ry, it must be acknowledged
that with modern American life he had little sympathy. He hated
politics, and in the restless democratic movement of the time, as we
have described it, he found no inspiration. This moderate and placid
gentleman, with his distrust of all kinds of fanaticism, had no liking
for the Puritans or for their descendants, the New England Yankees, if
we may judge from his sketch of Ichabod Crane, in the _Legend of Sleepy
Hollow_. His genius was reminiscent, and his imagination, like
Scott's, was the historic imagination. In crude America his fancy took
refuge in the picturesque aspects of the past, in "survivals" like the
Knickerbocker Dutch and the Acadian peasants, whose isolated
communities on the lower Mississippi he visited and described. He
turned naturally to the ripe civilization of the Old World. He was our
first picturesque tourist, the first "American in Europe." He
rediscovered England, whose ancient churches, quiet landscapes,
memory-haunted cities, Christmas celebrations, and rural festivals had
for him an unfailing attraction. With pictures of these, for the most
part, he filled the pages of the _Sketch Book_ and _Bracebridge Hall_,
1822. Delightful as are these English sketches, in which the author
conducts his readers to Windsor Castle, or Stratford-on-Avon, or the
Boar's Head Tavern, or sits beside him on the box of the old English
stage-coach, or shares with him the Yuletide cheer at the ancient
English country house, their interest has somewhat faded. {413} The
pathos of the _Broken Heart_ and the _Pride of the Village_, the mild
satire of the _Art of Book Making_, the rather obvious reflections in
_Westminster Abbey_ are not exactly to the taste of this generation.
They are the literature of leisure and retrospection; and already
Irving's gentle elaboration, the refined and slightly artificial beauty
of his style, and his persistently genial and sympathetic attitude have
begun to pall upon readers who demand a more nervous and accented kind
of writing. It is felt that a little roughness, a little harshness,
even, would give relief to his pictures of life. There is, for
instance, something a little irritating in the old-fashioned
courtliness of his manner toward women; and one reads with a certain
impatience smoothly punctuated passages like the following: "As the
vine, which has long twined its graceful foliage about the oak, and
been lifted by it into sunshine, will, w