ing's cheerfulness and
contentment, no doubt. And he was called away as soon as his task was
done, very soon after the last volume of the "Washington" issued from the
press. Yet he lived long enough to receive the hearty approval of it
from the literary men whose familiarity with the Revolutionary period
made them the best judges of its merits.

He had time also to revise his works. It is perhaps worthy of note that
for several years, while he was at the height of his popularity, his
books had very little sale. From 1842 to 1848 they were out of print;
with the exception of some stray copies of a cheap Philadelphia edition,
and a Paris collection (a volume of this, at my hand, is one of a series
entitled a "Collection of Ancient and Modern British Authors"), they were
not to be found. The Philadelphia publishers did not think there was
sufficient demand to warrant a new edition. Mr. Irving and his friends
judged the market more wisely, and a young New York publisher offered to
assume the responsibility. This was Mr. George P. Putnam. The event
justified his sagacity and his liberal enterprise. From July, 1848, to
November, 1859, the author received on his copyright over eighty-eight
thousand dollars. And it should be added that the relations between
author and publisher, both in prosperity and in times of business
disaster, reflect the highest credit upon both. If the like relations
always obtained, we should not have to say, "May the Lord pity the
authors in this world, and the publishers in the next."

I have outlined the life of Washington Irving in vain, if we have not
already come to a tolerably clear conception of the character of the man
and of his books. If I were to follow his literary method exactly, I
should do nothing more. The idiosyncrasies of the man are the strength
and weakness of his works. I do not know any other author whose writings
so perfectly reproduce his character, or whose character may be more
certainly measured by his writings. His character is perfectly
transparent: his predominant traits were humor and sentiment; his
temperament was gay with a dash of melancholy; his inner life and his
mental operations were the reverse of complex, and his literary method is
simple. He felt his subject, and he expressed his conception not so much
by direct statement or description as by almost imperceptible touches and
shadings here and there, by a diffused tone and color, with very little
show of analysi