuments, and mass readership.
Irving’s dramatic and poetic pieces, including The Wild Huntsman and Abu Hassan, reveal his cosmopolitan borrowings from German balladry and Arabian Nights farce. These slight works, often adapted or collaborative, speak to salon culture, amateur theatricals, and the mixed-media entertainments of early nineteenth-century cities. Occasional verses—inscriptions, addresses, album entries—belong to a gift-book world of albums and annuals that circulated sentiment alongside engravings. Their playful exoticism and folklore motifs anticipate tones heard in Crayon-era sketches and Alhambra legends. They also testify to a writer attentive to performance and voice, adept at modulating between narrated history, ghost story, and stage tableau.
Irving’s correspondence with Edgar Allan Poe and the 1842 New York speech by Charles Dickens locate him within periodical controversy and copyright reform. Poe, active in the Southern Literary Messenger and Graham’s Magazine, debated originality, hoax, and craft in an economy of reprints and reviews, exchanging courtesies and critiques with Irving in the early 1840s. Dickens’s American tour, culminating in a New York address on 18 February 1842, pressed for international copyright—an issue that had long affected Irving’s transatlantic income. The speech underscores a shared Anglo-American literary marketplace that shaped the reception, remuneration, and canonization of works represented across this collection.
Diplomatic service reinforced Irving’s historical perspective. Appointed U.S. Minister to Spain (1842–1846) under President John Tyler, he navigated Madrid’s court culture in the wake of the First Carlist War (1833–1840). Earlier posts in London and work with Alexander H. Everett in Madrid had already introduced him to archive diplomacy, treaty talk, and the subtleties of national image. These experiences inform the tone of even his non-political writings, which balance anecdote with statecraft, local custom with empire. The confluence of diplomacy and authorship—letters, dispatches, and books—connects his Spanish chronicles, Alhambra sketches, and Washington biography within a single civic-literary vocation.
Nineteenth-century criticism and memorialization—Hazlitt’s The Spirit of the Age (1825), Curtis’s and Warner’s later essays, Garnett’s British appreciations, Lowell’s A Fable for Critics (1848), and Lathrop’s assessments—helped fix Irving as urbane founder of the American short story and as a national historian. Illustrated editions, often featuring artists like F. O. C. Darley, placed Sleepy Hollow, Rip Van Winkle, and Hudson vistas into a gallery of American scenes. Within the American Renaissance that produced Emerson, Hawthorne, Poe, and later Melville, Irving’s transatlantic poise and archival curiosity offered a complementary model: literature as diplomacy, heritage-making, and travel—between past and present, Europe and America, myth and record.
Synopsis (Selection)
SPEECH: NEW YORK, FEBRUARY 18, 1842 by Charles Dickens
Dickens’s banquet address from his first American tour, offering thanks to New York audiences while invoking Anglo‑American goodwill and literature’s public responsibilities.
THE SKETCH BOOK OF GEOFFREY CRAYON, GENT.
A landmark miscellany of tales and essays—introducing Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow—that pairs American folklore with portraits of English manners and reflective sketches on custom and memory.
TALES OF A TRAVELLER
Linked travel and fireside narratives exploring superstition, avarice, and chance (including the money‑digger vein of The Devil and Tom Walker), balancing gothic color with wry social observation.
BRACEBRIDGE HALL
Episodic vignettes set in an English country manor, gently satirizing tradition, courtship, and holiday rituals while celebrating the picturesque rhythms of rural life.
WOLFERT’S ROOST AND MISCELLANIES
Later stories and essays—many set along the Hudson—that revisit Dutch‑American lore, local history, and literary reminiscence with a mellow, retrospective tone.
THE CRAYON PAPERS
A suite of Geoffrey Crayon sketches and essays mixing travel impressions, character studies, and light satire, ranging across Britain and the Continent with a reflective, conversational voice.
TALES OF THE ALHAMBRA
A travelogue composed in Granada’s Moorish palace that interweaves on‑site observation with romantic legends of sultans, saints, and hidden treasure.
ABBOTSFORD AND NEWSTEAD ABBY
Visits to Sir Walter Scott’s and Lord Byron’s estates, offering intimate portraits of their households and meditations on fame, hospitality, and literary legacy.
A TOUR ON THE PRAIRIES
An 1832 frontier journey into the southern plains, depicting landscapes, hunts, and encounters with Native American groups through a blend of curiosity, reportage, and period attitudes.
