hirty years ago Irving was much read
in America by young people, and his clear style helped to form a good
taste and correct literary habits. It is not so now. The manufacturers
of books, periodicals, and newspapers for the young keep the rising
generation fully occupied, with a result to its taste and mental fiber
which, to say the least of it, must be regarded with some apprehension.
The "plant," in the way of money and writing industry invested in the
production of juvenile literature, is so large and is so permanent an
interest, that it requires more discriminating consideration than can be
given to it in a passing paragraph.

Besides this, and with respect to Irving in particular, there has been in
America a criticism--sometimes called the destructive, sometimes the
Donnybrook Fair--that found "earnestness" the only amusing thing in the
world, that brought to literary art the test of utility, and disparaged
what is called the "Knickerbocker School" (assuming Irving to be the head
of it) as wanting in purpose and virility, a merely romantic development
of the post-Revolutionary period. And it has been to some extent the
fashion to damn with faint admiration the pioneer if not the creator of
American literature as the "genial" Irving.

Before I pass to an outline of the career of this representative American
author, it is necessary to refer for a moment to certain periods, more or
less marked, in our literature. I do not include in it the works of
writers either born in England or completely English in training, method,
and tradition, showing nothing distinctively American in their writings
except the incidental subject. The first authors whom we may regard as
characteristic of the new country--leaving out the productions of
speculative theology--devoted their genius to politics. It is in the
political writings immediately preceding and following the Revolution
--such as those of Hamilton, Madison, Jay, Franklin, Jefferson that the new
birth of a nation of original force and ideas is declared. It has been
said, and I think the statement can be maintained, that for any parallel
to those treatises on the nature of government, in respect to originality
and vigor, we must go back to classic times. But literature, that is,
literature which is an end in itself and not a means to something else,
did not exist in America before Irving. Some foreshadowings (the
autobiographical fragment of Franklin was not published till 1817