PERSONAL HISTORY OF

with triumph, the present with delight, the future with glowing and confident anticipation. Is not this a community in which we may rejoice to live? Is not this a city by which one may be proud to be received as the son? Is this not a land in which one may be happy to fix his destiny and ambition-if possible, to found a name?

"I am asked, how long I mean to remain here? They know but little of my heart or my feelings who can ask me this question. I answer, as long as I live."

It was some time before the plaudits ceased sufficiently for him to utter his toast: "Our City-May God continue to prosper it."

"ASTORIA."

"To Henry R. Schoolcraft, Esq.

"SUNNYSIDE, Nov. 10, 1851.

"DEAR SIR-In your Personal Memoirs, recently published, you give a conversation with the late Albert Gallatin, Esq., in the course of which he made to you the following statement:

"Several years ago John Jacob Astor put into my hands the journal of his traders on the Columbia, desiring me to use it. I put it into the hands of Malte-Brun, at Paris, who employed the geographical facts in his work, but paid but little respect to Mr. Astor, whom he regarded merely as a merchant seeking his own profit, and not a discoverer. He had not even sent a man to observe the facts in the natural history. Astor did not like it. He was restive several years, and then gave Washington Irving $5000 to take up the MSS. This is the History of Astoria."

"Now, sir, I beg to inform you that this is not the History of Astoria. Mr. Gallatin was misinformed as to the part he has assigned me in it. The work was undertaken by me through a real relish of the subject. In the course of visits in early life to Canada, I had seen much of the magnates of the Northwest Company, and of the hardy trappers and fur-traders in their employ, and had been excited by their stories of adventurous expeditions into the 'Indian country.' I was sure, therefore, that a narrative, treating of them and their doings, could not fail to be full of stirring interest, and to lay open regions and races of our country as yet but little known. I never asked nor received of Mr. Astor a farthing on account of the work. He paid my nephew, who was then absent practising law in Illinois, for coming on, examining, and collating manuscript journals, accounts, and other docu

A few months later, in the summer, Mr. Irving accompanied Mr. Ellsworth, one of the commissioners for removing the Indian tribes west of the Mississippi, in his journey, which he has described in his Tour on the Prairies, published in the Crayon Miscellany in 1835. His Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey formed another volume of the series. In 1836 he published his Astoria, or Anecdotes of an Enterprise beyond the Rocky Mountains, undertaken by the late Mr. John Jacob Astor, between the years 1810 and the war with England of 1812. He was attracted to the subject not less by an early fondness for the character of the trappers and voyageurs of the West, into whose company he had been thrown in his youth, in Canada, than by his subsequent acquaintance with the projector of the enterprise. He was assisted in the preparation of this work by his nephew, Mr. Pierre Munro Irving. Many years after this publication was issued a statement was made, under circumstances which seemed to challenge the attention of Mr. Irving, imputing the glorification of Mr. Astor as a motive for the work, with the ac-ments, and preparing what lawyers would call a companying stimulus of a large sum of money paid by the millionaire. Mr. Irving availed him self of the opportunity to give the history of the book. The letter is of sufficient interest, involving as it does several honorable personal traits of character, no less than a detail of literary his-out of my own purse. It was the compensation tory, to be presented entire. We give it as it appeared in the Literary World of Nov. 22, 1851.

brief, for me. Mr. Fitzgreene Halleck, who was with Mr. Astor at the time, determined what the compensation of my nephew ought to be. When the brief was finished, I paid my nephew an additional consideration on my own account, and

paid by Mr. Astor to my nephew which Mr. Gallatin may have heard of, and supposed it was paid to myself; but even in that case, the amount, as reported to him, was greatly exaggerated.

'Mr. Astor signified a wish to have the work brought out in a superior style, supposing that it was to be done at his expense. I replied that it must be produced in the style of my other works, and at my expense and risk; and that whatever profit I was to derive from it must be from its sale and my bargain with the publishers. This is the true History of Astoria, as far as I was concerned in it.

