of fame, could be spared without serious loss, while the
works of humor, the first fruits of his genius, are possessions in
English literature the loss of which would be irreparable. The world may
never openly allow to humor a position "above the salt," but it clings to
its fresh and original productions, generation after generation, finding
room for them in its accumulating literary baggage, while more
"important" tomes of scholarship and industry strew the line of its
march.

I feel that this study of Irving as a man of letters would be incomplete,
especially for the young readers of this generation, if it did not
contain some more extended citations from those works upon which we have
formed our estimate of his quality. We will take first a few passages
from the--"History of New York".

It has been said that Irving lacked imagination. That, while he had
humor and feeling and fancy, he was wanting in the higher quality, which
is the last test of genius. We have come to attach to the word
"imagination" a larger meaning than the mere reproduction in the mind of
certain absent objects of sense that have been perceived; there must be a
suggestion of something beyond these, and an ennobling suggestion, if not
a combination, that amounts to a new creation. Now, it seems to me that
the transmutation of the crude and heretofore unpoetical materials which
he found in the New World into what is as absolute a creation as exists
in literature, was a distinct work of the imagination. Its humorous
quality does not interfere with its largeness of outline, nor with its
essential poetic coloring. For, whimsical and comical as is the
Knickerbocker creation, it is enlarged to the proportion of a realm, and
over that new country of the imagination is always the rosy light of
sentiment.

This largeness of modified conception cannot be made apparent in such
brief extracts as we can make, but they will show its quality and the
author's humor. The Low-Dutch settlers of the Nieuw Nederlandts are
supposed to have sailed from Amsterdam in a ship called the Goede Vrouw,
built by the carpenters of that city, who always model their ships on the
fair forms of their countrywomen. This vessel, whose beauteous model was
declared to be the greatest belle in Amsterdam, had one hundred feet in
the beam, one hundred feet in the keel, and one hundred feet from the
bottom of the stern-post to the taffrail. Those illustrious adventurers
who sailed in her