KNICKERBOCKER’S HISTORY OF NEW YORK
A mock‑epic chronicle attributed to Diedrich Knickerbocker that lampoons colonial New Amsterdam, the pretensions of historians, and the making of national myths.
LETTERS OF JONATHAN OLDSTYLE, GENT.
Early satirical newspaper letters that parody New York social fashions, theatergoing, and urban foibles through the ironic voice of a faux genteel observer.
THE ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN BONNEVILLE
A narrative drawn from Benjamin Bonneville’s journals, recounting fur‑trade expeditions in the Rockies, river crossings, and encounters with diverse tribes and rival traders.
ASTORIA
A documentary history of John Jacob Astor’s Pacific fur venture, tracing overland and maritime efforts, hardships, and the founding of Astoria amid commercial and imperial competition.
CHRONICLE OF THE CONQUEST OF GRANADA
A romanticized account of the campaigns culminating in 1492, shaped from Spanish sources and emphasizing pageantry, chivalry, and the cultural clash of Moors and Christians.
LIFE OF OLIVER GOLDSMITH
A sympathetic literary biography balancing Goldsmith’s personal struggles with his artistic achievements and situating him within eighteenth‑century British letters.
LIFE OF GEORGE WASHINGTON
A multi‑volume, document‑based portrait tracing Washington from youth through the Revolution and presidency, aiming at a measured study of character, leadership, and nation‑building.
THE STUDENT’S LIFE OF WASHINGTON
An abridged, accessible version of Irving’s Washington biography that condenses campaigns and statecraft for general readers and students.
THE WILD HUNTSMAN
A brief dramatic adaptation of the German legend, staging a spectral chase in ballad‑like rhythms to evoke superstition and night‑world atmosphere.
ABU HASSAN
A short dramatic piece inspired by Arabian Nights motifs, using sudden fortune and mistaken identity to drive comic reversals and social satire.
POEMS (Collected: Echo and Silence; On Passaic Falls; Rhymed Address; The Dull Lecture; To Miss Emily Foster on Her Birthday; Song; The Lay of the Sunnyside Ducks; Signs of the Times; Written in the Deep Dene Album; Extracts from Abu Hassan; Song from The Wild Huntsman; Poem I–III)
Occasional and light‑verse pieces mixing landscape description, playful social satire, affectionate tributes, and songs from the dramas, marked by genial tone and polished ease.
CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN WASHINGTON IRVING AND EDGAR ALLAN POE
A small exchange revealing professional courtesies, criticism, and publication concerns, offering a glimpse of antebellum literary networks and reputations.
WASHINGTON IRVING by Charles Dudley Warner
A concise biographical appreciation that surveys Irving’s life, principal works, and public esteem while underscoring his genial style and cultural significance.
LITERARY AND SOCIAL ESSAYS – WASHINGTON IRVING BY George William Curtis
A commemorative essay praising Irving’s urbanity and broad cultural influence, presenting his persona as a model of American cosmopolitan taste.
THE SPIRIT OF THE AGE - ELIA, AND GEOFFREY CRAYON by William Hazlitt
A comparative sketch contrasting Lamb’s and Irving’s essayistic temperaments, situating both within early‑nineteenth‑century periodical culture and taste.
IRVING, WASHINGTON by Richard Garnett
A reference‑style critical notice summarizing Irving’s career, chief writings, and reputation in a concise, evaluative register.
A FABLE FOR CRITICS by James Russell Lowell
A satirical verse panorama of American authors in which Irving receives genial lines amid broader rhymed appraisals of style and character.
POE, IRVING, HAWTHORNE by George Parsons Lathrop
A critical comparison of three American prose stylists, tracing shared themes of imagination and moral fable while distinguishing their narrative methods.
The Complete Works of Washington Irving: Short Stories, Historical Works, Plays, Poems and Autobiographical Writings (Illustrated Edition)
INTRODUCTION
SPEECH: NEW YORK, FEBRUARY 18, 1842 by Charles Dickens
At a dinner presided over by Washington Irving, when nearly eight hundred of the most distinguished citizens of New York were present, “Charles Dickens, the Literary Guest of the Nation,” having been “proferred as a sentiment” by the Chairman, Mr. Dickens rose, and spoke as follows:
Gentlemen, - I don’t know how to thank you - I really don’t know how. You would naturally suppose that my former experience would have given me this power, and that the difficulties in my way would have been diminished; but I assure you the fact is exactly the reverse, and I have completely baulked the ancient proverb that “a rolling stone gathers no moss;” and in my progress to this city I have collected such a weight of obligations and acknowledgment - I have picked up such an enormous mass of fresh moss at every point, and was so struck by the brilliant scenes of Monday night, that I thought I could never by any possibility grow any bigger. I have made, continually, new accumulations to such an extent that I am compelled to stand still, and can roll no more!
