d, as if in hesitation, "though
all the while intending to admit him, Martin, I think he knows a little
law."--"Make it stronger, Jo," was the reply; "d----d little."]--Society
more than ever attracted him and devoured his time. He willingly
accepted the office of "champion at the tea-parties;" he was one of
a knot of young fellows of literary tastes and convivial habits, who
delighted to be known as "The Nine Worthies," or "Lads of Kilkenny." In
his letters of this period I detect a kind of callowness and affectation
which is not discernible in his foreign letters and journal.

These social worthies had jolly suppers at the humble taverns of the
city, and wilder revelries in an old country house on the Passaic,
which is celebrated in the "Salmagundi" papers as Cockloft Hall. We are
reminded of the change of manners by a letter of Mr. Paulding, one of
his comrades, written twenty years after, who recalls to mind the keeper
of a porter house, "who whilom wore a long coat, in the pockets whereof
he jingled two bushels of sixpenny pieces, and whose daughter played
the piano to the accompaniment of broiled oysters." There was some
affectation of roistering in all this; but it was a time of social
good-fellowship, and easy freedom of manners in both sexes. At the
dinners there was much sentimental and bacchanalian singing; it was
scarcely good manners not to get a little tipsy; and to be laid under
the table by the compulsory bumper was not to the discredit of a guest.
Irving used to like to repeat an anecdote of one of his early friends,
Henry Ogden, who had been at one of these festive meetings. He told
Irving the next day that in going home he had fallen through a grating
which had been carelessly left open, into a vault beneath. The solitude,
he said, was rather dismal at first, but several other of the guests
fell in, in the course of the evening, and they had, on the whole, a
pleasant night of it.

These young gentlemen liked to be thought "sad dogs." That they were
less abandoned than they pretended to be the sequel of their lives
shows among Irving's associates at this time who attained honorable
consideration were John and Gouverneur Kemble, Henry Brevoort, Henry
Ogden, James K. Paulding, and Peter Irving. The saving influence for all
of them was the refined households they frequented and the association
of women who were high-spirited without prudery, and who united purity
and simplicity with wit, vivacity, and ch