only, one
who for some time past has been the wife of another."

Upon the delicacy of this revelation the biographer does not comment,
but he says that the idea that Irving thought of marriage at that time
is utterly disproved by the following passage from the very manuscript
which he submitted to Mrs. Foster:--

"You wonder why I am not married. I have shown you why I was not
long since. When I had sufficiently recovered from that loss, I
became involved in ruin. It was not for a man broken down in the
world, to drag down any woman to his paltry circumstances. I was
too proud to tolerate the idea of ever mending my circumstances by
matrimony. My time has now gone by; and I have growing claims upon
my thoughts and upon my means, slender and precarious as they are.
I feel as if I already had a family to think and provide for."

Upon the question of attachment and depression, Mr. Pierre Irving
says:--

"While the editor does not question Mr. Irving's great enjoyment of
his intercourse with the Fosters, or his deep regret at parting
from them, he is too familiar with his occasional fits of
depression to have drawn from their recurrence on his return to
Paris any such inference as that to which the lady alludes. Indeed,
his 'memorandum book' and letters show him to have had, at this
time, sources of anxiety of quite a different nature. The allusion
to his having 'to put once more to sea' evidently refers to his
anxiety on returning to his literary pursuits, after a season of
entire idleness."

It is not for us to question the judgment of the biographer, with his
full knowledge of the circumstances and his long intimacy with his
uncle; yet it is evident that Irving was seriously impressed at Dresden,
and that he was very much unsettled until he drove away the impression
by hard work with his pen; and it would be nothing new in human nature
and experience if he had for a time yielded to the attractions of
loveliness and a most congenial companionship, and had returned again to
an exclusive devotion to the image of the early loved and lost.

That Irving intended never to marry is an inference I cannot draw either
from his fondness for the society of women, from his interest in the
matrimonial projects of his friends and the gossip which has feminine
attractions for its food, or from his letters to those who had his
confidence.