nd liable to wander over
the "dead-line" of matrimonial danger. He confesses that he was all day
in Elysium. "When we had descended from the last precipice," he says,
"and come to where the Dove flowed musically through a verdant
meadow--then--fancy me, oh, thou 'sweetest of poets,' wandering by the
course of this romantic stream--a lovely girl hanging on my arm,
pointing out the beauties of the surrounding scenery, and repeating in
the most dulcet voice tracts of heaven-born poetry. If a strawberry
smothered in cream has any consciousness of its delicious situation, it
must feel as I felt at that moment." Indeed, the letters of this doleful
year are enlivened by so many references to the graces and attractions
of lovely women, seen and remembered, that insensibility cannot be
attributed to the author of the "Sketch-Book."

The death of Irving's mother in the spring of 1817 determined him to
remain another year abroad. Business did not improve. His
brother-in-law Van Wart called a meeting of his creditors, the Irving
brothers floundered on into greater depths of embarrassment, and
Washington, who could not think of returning home to face poverty in New
York, began to revolve a plan that would give him a scanty but
sufficient support. The idea of the "Sketch-Book" was in his mind. He
had as yet made few literary acquaintances in England. It is an
illustration of the warping effect of friendship upon the critical
faculty that his opinion of Moore at this time was totally changed by
subsequent intimacy. At a later date the two authors became warm friends
and mutual admirers of each other's productions. In June, 1817, "Lalla
Rookh" was just from the press, and Irving writes to Brevoort: "Moore's
new poem is just out. I have not sent it to you, for it is dear and
worthless. It is written in the most effeminate taste, and fit only to
delight boarding-school girls and lads of nineteen just in their first
loves. Moore should have kept to songs and epigrammatic conceits. His
stream of intellect is too small to bear expansion--it spreads into
mere surface." Too much cream for the strawberry!

Notwithstanding business harassments in the summer and fall of 1817 he
found time for some wandering about the island; he was occasionally in
London, dining at Murray's, where he made the acquaintance of the elder
D'Israeli and other men of letters (one of his notes of a dinner at
Murray's is this: "Lord Byron told Murray that he was much h