Gentlemen, we learn from the authorities, that, when fairy stories, or balls, or rolls of thread, stopped of their own accord - as I do not - it presaged some great catastrophe near at hand. The precedent holds good in this case. When I have remembered the short time I have before me to spend in this land of mighty interests, and the poor opportunity I can at best have of acquiring a knowledge of, and forming an acquaintance with it, I have felt it almost a duty to decline the honours you so generously heap upon me, and pass more quietly among you. For Argus himself, though he had but one mouth for his hundred eyes, would have found the reception of a public entertainment once a-week too much for his greatest activity; and, as I would lose no scrap of the rich instruction and the delightful knowledge which meet me on every hand, (and already I have gleaned a great deal from your hospitals and common jails), - I have resolved to take up my staff, and go my way rejoicing, and for the future to shake hands with America, not at parties but at home; and, therefore, gentlemen, I say tonight, with a full heart, and an honest purpose, and grateful feelings, that I bear, and shall ever bear, a deep sense of your kind, your affectionate and your noble greeting, which it is utterly impossible to convey in words. No European sky without, and no cheerful home or well-warmed room within shall ever shut out this land from my vision. I shall often hear your words of welcome in my quiet room, and oftenest when most quiet; and shall see your faces in the blazing fire. If I should live to grow old, the scenes of this and other evenings will shine as brightly to my dull eyes fifty years hence as now; and the honours you bestow upon me shall be well remembered and paid back in my undying love, and honest endeavours for the good of my race.
Gentlemen, one other word with reference to this first person singular, and then I shall close. I came here in an open, honest, and confiding spirit, if ever man did, and because I felt a deep sympathy in your land; had I felt otherwise, I should have kept away. As I came here, and am here, without the least admixture of one-hundredth part of one grain of base alloy, without one feeling of unworthy reference to self in any respect, I claim, in regard to the past, for the last time, my right in reason, in truth, and in justice, to approach, as I have done on two former occasions, a question of literary interest. I claim that justice be done; and I prefer this claim as one who has a right to speak and be heard. I have only to add that I shall be as true to you as you have been to me. I recognize in your enthusiastic approval of the creatures of my fancy, your enlightened care for the happiness of the many, your tender regard for the afflicted, your sympathy for the downcast, your plans for correcting and improving the bad, and for encouraging the good; and to advance these great objects shall be, to the end of my life, my earnest endeavour, to the extent of my humble ability. Having said thus much with reference to myself, I shall have the pleasure of saying a few words with reference to somebody else.
There is in this city a gentleman who, at the reception of one of my books - I well remember it was the Old Curiosity Shop - wrote to me in England a letter so generous, so affectionate, and so manly, that if I had written the book under every circumstance of disappointment, of discouragement, and difficulty, instead of the reverse, I should have found in the receipt of that letter my best and most happy reward. I answered him, and he answered me, and so we kept shaking hands autographically, as if no ocean rolled between us. I came here to this city eager to see him, and [laying his hand it upon Irving’s shoulder] here he sits! I need not tell you how happy and delighted I am to see him here tonight in this capacity.
Washington Irving! Why, gentlemen, I don’t go upstairs to bed two nights out of the seven - as a very creditable witness near at hand can testify - I say I do not go to bed two nights out of the seven without taking Washington Irving under my arm; and, when I don’t take him, I take his own brother, Oliver Goldsmith. Washington Irving! Why, of whom but him was I thinking the other day when I came up by the Hog’s Back, the Frying Pan, Hell Gate, and all these places? Why, when, not long ago, I visited Shakespeare’s birthplace, and went beneath the roof where he first saw light, whose name but his was pointed out to me upon the wall? Washington Irving - Diedrich Knickerbocker - Geoffrey Crayon - why, where can you go that they have not been there before? Is there an English farm - is there an English stream, an English city, or an English country-seat, where they have not been? Is there no Bracebridge Hall in existence? Has it no ancient shades or quiet streets?
