ickerbocker's History of New York_ was a real addition to the comic
literature of the world, a work of genuine humor, original and vital.
Walter Scott said that it reminded him closely of Swift, and had
touches resembling Sterne. It is not necessary to claim for Irving's
little masterpiece a place beside _Gulliver's Travels_ and _Tristram
Shandy_. But it was, at least, the first American book in the lighter
departments of literature which needed no apology and stood squarely on
its own legs. It was written, too, at just the right time. Although
New Amsterdam had become New York as early as 1664, the impress of its
first settlers, with their quaint conservative ways, was still upon it
when Irving was a boy. The descendants of the Dutch families formed a
definite element not only in Manhattan, but all up along the kills of
the Hudson, at Albany, at Schenectady, in Westchester County, at
Hoboken, and Communipaw, localities made familiar to him in many a
ramble and excursion. He lived to see the little provincial town of
his birth grow into a great metropolis, in which all national
characteristics were blended together, and a tide of immigration from
Europe and New England flowed over the old landmarks and obliterated
them utterly.

Although Irving was the first to reveal to his countrymen the literary
possibilities of their early history 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