"During my long intimacy with Mr. Astor,

COMPLIMENT FROM DANIEL WEBSTER.

commencing when I was a young man, and ending only with his death, I never came under a pecuniary obligation to him of any kind. At a time of public pressure, when, having invested a part of my very moderate means in wild lands, I was straitened and obliged to seek accommodations from moneyed institutions, he repeatedly urged me to accept loans from him, but I always declined. He was too proverbially rich a man for me to permit the shadow of a pecuniary favor to rest on our intercourse.

66

land and sea. The facts, however, will prove to be linked and banded together by one great scheme, devised and conducted by a masterspirit; one set of characters, also, continues throughout, appearing occasionally, though sometimes at long intervals, and the whole enterprise winds up by a regular catastrophe; so that the work, without any labored attempt at artificial construction, actually possesses much of that variety so much sought after in works of fiction, and considered so important to the interest of every history."

Another undertaking of a similar character was the Adventures of Captain Bonneville, U.S.A., in the Rocky Mountains and the Far West, prepared from the MSS. of that traveller, but made an original work by the observation and style of the writer.

Commencing with 1839, for the two following years, Mr. Irving contributed a series of papers monthly to the Knickerbocker Magazine. Among these tales and sketches are two narratives of some length, The Early Experiences of Ralph Ringwood, and Mountjoy, or some Passages out of the Life of a Castle Builder. A number of these papers, with some others from the English Annuals and other sources, were collected in 1855 in a volume, with the title of Wolfert's Roost.

"The only moneyed transaction between us was my purchase of a share in a town he was founding at Green Bay; for that I paid cash, though he wished the amount to stand on mortgage. The land fell in value; and some years afterwards, when I was in Spain, Mr. Astor, of his own free-will, took back the share from my agent, and repaid the original purchase-money. This, I repeat, was the only moneyed transaction that ever took place between us; and by this I lost four or five years' interest of my investment. My intimacy with Mr. A. was perfectly independent and disinterested. It was sought originally on his part, and grew up, on mine, out of the friendship he spontaneously manifested for me, and the confidence he seemed to repose It was drawn closer when, in the prosecution of my literary task, I became acquainted, from his papers and his confidential conversa- In February, 1842, Mr. Irving was appointed tions, with the scope and power of his mind, Minister to Spain, an office which he occupied and the grandeur of his enterprises. His noble for the next four years. The nomination was project of the ASTOR LIBRARY, conceived about entirely unsought for, and was a compliment the same time, and which I was solicitous he paid him by Daniel Webster, who announced it should carry into execution during his lifetime, to him in a dispatch bearing his honorary title. was a still stronger link of intimacy between us. It was the first notice he received of it. On his "He was altogether one of the most remark-return to America he took up his permanent able men I have ever known: of penetrating sagacity, massive intellect, and possessing elements of greatness of which the busy world around him was little aware; who, like MalteBrun, regarded him 'merely as a merchant seeking his own profit.'

in me.

Very respectfully, your friend and servant, "WASHINGTON IRVING."

Though made up from the most unpromising material of a commercial correspondence frequently carried on under great disadvantages, with gaps and deficiences which had to be supplied from the scanty stock of published travels in the West, the skill of the writer overcame all difficulties. His own conception of the artistical requirements of the subject, happily fulfilled by his adroit pen, is expressed in the concluding paragraph of the Introduction:-"The work I Ï here present to the public is necessarily of a rambling and somewhat disjointed nature, comprising various expeditions and adventures by

residence at his cottage, "Sunnyside," near Tarrytown, on the banks of the Hudson, the very spot which he had described years before in the "Legend of Sleepy Hollow," as the castle of the Herr van Tassel, and of the neighborhood of which he had said:-"If ever I should wish for a retreat, whither I might steal from the world and its distractions, and dream quietly away the remainder of a troubled life, I know of none more promising than this little valley." At this retreat, looking out upon the river which he loved so well, he continued to live, in the midst of a family circle composed of his brother and his nieces, hospitably entertaining his friends, occasionally visiting different portions of the country, and employing his pen in the composition of his Life of Washington, the last volume of which passed through the press the present year. The preparation of this great work, the publication of Oliver Goldsmith, a Biography, an enlargement of a life which he had prefixed to an edition in Paris of that author's works,

THE LIFE OF WASHINGTON.