In bygone times, when Irving left that Hall, he left sitting in an old oak chair, in a small parlour of the Boar’s Head, a little man with a red nose, and an oilskin hat. When I came away he was sitting there still! - not a man like him, but the same man - with the nose of immortal redness and the hat of an undying glaze! Crayon, while there, was on terms of intimacy with a certain radical fellow, who used to go about, with a hatful of newspapers, wofully out at elbows, and with a coat of great antiquity. Why, gentlemen, I know that man - Tibbles the elder, and he has not changed a hair; and, when I came away, he charged me to give his best respects to Washington Irving!
Leaving the town and the rustic life of England - forgetting this man, if we can - putting out of mind the country churchyard and the broken heart - let us cross the water again, and ask who has associated himself most closely with the Italian peasantry and the bandits of the Pyrenees? When the traveller enters his little chamber beyond the Alps - listening to the dim echoes of the long passages and spacious corridors - damp, and gloomy, and cold - as he hears the tempest beating with fury against his window, and gazes at the curtains, dark, and heavy, and covered with mould - and when all the ghost-stories that ever were told come up before him - amid all his thick-coming fancies, whom does he think of? Washington Irving.
Go farther still: go to the Moorish Mountains, sparkling full in the moonlight - go among the water-carriers and the village gossips, living still as in days of old - and who has travelled among them before you, and peopled the Alhambra and made eloquent its shadows? Who awakes there a voice from every hill and in every cavern, and bids legends, which for centuries have slept a dreamless sleep, or watched unwinkingly, start up and pass before you in all their life and glory?
But leaving this again, who embarked with Columbus upon his gallant ship, traversed with him the dark and mighty ocean, leaped upon the land and planted there the flag of Spain, but this same man, now sitting by my side? And being here at home again, who is a more fit companion for money-diggers? and what pen but his has made Rip Van Winkle, playing at ninepins on that thundering afternoon, as much part and parcel of the Catskill Mountains as any tree or crag that they can boast?
But these are topics familiar from my boyhood, and which I am apt to pursue; and lest I should be tempted now to talk too long about them, I will, in conclusion, give you a sentiment, most appropriate, I am sure, in the presence of such writers as Bryant, Halleck, and - but I suppose I must not mention the ladies here -
THE LITERATURE OF AMERICA:
She well knows how to do honour to her own literature and to that of other lands, when she chooses Washington Irving for her representative in the country of Cervantes.
COLLECTIONS OF SHORT STORIES
THE SKETCH BOOK OF GEOFFREY CRAYON, GENT.
THE SKETCHBOOK OF GEOFFREY CRAYON, GENT.
“I have no wife nor children, good or bad, to provide for. A mere spectator of other men’s fortunes and adventures, and how they play their parts; which, methinks, are diversely presented unto me, as from a common theatre or scene.” — BURTON.
PREFACE TO THE REVISED EDITION.
THE following papers, with two exceptions, were written in England, and formed but part of an intended series for which I had made notes and memorandums. Before I could mature a plan, however, circumstances compelled me to send them piecemeal to the United States, where they were published from time to time in portions or numbers. It was not my intention to publish them in England, being conscious that much of their contents could be interesting only to American readers, and, in truth, being deterred by the severity with which American productions had been treated by the British press.
By the time the contents of the first volume had appeared in this occasional manner, they began to find their way across the Atlantic, and to be inserted, with many kind encomiums, in the London Literary Gazette. It was said, also, that a London bookseller intended to publish them in a collective form. I determined, therefore, to bring them forward myself, that they might at least have the benefit of my superintendence and revision. I accordingly took the printed numbers which I had received from the United States, to Mr. John Murray, the eminent publisher, from whom I had already received friendly attentions, and left them with him for examination, informing him that should he be inclined to bring them before the public, I had materials enough on hand for a second volume. Several days having elapsed without any communication from Mr. Murray, I addressed a note to him, in which I construed his silence into a tacit rejection of my work, and begged that the numbers I had left with him might be returned to me. The following was his reply:
MY DEAR SIR: I entreat you to believe that I feel truly obliged by your kind intentions towards me, and that I entertain the most unfeigned respect for your most tasteful talents. My house is completely filled with workpeople at this time, and I have only an office to transact business in; and yesterday I was wholly occupied, or I should have done myself the pleasure of seeing you.
