ars
from his shoulders. "No one seemed more unconscious of the celebrity
to which he had attained," wrote one of his Saratoga acquaintances,
long after. "In this there was not a particle of affectation. Nothing
he shrank from with greater earnestness and sincerity and (I may add)
pertinacity, than any attempt to lionize him." His name was used to
conjure with too often for his comfort. An "Irving Literary Union" had
been formed in New York. Irving's attitude toward it was amusing and
characteristic; he was always invited to attend the anniversary
meeting, always accepted, and always stayed away.

Events abroad continued to interest him. His sister had sent an
account from Paris of the marriage of Louis Napoleon. "Louis Napoleon
and Eugenie Montijo, Emperor and Empress of France!" he wrote. "One of
whom I have had a guest at my cottage on the Hudson; the other of
whom, when a child, I have had on my knee at Granada! It seems to cap
the climax of the strange dramas of which Paris has been the theatre
during my lifetime."

In 1855, "Wolfert's Roost" was published. Most of its contents had
figured years before in the "Knickerbocker Magazine." It is one of the
best of his miscellaneous collections, and should be better known to
the modern reader of Irving. Thereafter, his work was over, except for
the "Life of Washington," which was to appear in parts during the next
three years. Its merits were perhaps exaggerated at the time; to the
modern critic they lie chiefly in its possession of the lucid
simplicity of method without which its author could not write, and in
the life which it infuses into a cold abstraction. If this is not
Washington, it is at least a living and breathing person, whose
interest for us lies not altogether in his career.

These closing years were sadly clouded by sleeplessness and depression
of spirits, from which at times he roused himself to bursts of his old
brilliancy and humor. A year before his death he said to one of the
innumerable inquiries about his health, "I have a streak of old age.
Pity, when we have grown old, we could not turn round and grow young
again, and die of cutting our teeth." A few months later, when he had
begun to be troubled with difficulty of breathing, he had a long and
prosy letter from a total stranger, who proposed a call. "Oh, if he
could only give me his long wind," gasped Irving, "he should be most
welcome."

We need not follow here the rather pitiful struggle of