adapting the researches of Prior and Forster, fully borne by the author, who sacrificed welland a revised edition of his own writings pub-earned ease and leisure, with no other stimulus lished by Putnam, of which several of the vol- than the sense of duty, and with which we may umes have been issued in a more costly form, associate the impulse of genius, performing a enriched by the vigorous and refined designs of great part, if not the whole, of his allotted work Darley, were the literary employments of his after he had attained the age of threescore and closing years. His retirement at Sunnyside was ten. There are few more cheering instances of all that his youthful fancy painted, and more literary activity in the whole history of authorthan experience of the world could have prom- ship. We have frequently thought, as our eye ised. His age was not exempt from infirmities; rested on the narrative, that the author needed but it was spared many of the sufferings common all the encouragement to be derived from the to mortality. And when he came to die, his soul conscientiousness and sense of duty of his great passed to heaven the nearest way. His death, subject. There stood above the page the awful on the night of November 28, 1859, when he had shade of Washington, with warning finger pointjust retired from his cheerful family circle, was ing the way his historian should follow. The instantaneous. monition was not unheeded. The history is such a one as Washington himself, were he privileged or condemned to revisit the scene of his earthly cares and anxieties, the country which he loved, the people for whom he gravely toiled, would, we think, calmly approve of.

We now return to the concluding literary labor of the life we have thus traced to its close. The preface to the first volume of the Washington bears date 1855. Two volumes were published in that year; a third in the following; a fourth in 1857; the fifth, and concluding portion, in 1859. It was the completion of a work to which, in his own words prefixed to the last volume, "the author had long looked forward as the crowning effort of his literary career." Continuing this retrospect, Mr. Irving relates that "the idea of writing a life of Washington entered at an early day into his mind. It was especially pressed upon his attention nearly thirty years ago, while he was in Europe, by a proposition of the late Mr. Archibald Constable, the eminent publisher of Edinburgh, and he resolved to undertake it as soon as he should return to the United States, and be within reach of the necessary documents." The purpose was never lost sight of, though the work was postponed. If there was any expiation due the delay, the author paid the penalty in the increasing difficulty of the theme. Thirty years ago less would have been demanded by the public in the performance of such a work. A thoroughly scientific school of historians had sprung up in the interval. The collection of facts by the historical societies and other agencies imposed new exactions in the weighing of evidence. Each addition to the vast Washington library brought additional care and responsibility. Researches of this nature may, indeed, be benefited by the judgment of age; but the labor would seem to require the strength and enthusiasm of youth.

The writer, no doubt, found the undertaking a very different one from that which presented itself to his mind, on his first conception of the idea in the presence of Mr. Constable. There were sterner requisitions, as we have said, to be met; and there was also a spectre of his own raising to be encountered, the shadow of his fame. But, whatever the struggle, it was man

The qualities of Washington in the book are its simple, straightforward manner; its dignity and reserve, associated with care and candor, its paramount truthfulness. It is scarcely possible that a work of the kind could be written with greater absence of display or personal pretension on the part of the writer. The labor of rejection must have been great, where the material was overwhelming. The forbearance and self-denial, the avoidance of the sin of surplusage, can be fully estimated only by one who has made the prevalent characteristics and vices of the literature of the day a study. There are eloquent, profound, learned works in abundance; but a well-written book is a great rarity. We are not aware that Mr. Irving goes out of his way to make a point, indulge in an unnecessary digression, or yield, in a single instance, to the temptation to description, which last must, at times, have sorely beset his pen. He never stops in his steady movement to attitudinize, to strike a position, arouse the attention of his reader with "Here we are!" like the mountebank in the ring, or violate in any manner the sober pace of history. Great men come and depart noiselessly on the plain republican stage, trumpeted by no rhetorical blare of adjectives; their acts only betray their presence. There are no set attempts, no efforts for effect. A half reflection inwrought with the progress of the sentence, a single epithet does all-and the whole is any thing but a barren recital. It is the charm of the writings of Washington himself, where we are impressed by the truthfulness and pleased by a certain native gracefulness-a plain thing like the clown's mistress, but his own. Little, winning idiomatic touches frequently appear in the composition; but it has also the higher merit of

COPYRIGHTS.-FRIENDSHIP WITH ARTISTS.

dramatic unity and steady progress. Washing-said, have paid to the author seventy-five thou

ton is the central personage, never far distant, always inspiring and directing the scene: he appears firmly planted amidst the historical elements of his people and country.

sand dollars. They owe much to the good taste of the publisher, especially in the illustrated series.