If it would not suit me to engage in the publication of your present work, it is only because I do not see that scope in the nature of it which would enable me to make those satisfactory accounts between us, without which I really feel no satisfaction in engaging — but I will do all I can to promote their circulation, and shall be most ready to attend to any future plan of yours.
With much regard, I remain, dear sir,
Your faithful servant, JOHN MURRAY.
This was disheartening, and might have deterred me from any further prosecution of the matter, had the question of republication in Great Britain rested entirely with me; but I apprehended the appearance of a spurious edition. I now thought of Mr. Archibald Constable as publisher, having been treated by him with much hospitality during a visit to Edinburgh; but first I determined to submit my work to Sir-Walter (then Mr.) Scott, being encouraged to do so by the cordial reception I had experienced from him at Abbotsford a few years previously, and by the favorable opinion he had expressed to others of my earlier writings. I accordingly sent him the printed numbers of the Sketch-Book in a parcel by coach, and at the same time wrote to him, hinting that since I had had the pleasure of partaking of his hospitality, a reverse had taken place in my affairs which made the successful exercise of my pen all-important to me; I begged him, therefore, to look over the literary articles I had forwarded to him, and, if he thought they would bear European republication, to ascertain whether Mr. Constable would be inclined to be the publisher.
The parcel containing my work went by coach to Scott’s address in Edinburgh; the letter went by mail to his residence in the country. By the very first post I received a reply, before he had seen my work.
“I was down at Kelso,” said he, “when your letter reached Abbotsford. I am now on my way to town, and will converse with Constable, and do all in my power to forward your views — I assure you nothing will give me more pleasure.”
The hint, however, about a reverse of fortune had struck the quick apprehension of Scott, and, with that practical and efficient goodwill which belonged to his nature, he had already devised a way of aiding me. A weekly periodical, he went on to inform me, was about to be set up in Edinburgh, supported by the most respectable talents, and amply furnished with all the necessary information. The appointment of the editor, for which ample funds were provided, would be five hundred pounds sterling a year, with the reasonable prospect of further advantages. This situation, being apparently at his disposal, he frankly offered to me. The work, however, he intimated, was to have somewhat of a political bearing, and he expressed an apprehension that the tone it was desired to adopt might not suit me. “Yet I risk the question,” added he, “because I know no man so well qualified for this important task, and perhaps because it will necessarily bring you to Edinburgh. If my proposal does not suit, you need only keep the matter secret and there is no harm done. ‘And for my love I pray you wrong me not.’ If on the contrary you think it could be made to suit you, let me know as soon as possible, addressing Castle Street, Edinburgh.”
In a postscript, written from Edinburgh, he adds, “I am just come here, and have glanced over the Sketch-Book. It is positively beautiful, and increases my desire to crimp you, if it be possible. Some difficulties there always are in managing such a matter, especially at the outset; but we will obviate them as much as we possibly can.”
The following is from an imperfect draught of my reply, which underwent some modifications in the copy sent:
“I cannot express how much I am gratified by your letter. I had begun to feel as if I had taken an unwarrantable liberty; but, somehow or other, there is a genial sunshine about you that warms every creeping thing into heart and confidence. Your literary proposal both surprises and flatters me, as it evinces a much higher opinion of my talents than I have myself.”
I then went on to explain that I found myself peculiarly unfitted for the situation offered to me, not merely by my political opinions, but by the very constitution and habits of my mind. “My whole course of life,” I observed, “has been desultory, and I am unfitted for any periodically recurring task, or any stipulated labor of body or mind. I have no command of my talents, such as they are, and have to watch the varyings of my mind as I would those of a weathercock. Practice and training may bring me more into rule; but at present I am as useless for regular service as one of my own country Indians or a Don Cossack.
“I must, therefore, keep on pretty much as I have begun; writing when I can, not when I would. I shall occasionally shift my residence and write whatever is suggested by objects before me, or whatever rises in my imagination; and hope to write better and more copiously by and by.
“I am playing the egotist, but I know no better way of answering your proposal than by showing what a very good-for-nothing kind of being I am. Should Mr. Constable feel inclined to make a bargain for the wares I have on hand, he will encourage me to further enterprise; and it will be something like trading with a gypsy for the fruits of his prowlings, who may at one time have nothing but a wooden bowl to offer, and at another time a silver tankard.”
