blems of life. And it is very fortunate
that a writer who can reach the great public and entertain it can also
elevate and refine its tastes, set before it high ideas, instruct it
agreeably, and all this in a style that belongs to the best literature.
It is a safe model for young readers; and for young readers there is very
little in the overwhelming flood of to-day that is comparable to Irving's
books, and especially, it seems to me, because they were not written for
children.

Irving's position in American literature, or in that of the English
tongue, will be determined only by the slow settling of opinion, which no
critic can foretell, and the operation of which no criticism seems able
to explain. I venture to believe, however, that the verdict will not be
in accord with much of the present prevalent criticism. The service that
he rendered to American letters no critic disputes; nor is there any
question of our national indebtedness to him for investing a crude and
new land with the enduring charms of romance and tradition. In this
respect, our obligation to him is that of Scotland to Scott and Burns;
and it is an obligation due only, in all history, to here and there a
fortunate creator to whose genius opportunity is kind. The Knickerbocker
Legend and the romance with which Irving has invested the Hudson are a
priceless legacy; and this would remain an imperishable possession in
popular tradition if the literature creating it were destroyed. This
sort of creation is unique in modern times. New York is the
Knickerbocker city; its whole social life remains colored by his fiction;
and the romantic background it owes to him in some measure supplies to it
what great age has given to European cities. This creation is sufficient
to secure for him an immortality, a length of earthly remembrance that
all the rest of his writings together might not give.

Irving was always the literary man; he had the habits, the
idiosyncrasies, of his small genus. I mean that he regarded life not
from the philanthropic, the economic, the political, the philosophic, the
metaphysic, the scientific, or the theologic, but purely from the
literary point of view. He belongs to that small class of which Johnson
and Goldsmith are perhaps as good types as any, and to which America has
added very few. The literary point of view is taken by few in any
generation; it may seem to the world of very little consequence in the
pressure of all the complex in