engaged, and the
latter instantly authorized Mr. Cogswell to say that he abandoned it.
Although our author was somewhat far advanced, and Mr. Prescott had not
yet collected his materials, Irving renounced the glorious theme in such
a manner that Prescott never suspected the pain and loss it cost him,
nor the full extent of his own obligation. Some years afterwards Irving
wrote to his nephew that in giving it up he in a manner gave up his
bread, as he had no other subject to supply its place: "I was," he
wrote, "dismounted from my cheval de bataille, and have never been
completely mounted since." But he added that he was not sorry for the
warm impulse that induced him to abandon the subject, and that
Mr. Prescott's treatment of it had justified his opinion of him.
Notwithstanding Prescott's very brilliant work, we cannot but feel some
regret that Irving did not write a Conquest of Mexico. His method, as
he outlined it, would have been the natural one. Instead of partially
satisfying the reader's curiosity in a preliminary essay, in which the
Aztec civilization was exposed, Irving would have begun with the entry
of the conquerors, and carried his reader step by step onward, letting
him share all the excitement and surprise of discovery which the
invaders experienced, and learn of the wonders of the country in the
manner most likely to impress both the imagination and the memory; and
with his artistic sense of the value of the picturesque he would have
brought into strong relief the dramatis personae of the story.

In 1842 Irving was tendered the honor of the mission to Madrid. It was
an entire surprise to himself and to his friends. He came to look upon
this as the "crowning honor of his life," and yet when the news first
reached him, he paced up and down his room, excited and astonished,
revolving in his mind the separation from home and friends, and
was heard murmuring, half to himself and half to his nephew: "It is
hard,--very hard; yet I must try to bear it. God tempers the wind to the
shorn lamb." His acceptance of the position was doubtless influenced by
the intended honor to his profession, by the gratifying manner in which
it came to him, by his desire to please his friends, and the belief,
which was a delusion, that diplomatic life in Madrid would offer no
serious interruption to his "Life of Washington," in which he had
just become engaged. The nomination, the suggestion of Daniel Webster,
Tyler's Secretary of