, he was attended to
the last by the admiring affection of his countrymen. He had the love
and praises of the foremost English writers of his own generation and
the generation which followed--of Scott, Byron, Coleridge, Thackeray,
and Dickens, some of whom had been among his personal friends. He is
not the greatest of American authors, but the influence of his writings
is sweet and wholesome, and it is in many ways fortunate that the first
American man of letters who made himself heard in Europe should have
been in all particulars a gentleman.

Connected with Irving, at least by name and locality, were a number of
authors who resided in the city of New York and who are known as the
Knickerbocker writers, perhaps because they were contributors to the
_Knickerbocker Magazine_. One of these was James K. Paulding, a
connection of Irving by marriage, and his partner in the _Salmagundi
Papers_. Paulding became Secretary of the Navy under Van Buren, and
lived down to the year 1860. He was a {416} voluminous author, but his
writings had no power of continuance, and are already obsolete, with
the possible exception of his novel, the _Dutchman's Fireside_, 1831.

A finer spirit than Paulding was Joseph Rodman Drake, a young poet of
great promise, who died in 1820, at the age of twenty-five. Drake's
patriotic lyric, the _American Flag_, is certainly the most spirited
thing of the kind in our poetic literature, and greatly superior to
such national anthems as _Hail Columbia_ and the _Star Spangled
Banner_. His _Culprit Fay_, published in 1819, was the best poem that
had yet appeared in America, if we except Bryant's _Thanatopsis_, which
was three years the elder. The _Culprit Fay_ was a fairy story, in
which, following Irving's lead, Drake undertook to throw the glamour of
poetry about the Highlands of the Hudson. Edgar Poe said that the poem
was fanciful rather than imaginative; but it is prettily and even
brilliantly fanciful, and has maintained its popularity to the present
time. Such verse as the following--which seems to show that Drake had
been reading Coleridge's _Christabel_, published three years
before--was something new in American poetry:

"The winds are whist and the owl is still,
The bat in the shelvy rock is hid,
And naught is heard on the lonely hill,
But the cricket's chirp and the answer shrill,
Of the gauze-winged katydid,
And the plaint of the wailing whip-poor-will
{417}
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