red the position of Chief Clerk of the Navy Department, with a
salary of twenty-four hundred dollars a year. This, however, after some
misgivings, he declines. He does not like the idea of being cramped by
official routine of duty. He will try what he can do with his pen. And
for months after making this decision (we have heard it with unction
from his own lips) he can do nothing. His friend Allston is going back
to America; Leslie is making a reputation; and he, a bankrupt, and
having wantonly thrown up the chance for a lucrative position at home,
is suddenly bereft of all capacity for literary work; he makes trial;
but it is in vain. The "Sketch-Book" is floating in his thought; but he
cannot commit its graces to paper.

The months roll on; something must be done; the secretaryship at home is
abandoned; he must try again; he does try; he sends off "Sketch-Book No.
I." to America. We know what came of it: success, delight. Number upon
number followed. There was an early republication, under the author's
auspices, in London. He was feted: it was so odd that an American should
write with such control of language, with such a play of fancy, with
such pathetic grace. There was a kind of social _furor_ to meet and to
see the man who, notwithstanding his Transatlantic birth, had conquered
all the witchery of British speech, who knew its possible delicacies of
expression, and who graced it with a humor that reminded of Goldsmith.

No American author had ever dreamed of such ovation before: an ovation
not due to any incisive thought, not due to any novelty of his
subject-matter,--but due to the fact that a man born overseas had
suddenly appeared among British writers, who could lay hold upon their
own resources of sentiment, and inwrap it in language which charmed them
by its grace and provoked them by its purity.

Mr. Murray entered upon the publication of the "Sketch-Book" in 1820,
Mr. Irving being at that time thirty-seven years of age. Of his pleasant
intimacy with Sir Walter Scott, of his junketings in Paris, of his
meeting with Tom Moore, of his unfortunate enlistment in a
steamboat-enterprise upon the Seine, there is full and most lively
account in the "Life and Letters" before us. "Bracebridge Hall,"
despatched from Paris in 1822, is received with the same favor which had
attended the publication of the "Sketch-Book"; and the pecuniary returns
are so liberal that he can lie upon his oars for a while, and (what
please