ation. He
seems always writing from an internal calm, which is the necessary
condition of his production. If he wins at all by his style, by his
humor, by his portraiture of scenes or of character, it is by a gentle
force, like that of the sun in spring. There are many men now living,
or recently dead, intellectual prodigies, who have stimulated thought,
or upset opinions, created mental eras, to whom Irving stands hardly in
as fair a relation as Goldsmith to Johnson. What verdict the next
generation will put upon their achievements I do not know; but it is safe
to say that their position and that of Irving as well will depend largely
upon the affirmation or the reversal of their views of life and their
judgments of character. I think the calm work of Irving will stand when
much of the more startling and perhaps more brilliant intellectual
achievement of this age has passed away.

And this leads me to speak of Irving's moral quality, which I cannot
bring myself to exclude from a literary estimate, even in the face of the
current gospel of art for art's sake. There is something that made Scott
and Irving personally loved by the millions of their readers, who had
only the dimmest ideas of their personality. This was some quality
perceived in what they wrote. Each one can define it for himself; there
it is, and I do not see why it is not as integral a part of the authors
--an element in the estimate of their future position--as what we term
their intellect, their knowledge, their skill, or their art. However you
rate it, you cannot account for Irving's influence in the world without
it. In his tender tribute to Irving, the great-hearted Thackeray, who
saw as clearly as anybody the place of mere literary art in the sum total
of life, quoted the dying words of Scott to Lockhart,--"Be a good man, my
dear." We know well enough that the great author of "The Newcomes" and
the great author of "The Heart of Midlothian" recognized the abiding
value in literature of integrity, sincerity, purity, charity, faith.
These are beneficences; and Irving's literature, walk round it and
measure it by whatever critical instruments you will, is a beneficent
literature. The author loved good women and little children and a pure
life; he had faith in his fellow-men, a kindly sympathy with the lowest,
without any subservience to the highest; he retained a belief in the
possibility of chivalrous actions, and did not care to envelop them in a
cynica