ary Fairlie, known to _Salmagundi_ readers as "Sophia
Sparkle," and who married Cooper the tragic actor.

In the Ann Street house most of the _Knickerbocker History of New
York_ was written. Washington Irving and his brother Peter were to
write it as an extravagant burlesque on Dr. Samuel Mitchill's _Picture
of New York_, then a very popular and learned work. But Peter Irving
was forced to Europe by ill health in 1808, and Washington settled
down to the history, changing its plan and scope. Ten minutes' walk to
the north of where Irving lived in Ann Street is a little park--a
green spot that has taken the place of the squalid Mulberry Bend slum.
In Mulberry Street opposite the park was the location of the imaginary
Independent Columbian Hotel where Dietrich Knickerbocker was supposed
to have lived, and left his manuscript in payment of his board bill.

But by far the most important house connected with this part of
Irving's life is gone now. This was in Broadway where Leonard Street
now crosses. A square house of many rooms, indeed it was a mansion in
the city of 1809. Here lived Josiah Ogden Hoffman, the protector of
the youthful author, in whose office Irving came by his law training.
In the Hoffman mansion, Irving courted Matilda Hoffman, the lawyer's
fair daughter; here he saw her sicken and grow more feeble day by day;
here she died, and so ended the romance of his life. He never
mentioned her name in after days and could not bear to hear it spoken.
But she lived in his memory, and he never married. In the depths of
his seclusion, during the first months of his sorrow, he finished the
_History_. But his heart was not in the laughter of the book, and he
made joy for others out of his own sorrow.

Two years after this, Irving was living beside the Bowling Green, at
16 Broadway, with his friend, Henry Brevoort, at the house of Mrs.
Ryckman. While here he edited the _Analectic Magazine_. From here he
often strolled up Broadway as far as Cortlandt Street, to dine at the
house of Jane Renwick, then passing her widowhood in the city. Her son
became the Professor James Renwick of Columbia College. It was she of
whom Burns sang as _The Blue-Eyed Lassie_.

Still another house knew the Irving of early days, the boarding-house
of Mrs. Brandish, at Greenwich and Rector streets, where he went from
Bowling Green. It was a pretty brick building on a quiet street then,
but it is a gloomy-enough place to look upon now, darkened b