pired by a
translation of "Orlando Furioso;" he devoured books of voyages and
travel; he could turn a neat verse, and his scribbling propensities
were exercised in the composition of childish plays. The fact seems to
be that the boy was a dreamer and saunterer; he himself says that he
used to wander about the pier heads in fine weather, watch the ships
departing on long voyages, and dream of going to the ends of the earth.
His brothers Peter and John had been sent to Columbia College, and it is
probable that Washington would have had the same advantage if he had not
shown a disinclination to methodical study. At the age of sixteen he
entered a law office, but he was a heedless student, and never acquired
either a taste for the profession or much knowledge of law. While he sat
in the law office, he read literature, and made considerable progress in
his self-culture; but he liked rambling and society quite as well as
books. In 1798 we find him passing a summer holiday in Westchester
County, and exploring with his gun the Sleepy Hollow region which he was
afterwards to make an enchanted realm; and in 1800 he made his first
voyage up the Hudson, the beauties of which he was the first to
celebrate, on a visit to a married sister who lived in the Mohawk
Valley. In 1802 he became a law clerk in the office of Josiah Ogden
Hoffman, and began that enduring intimacy with the refined and charming
Hoffman family which was so deeply to influence all his life. His health
had always been delicate, and his friends were now alarmed by symptoms
of pulmonary weakness. This physical disability no doubt had much to do
with his disinclination to severe study. For the next two or three years
much time was consumed in excursions up the Hudson and the Mohawk, and
in adventurous journeys as far as the wilds of Ogdensburg and to
Montreal, to the great improvement of his physical condition, and in the
enjoyment of the gay society of Albany, Schenectady, Ballston, and
Saratoga Springs. These explorations and visits gave him material for
future use, and exercised his pen in agreeable correspondence; but his
tendency at this time, and for several years afterwards, was to the idle
life of a man of society. Whether the literary impulse which was born in
him would have ever insisted upon any but an occasional and fitful
expression, except for the necessities of his subsequent condition, is
doubtful.

Irving's first literary publication was a series of le