In reply, Scott expressed regret, but not surprise, at my declining what might have proved a troublesome duty. He then recurred to the original subject of our correspondence; entered into a detail of the various terms upon which arrangements were made between authors and booksellers, that I might take my choice; expressing the most encouraging confidence of the success of my work, and of previous works which I had produced in America. “I did no more,” added he, “than open the trenches with Constable; but I am sure if you will take the trouble to write to him, you will find him disposed to treat your overtures with every degree of attention. Or, if you think it of consequence in the first place to see me, I shall be in London in the course of a month, and whatever my experience can command is most heartily at your command. But I can add little to what I have said above, except my earnest recommendation to Constable to enter into the negotiation.”*
Before the receipt of this most obliging letter, however, I had determined to look to no leading bookseller for a launch, but to throw my work before the public at my own risk, and let it sink or swim according to its merits. I wrote to that effect to Scott, and soon received a reply:
“I observe with pleasure that you are going to come forth in Britain. It is certainly not the very best way to publish on one’s own accompt; for the booksellers set their face against the circulation of such works as do not pay an amazing toll to themselves. But they have lost the art of altogether damming up the road in such cases between the author and the public, which they were once able to do as effectually as Diabolus in John Bunyan’s Holy War closed up the windows of my Lord Understanding’s mansion. I am sure of one thing, that you have only to be known to the British public to be admired by them, and I would not say so unless I really was of that opinion.
“If you ever see a witty but rather local publication called Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, you will find some notice of your works in the last number: the author is a friend of mine, to whom I have introduced you in your literary capacity. His name is Lockhart, a young man of very considerable talent, and who will soon be intimately connected with my family. My faithful friend Knickerbocker is to be next examined and illustrated. Constable was extremely willing to enter into consideration of a treaty for your works, but I foresee will be still more so when
Your name is up, and may go
From Toledo to Madrid.
“ —— And that will soon be the case. I trust to be in London about the middle of the month, and promise myself great pleasure in once again shaking you by the hand.”
The first volume of the Sketch-Book was put to press in London, as I had resolved, at my own risk, by a bookseller unknown to fame, and without any of the usual arts by which a work is trumpeted into notice. Still some attention had been called to it by the extracts which had previously appeared in the Literary Gazette, and by the kind word spoken by the editor of that periodical, and it was getting into fair circulation, when my worthy bookseller failed before the first month was over, and the sale was interrupted.
At this juncture Scott arrived in London. I called to him for help, as I was sticking in the mire, and, more propitious than Hercules, he put his own shoulder to the wheel. Through his favorable representations, Murray was quickly induced to undertake the future publication of the work which he had previously declined. A further edition of the first volume was struck off and the second volume was put to press, and from that time Murray became my publisher, conducting himself in all his dealings with that fair, open, and liberal spirit which had obtained for him the well-merited appellation of the Prince of Booksellers.
Thus, under the kind and cordial auspices of Sir Walter Scott, I began my literary career in Europe; and I feel that I am but discharging, in a trifling degree, my debt of gratitude to the memory of that golden-hearted man in acknowledging my obligations to him. But who of his literary contemporaries ever applied to him for aid or counsel that did not experience the most prompt, generous, and effectual assistance?
W. I.
SUNNYSIDE, 1848.
*I cannot avoid subjoining in a note a succeeding paragraph of Scott’s letter, which, though it does not relate to the main subject of our correspondence, was too characteristic to be emitted. Some time previously I had sent Miss Sophia Scott small duodecimo American editions of her father’s poems published in Edinburgh in quarto volumes; showing the “nigromancy” of the American press, by which a quart of wine is conjured into a pint bottle. Scott observes: “In my hurry, I have not thanked you in Sophia’s name for the kind attention which furnished her with the American volumes. I am not quite sure I can add my own, since you have made her acquainted with much more of papa’s folly than she would ever otherwise have learned; for I had taken special care they should never see any of those things during their earlier years. I think I have told you that Walter is sweeping the firmament with a feather like a maypole and indenting the pavement with a sword like a scythe — in other words, he has become a whiskered hussar in the 18th Dragoons.”
THE AUTHOR’S ACCOUNT OF HIMSELF
I am of this mind with Homer, that as the snaile that crept out of her shel was turned eftsoones into a toad I and thereby was forced to make a stoole to sit on; so the traveller that stragleth from his owne country is in a short time transformed into so monstrous a shape, that he is faine to alter his mansion with his manners, and to live where he can, not where he would. — LYLY’S EUPHUES.
