ic, for it took
place the year the British troops evacuated the city of New York, and
only a few months before General Washington marched in at the head of the
Continental army and took possession of the metropolis. For fifty years
Irving charmed and instructed the American people, and was the author who
held, on the whole, the first place in their affections. As he was the
first to lift American literature into the popular respect of Europe,
so for a long time he was the chief representative of the American name
in the world of letters. During this period probably no citizen of the
Republic, except the Father of his Country, had so wide a reputation as
his namesake, Washington Irving.

It is time to inquire what basis this great reputation had in enduring
qualities, what portion of it was due to local and favoring
circumstances, and to make an impartial study of the author's literary
rank and achievement.

The tenure of a literary reputation is the most uncertain and fluctuating
of all. The popularity of an author seems to depend quite as much upon
fashion or whim as upon a change in taste or in literary form. Not only
is contemporary judgment often at fault, but posterity is perpetually
revising its opinion. We are accustomed to say that the final rank of an
author is settled by the slow consensus of mankind in disregard of the
critics; but the rank is after all determined by the few best minds of
any given age, and the popular judgment has very little to do with it.
Immediate popularity, or currency, is a nearly valueless criterion of
merit. The settling of high rank even in the popular mind does not
necessarily give currency; the so-called best authors are not those most
widely read at any given time. Some who attain the position of classics
are subject to variations in popular and even in scholarly favor or
neglect. It happens to the princes of literature to encounter periods of
varying duration when their names are revered and their books are not
read. The growth, not to say the fluctuation, of Shakespeare's
popularity is one of the curiosities of literary history. Worshiped by
his contemporaries, apostrophized by Milton only fourteen pears after his
death as the "dear son of memory, great heir to fame,"

"So sepulchred in such pomp dost lie,
That kings, for such a tomb, would wish to die,"

he was neglected by the succeeding age, the subject of violent extremes
of opinion in the eighteenth century, a