d upon
all the conventionalities of the world as tyranny, and defied all
restraints of authority from his earliest youth. He believed the
opinions he entertained to be true, and he loved truth with a martyr's
love; he was ready to sacrifice station and fortune and his dearest
affections at her shrine. With the rashness of youth he proclaimed all
the wildest of his opinions, and upheld them with uncompromising zeal.
In his acts he rushed into the face of the world in the same defiant
manner; and the world did not fail to take her revenge upon him. But
posterity will do him justice; it will see him, noble, kind, passionate,
generous, tender, brave, with an unbounded and unquestioning love for
his fellow-men, with a holy and fervid hope in their ultimate virtue and
happiness, and an intense and passionate scorn for all baseness and
oppression.

Already about his grave in a foreign land there gather many pilgrims,
not only from his own country, but from beyond the sea; and as they read
the inscription there,--

"Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea change into something rich and strange,"--

they think that the misconceptions which hung over him during life are
gradually suffering such a change, and they thank God amid their tears.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

WASHINGTON IRVING.

It is a little over one hundred years since Washington Irving was born;
and it is nearly thirty years since he ceased to charm the reading world
by the work of his genial and graceful pen. For fifty long and fruitful
years he was our pride and boast, and his memory will for many a long
year yet be green in the hearts of his countrymen. He was our first and
best humorist. Before his advent, what little writing had been done in
this country was mostly of the sentimental and tearful sort. And for
many years after he began to write, it was much the same. Weeping
poetesses filled whole columns with their tears, and in every local
sheet new Werthers were trying to tell of the worthlessness of life and
the beauties of dying. Young bards were inditing odes to melancholy, and
everybody was chanting in chorus, if not the words, at least the
sentiment of, "how sublime a thing it is to suffer and be strong." There
was no laughter in the land.

Could a collection of these mournful melodies have been made, and these
lorn lyrists have been induced to glance over it, it seems to us that
they must have received it with ine