cient to his purpose; either
when that purpose is a highly creative one, as in the character and
achievements of his Dutch heroes, or merely that of portraiture, as in
the "Columbus" and the "Washington." The analysis of a nature so simple
and a character so transparent as Irving's, who lived in the sunlight
and had no envelope of mystery, has not the fascination that attaches to
Hawthorne.

Although the direction of his work as a man of letters was largely
determined by his early surroundings,--that is, by his birth in a land
void of traditions, and into a society without much literary life, so
that his intellectual food was of necessity a foreign literature that
was at the moment becoming a little antiquated in the land of its birth,
and his warm imagination was forced to revert to the past for that
nourishment which his crude environment did not offer,--yet he was by
nature a retrospective man. His face was set towards the past, not
towards the future. He never caught the restlessness of this century,
nor the prophetic light that shone in the faces of Coleridge, Shelley,
and Keats; if he apprehended the stir of the new spirit he still, by
mental affiliation, belonged rather to the age of Addison than to that
of Macaulay. And his placid, retrospective, optimistic strain pleased a
public that were excited and harrowed by the mocking and lamenting of
Lord Byron, and, singularly enough, pleased even the great pessimist
himself.

His writings induce to reflection, to quiet musing, to tenderness for
tradition; they amuse, they entertain, they call a check to the
feverishness of modern life; but they are rarely stimulating or
suggestive. They are better adapted, it must be owned, to please the
many than the critical few, who demand more incisive treatment and a
deeper consideration of the problems of life. And it is very fortunate
that a writer who can reach the great public and entertain it can also
elevate and refine its tastes, set before it high ideas, instruct it
agreeably, and all this in a style that belongs to the best literature.
It is a safe model for young readers; and for young readers there is
very little in the overwhelming flood of to-day that is comparable to
Irving's books, and, especially, it seems to me, because they were not
written for children.

Irving's position in American literature, or in that of the English
tongue, will only be determined by the slow settling of opinion, which
no critic can fo