ll constrained to attend his father's church, went
stealthily to Trinity Church at an early age, and received the rite of
confirmation. The boy was full of vivacity, drollery, and innocent
mischief. His sportiveness and disinclination to religious seriousness
gave his mother some anxiety, and she would look at him, says his
biographer, with a half-mournful admiration, and exclaim, "O Washington!
if you were only good!" He had a love of music, which became later in
life a passion, and great fondness for the theater. The stolen delight
of the theater he first tasted in company with a boy who was somewhat his
senior, but destined to be his literary comrade,--James K. Paulding,
whose sister was the wife of Irving's brother William. Whenever he could
afford this indulgence, he stole away early to the theater in John
Street, remained until it was time to return to the family prayers at
nine, after which he would retire to his room, slip through his window
and down the roof to a back alley, and return to enjoy the after-piece.

Young Irving's school education was desultory, pursued under several more
or less incompetent masters, and was over at the age of sixteen. The
teaching does not seem to have had much discipline or solidity;
he studied Latin a few months, but made no other incursion into the
classics. The handsome, tender-hearted, truthful, susceptible boy was no
doubt a dawdler in routine studies, but he assimilated what suited him.
He found his food in such pieces of English literature as were floating
about, in "Robinson Crusoe" and "Sindbad;" at ten he was inspired by a
translation of "Orlando Furioso;" he devoured books of voyages and
travel; he could turn a neat verse, and his scribbling propensities were
exercised in the composition of childish plays. The fact seems to be
that the boy was a dreamer and saunterer; he himself says that he used to
wander about the pier heads in fine weather, watch the ships departing on
long voyages, and dream of going to the ends of the earth. His brothers
Peter and John had been sent to Columbia College, and it is probable that
Washington would have had the same advantage if he had not shown a
disinclination to methodical study. At the age of sixteen he entered a
law office, but he was a heedless student, and never acquired either a
taste for the profession or much knowledge of law. While he sat in the
law office, he read literature, and made considerable progress in his
self-cultur