, and which had dropped
from his wallet during his furious encounter with the drummer. The
hideous weapon sang through the air, and true to its course as was
the fragment of a rock discharged at Hector by bully Ajax,
encountered the head of the gigantic Swede with matchless violence.

"This heaven-directed blow decided the battle. The ponderous
pericranium of General Jan Risingh sank upon his breast; his knees
tottered under him; a deathlike torpor seized upon his frame, and he
tumbled to the earth with such violence that old Pluto started with
affright, lest he should have broken through the roof of his
infernal palace.

"His fall was the signal of defeat and victory: the Swedes gave way,
the Dutch pressed forward; the former took to their heels, the
latter hotly pursued. Some entered with them, pell-mell, through
the sally-port; others stormed the bastion, and others scrambled
over the curtain. Thus in a little while the fortress of Fort
Christina, which, like another Troy, had stood a siege of full ten
hours, was carried by assault, without the loss of a single man on
either side. Victory, in the likeness of a gigantic ox-fly, sat
perched upon the cocked hat of the gallant Stuyvesant; and it was
declared by all the writers whom he hired to write the history of
his expedition that on this memorable day he gained a sufficient
quantity of glory to immortalize a dozen of the greatest heroes in
Christendom!"

In the "Sketch-Book," Irving set a kind of fashion in narrative essays,
in brief stories of mingled humor and pathos, which was followed for half
a century. He himself worked the same vein in "Bracebridge Hall" and
"Tales of a Traveller." And there is no doubt that some of the most
fascinating of the minor sketches of Charles Dickens, such as the story
of the Bagman's Uncle, are lineal descendants of, if they were not
suggested by, Irving's "Adventure of My Uncle," and the "Bold Dragoon."

The taste for the leisurely description and reminiscent essay of the
"Sketch-Book" does not characterize the readers of this generation, and
we have discovered that the pathos of its elaborated scenes is somewhat
"literary." The sketches of "Little Britain," and "Westminster Abbey,"
and, indeed, that of "Stratford-on-Avon," will for a long time retain
their place in selections of "good reading;" but the "Sketch-Book