is residence to literary account; and it
was not until two years after his return that Forster's "Life of
Goldsmith," by reminding him of a slight essay of his own which he now
thought too imperfect by comparison to be included among his collected
writings, stimulated him to the production of his own biography of his
favorite author. Without pretensions to original research, the book
displays an admirable talent for employing existing material to the
best effect. The same may be said of "The Lives of Mahomet and his
Successors," published two years subsequently. Here, as elsewhere,
Irving has correctly discriminated the biographer's province from the
historian's, and leaving the philosophical investigation of cause and
effect to writers of Gibbon's calibre, has applied himself to
represent the picturesque features of the age as embodied in the
actions and utterances of its most characteristic representatives. His
last days were devoted to a biography of Washington, undertaken in an
enthusiastic spirit, but which the author found exhausting and his
readers tame. His genius required a more poetical theme, and indeed
the biographer of Washington must be at least a potential soldier and
statesman. Irving just lived to complete this work, dying of heart
disease at Sunnyside, on November 28, 1859.

Although one of the chief ornaments of American literature, Irving is
not characteristically an American author. Like most of the
transatlantic writers of his generation, he disappointed expectation
by a scrupulous conformity to acknowledged European standards. The
American vine had not then begun to produce the looked-for wild
grapes. Irving, however, is one of the few authors of his period who
really manifests traces of a vein of national peculiarity which might
under other circumstances have been productive. "Knickerbocker's
History of New York," although the air of mock solemnity which
constitutes the staple of its humor is peculiar to no literature,
manifests nevertheless, a power of producing a distinct national type.
Had circumstances taken Irving to the West and placed him amid a
society teeming with quaint and genial eccentricity, he might possibly
have been the first Western humorist, and his humor might have gained
in depth and richness. In England, on the other hand, everything
encouraged his natural fastidiousness; he became a refined writer, but
by no means a robust one. At the same time he is too essentially the
man