I was always fond of visiting new scenes, and observing strange characters and manners. Even when a mere child I began my travels, and made many tours of discovery into foreign parts and unknown regions of my native city, to the frequent alarm of my parents, and the emolument of the town crier. As I grew into boyhood, I extended the range of my observations. My holiday afternoons were spent in rambles about the surrounding country. I made myself familiar with all its places famous in history or fable. I knew every spot where a murder or robbery had been committed, or a ghost seen. I visited the neighboring villages, and added greatly to my stock of knowledge, by noting their habits and customs, and conversing with their sages and great men. I even journeyed one long summer’s day to the summit of the most distant hill, whence I stretched my eye over many a mile of terra incognita, and was astonished to find how vast a globe I inhabited.
This rambling propensity strengthened with my years. Books of voyages and travels became my passion, and in devouring their contents, I neglected the regular exercises of the school. How wistfully would I wander about the pier-heads in fine weather, and watch the parting ships, bound to distant climes; with what longing eyes would I gaze after their lessening sails, and waft myself in imagination to the ends of the earth!
Further reading and thinking, though they brought this vague inclination into more reasonable bounds, only served to make it more decided. I visited various parts of my own country; and had I been merely a lover of fine scenery, I should have felt little desire to seek elsewhere its gratification, for on no country had the charms of nature been more prodigally lavished. Her mighty lakes, her oceans of liquid silver; her mountains, with their bright aerial tints; her valleys, teeming with wild fertility; her tremendous cataracts, thundering in their solitudes; her boundless plains, waving with spontaneous verdure; her broad, deep rivers, rolling in solemn silence to the ocean; her trackless forests, where vegetation puts forth all its magnificence; her skies, kindling with the magic of summer clouds and glorious sunshine; — no, never need an American look beyond his own country for the sublime and beautiful of natural scenery.
But Europe held forth all the charms of storied and poetical association. There were to be seen the masterpieces of art, the refinements of highly cultivated society, the quaint peculiarities of ancient and local custom. My native country was full of youthful promise; Europe was rich in the accumulated treasures of age. Her very ruins told the history of the times gone by, and every mouldering stone was a chronicle. I longed to wander over the scenes of renowned achievement — to tread, as it were, in the footsteps of antiquity — to loiter about the ruined castle — to meditate on the falling tower — to escape, in short, from the commonplace realities of the present, and lose myself among the shadowy grandeurs of the past.
I had, besides all this, an earnest desire to see the great men of the earth. We have, it is true, our great men in America: not a city but has an ample share of them. I have mingled among them in my time, and been almost withered by the shade into which they cast me; for there is nothing so baleful to a small man as the shade of a great one, particularly the great man of a city. But I was anxious to see the great men of Europe; for I had read in the works of various philosophers, that all animals degenerated in America, and man among the number. A great man of Europe, thought I, must therefore be as superior to a great man of America, as a peak of the Alps to a highland of the Hudson; and in this idea I was confirmed by observing the comparative importance and swelling magnitude of many English travellers among us, who, I was assured, were very little people in their own country. I will visit this land of wonders, thought I, and see the gigantic race from which I am degenerated.
It has been either my good or evil lot to have my roving passion gratified. I have wandered through different countries and witnessed many of the shifting scenes of life. I cannot say that I have studied them with the eye of a philosopher, but rather with the sauntering gaze with which humble lovers of the picturesque stroll from the window of one print-shop to another; caught sometimes by the delineations of beauty, sometimes by the distortions of caricature, and sometimes by the loveliness of landscape. As it is the fashion for modern tourists to travel pencil in hand, and bring home their portfolios filled with sketches, I am disposed to get up a few for the entertainment of my friends. When, however, I look over the hints and memorandums I have taken down for the purpose, my heart almost fails me, at finding how my idle humor has led me astray from the great object studied by every regular traveller who would make a book. I fear I shall give equal disappointment with an unlucky landscape-painter, who had travelled on the Continent, but following the bent of his vagrant inclination, had sketched in nooks, and corners, and by-places. His sketch-book was accordingly crowded with cottages, and landscapes, and obscure ruins; but he had neglected to paint St. Peter’s, or the Coliseum, the cascade of Terni, or the bay of Naples, and had not a single glacier or volcano in his whole collection.
