nd so lightly esteemed by some
that Hume could doubt if he were a poet "capable of furnishing a proper
entertainment to a refined and intelligent audience," and attribute to
the rudeness of his "disproportioned and misshapen" genius the "reproach
of barbarism" which the English nation had suffered from all its
neighbors. Only recently has the study of him by English scholars--I do
not refer to the verbal squabbles over the text--been proportioned to his
preeminence, and his fame is still slowly asserting itself among foreign
peoples.

There are already signs that we are not to accept as the final judgment
upon the English contemporaries of Irving the currency their writings
have now. In the case of Walter Scott, although there is already visible
a reaction against a reaction, he is not, at least in America, read by
this generation as he was by the last. This faint reaction is no doubt a
sign of a deeper change impending in philosophic and metaphysical
speculation. An age is apt to take a lurch in a body one way or another,
and those most active in it do not always perceive how largely its
direction is determined by what are called mere systems of philosophy.
The novelist may not know whether he is steered by Kant, or Hegel, or
Schopenhauer. The humanitarian novel, the fictions of passion, of
realism, of doubt, the poetry and the essays addressed to the mood of
unrest, of questioning, to the scientific spirit and to the shifting
attitudes of social change and reform, claim the attention of an age that
is completely adrift in regard to the relations of the supernatural and
the material, the ideal and the real. It would be natural if in such a
time of confusion the calm tones of unexaggerated literary art should be
not so much heeded as the more strident voices. Yet when the passing
fashion of this day is succeeded by the fashion of another, that which is
most acceptable to the thought and feeling of the present may be without
an audience; and it may happen that few recent authors will be read as
Scott and the writers of the early part of this century will be read.
It may, however, be safely predicted that those writers of fiction worthy
to be called literary artists will best retain their hold who have
faithfully painted the manners of their own time.

Irving has shared the neglect of the writers of his generation. It would
be strange, even in America, if this were not so. The development of
American literature (using th