guilty of the sin of eloquence, and careful not to have any energy, energy being often vulgar. Our intention is not to lower a really great merit, to depreciate a talent which we love. None know better than we, the excellence of a style without pretension and without emphasis, though not without grace, the coloring of which is harmonious and its form pure; but we cannot dissemble, that there is a certain feebleness under these qualities.

We may add that the characteristic merit of Mr. Irving has nothing American in it. All his thoughts direct themselves towards England alone; for her his wishes, his memories; he has for her a singularly superstitious and poetic worship, and takes her as the writers of Queen Anne's day exhibit her. Do not tell him that Addison's England is an embellished ideality, he will not hear you; do not try to prove. to him that Sir Roger de Coverley is a creature like Don Quixotte, a half-symbolic personage, to whom the man of talent has lent action, speech and costume. For Washington Irving, all that the cotemporaries of Pope have written is gospel. He reproduces their phrases, he borrows their language. He loves even the noisy drunken hospitality of that day. This writer, who traces his lines not far from the savannahs of the Ohio, or in some square house in Boston, lives in thought in St. James' Park; he wanders, in his reveries, through the shadowy alleys of Kensington; he talks with Sterne; he shakes hands with Goldsmith. He will soon don the rosecolored buckram and jerkin of the seventeenth century. Do not wake him; he dreams of losing himself in the sinuous alleys of the old city; he is listening to the winds which whistle by the great arched windows of the feudal mansions, or agitates the immense sign boards, so spoken against by Addison. All Irving's poetic Past is there; it is the charin. of his works. The velvety and golden dream which enchants

him, gives a delicious illusion to olden time, and makes of him the Wouvermans of Anglo-American literature.

This delightful story-teller, is the son of a Scotchman established in New York and of an English lady. His feeble infancy and delicate youth, were passed in the neighborhood and in the city itself; "which at that time," says an American, was little like a metropolis or even a city of Europe." You still found an ingenuous morality in this growing city, where all the pleasures of a progressing prosperity, all the enjoyments of an internal well-being, were combined with the pleasant liberty and easy pleasures of an almost country life.

"The advantageous situation of the port caused an affluence of dollars to the coffers of the merchant, for the inhabitants. of other parts of the province had not yet come to colonize this fortunate spot and to demand their share of its profits. The felders of the city saw the falling of the commercial manna, and busied themselves rather in enjoying the present, than in thinking of the future. They had not yet recognized the necessity of habituating their children to the discipline of labor and prudence. The cupidity engendered by gain, the close egotism of local concurrence, had not yet dried their hearts. You saw in these rapidly enriched families, patriarchal manners; they believed in domestic happiness; they did not resign their children for ten hours a day to the mercenary care of the pedagogue; they feared the suffocating atmosphere of the school-room; they found time to bring them up themselves, and then sent them into the free air of the fields

and the neighborhood of New York was admirably adapted to this sort of education. A few minutes walk brought the city youth out into green fields; under fresh shadows, to the brink of fair streams which, covered in the winter with thick ice, invited the skaters to rival the exploits of their Dutch anThe city of New York possessed the most pictur

cestors.

esque site; Edinburgh alone, in Europe, could comparo with it.

Now its rustic environs no longer exist; brick houses replace the verdure; the mason has chased away the gardener; a rail-road has destroyed even the fresh grots of Hoboken." What Irving has of inmost and truest, comes from these almost Dutch souvenirs of his childhood.

He went no farther than the flowery Isle of Manhattan or the neighboring shores; his imagination was cradled in citizen and peaceful memories. Never had he dreamed of far forests; nor of the plumes that fall from the golden-robed flamingo, nor of the desert flower, nor of the columns of wild rock which edge the Mississippi. What grace and nobleness he has belonged to this primitive and simple sphere. His youth was passed in the midst of an active, commercial population, nor had he longed for living brooks which murmur through the heart of antique woods, nor of the deer that crosses them, nor of the colonist's lodge, nor of lakes with gleaming waves. He carly saw himself surrounded with small provincial rivalries, and his delicate observation, worthy of Teniers and of Wouvcrmans, was already in action.

"The city," says a cotemporary, "fifty years ago, exhibited the singular spectacle of various races distinct in origin, character, physiognomy, struggling for a puerile pre-eminence. Time has done justice to those very little quarrels, and showed us their innocent absurdities in relief: all those shades are now confounded into one-but in that day, the Dutch American stuck to his jargon as to a holy thing, his bitterness of a vanquished race, it is true, being much softened by his natural good temper. With the Dutch, mingled the French Protestauts, banished by the edict of Nantes, and tempered the Dutch phlegm with Gallic vivacity. Then came the gentry and cavaliers of old England, proud of their genealogy and

always citing their ancestors, who had come to the once Dutch colony and transformed it into a British province given by Charles II., to his brother the Duke of York. You remarked too, the New Englander, the real American, distinguished by his intelligent activity, and already beginning with the Batavian that strife which has terminated in the nearly total disappearance of the patronymics of old burgomasters from the commercial streets. Finally, the last, the least numerous of this population, but at the same time the most important by their acquired wealth and mercantile influence, the Scotchformed a clan, canny, calculating, enterprising, and joining to their habits of worldly knowledge and economy, hospitable manners and a love of good eating."

The most loveable works of Irving, are those in which the delicate observation of his youth, is naïvely set forth. His satiric History of New York by Dietrich Knickerbocker, a parody on the Dutch minuteness, and the microscopic importance claimed for themselves by the very little-the Sketch Book, Bracebridge Hall, and the Tales of a Traveller-works which will remain and which, indeed, are refined continuations of the style of Addison-constitute what one may call Irving's first manner. Criticism had accused him of feebleness; he wished to rise higher, aad wrote the History of Christopher Columbus, and that of his companions-that of the Conquest of Grenada, and at last the Alhambra. In this second manner there is a little too high coloring and emphasis; but the research is conscientious and the style brilliant.

Returned among his compatriots, who had made him their ambassador to Spain, he undertook a voyage throughout the United States.

The Falls of Niagara, the Lakes of Champlain and Erie, the banks of the Ohio, the majestic course of the Missisippi, formed the theatre of his first excursions. Then, with a

air

troop of mounted pioneers, he penetrated into the territories. of the warlike Pawnees, explored the prairies and forests, chased the wild horse and the buffalo, slept in the open by the camp-fire or in the Indian wigwam. This expedition inspired a charming book. The recent Life of Mahomet and his Successors is not a very clever production for so loveable and gracious a talent.

SECTION VIII.

THE NOVELIST, FENNIMORE COOPER.

With Washington Irving appears the first light of vivid originality, which lends a halo to American literature.

This dawn will grow with Fennimore Cooper.

In his first romances, which awakened the attention of Europe, all is American, descriptions, inspirations, ideas, personages; he copies only translantic nature; certainly, he reproduces it minutely, long, without pause, without perspective, but he is always American. You find his pictures rather dry, fatiguing, by the fidelity of their details; the coldness of his coloring displeases; you accuse him of prolixity; the intrigue seems to be woven with a sufficient clumsiness; and the play of the passions reveals itself with a mechanical punctuality, and a scrupulous stiffness. Now, these Calvinistic and American defects are not without interest; the most rigid Quakerism seems to preside over Cooper's narration; his style is the style of an indictment. Others are prodigal of rich coloring, and shade with boldness, valueless stories and things; Cooper acts like the most con