Mr. Allibone, who, in his "Critical DictionMr. Irving always received handsome sums for ary," has infused a loving spirit into his comprehis copyrights. In 1850 it began to be doubted hensive bibliographical details of the writings of in England whether the copyright of a book by Irving, pays a just tribute to his publisher, Mr. an American or alien could be held by a British Putnam,-"a gentleman who, by his extensive publisher, and Irving's works were boldly taken circulation of sound literature for many years from Murray, and issued in cheap editions by both in Europe and America, has honestly earned Bohn & Routledge. The legal question was car- the title of a benefactor to the public mind." A ried into the Court of Chancery, and the plea letter from Mr. Irving to Mr. Putnam, expresses was at least meditated by Mr. Murray, that Mr. a still more intimate and cordial sentiment. "I Irving was not an alien, his father being a native | take pleasure," he writes, "in expressing the of the Orkneys, and his mother of Falmouth. great satisfaction I have derived throughout all The absurdity of this pretence to citizenship- our intercourse, from your amiable, obliging, and with which, of course, Mr. Irving had nothing to do-in behalf of an American who had held military rank in a war with Great Britain, was at once apparent. What stood in the way, it was asked, if he were a British subject, of taking him from Westminster Hall, as a rebel, to a court-martial, and ordering him to be shot!

A more pertinent plea was Mr. Murray's long previous undisputed enjoyment of the copyrights, and a statement of the sums he had paid for them. As given in the London Athenæum of Aug. 24, 1850, they were as follows:

Sketch Book
Bracebridge Hall.
Tales of a Traveller.
Life of Columbus

Companions of Columbus.
Conquest of Granada.

Tour on the Prairies.

Abbotsford and Newstead.
Legends of Spain....

£467 108. 1,050 0 1,575 0 .3,150 0

525 0 .2,100 0

400 0

400 0
100 0

honorable conduct. Indeed, I never had dealings with any man, whether in the way of business or friendship, more perfectly free from any alloy." Mr. Irving was throughout life fortunate in his friendships with artists, who were attracted by the man, no less than his picturesque books, for subjects for their pencil. His friend, the Academician Leslie, who had much in common with his genius, designed for Murray a series of ten plates to illustrate The Sketch Book, and Knickerbocker's History of New York, which were engraved by the best artists of the day. He also introduced a portrait of his friend in his Roger de Coverly picture. Allston, likewise, made illustrations for the Knickerbocker. Heath, the engraver, drew a humorous design of the march of the great Amsterdam army to the attack of Fort Casimir, from the original of which, preserved at Sunnyside, an engraving was published by Mr. Putnam. He also engraved a choice series of Illustrations of the Sketch Book, from designs by Westall. George Cruikshank also made several capital pictures for an edition of Knickerbocker, published in the "Family Library," and also quite a number of very felicitous designs, chiefly from Salmagundi, and the Knickerbocker, which appeared in an elegant little volume, by Tegg, of London, entitled The Beauties of Washington Irving. Of the American deNor were his copyrights of late less remunera- signs, by Mr. Darley, much might be said, partive in America. In a recent statement it is ticularly of the two series of "Sleepy Hollow," said, that within the last ten years-the period of and "Rip Van Winkle," issued by the American the revised edition of his works-there have Art Union. They seize with a firm grasp, and been sold twenty-two thousand sets of fifteen an individuality of their own, the stronger and volumes each, exclusive of the Life of Washing-deeper elements of Mr. Irving's pathos and ton, and The Sketch Book; while of the latter humor. They are full of grace and feeling, and thirty-five thousand copies have been distributed, are something more than interpreters of the and of the Washington forty-two thousand sets author,-they are revelations of the artist's own of five volumes each-a total of five hundred mind. and seventy-five thousand volumes disposed of by Mr. George P. Putnam, the publisher of the works since 1849. These various editions, it is

footing up the respectable sum of..9,767 10

Mr. Bentley also published a statement of the sums paid by him to Irving, in conjunction with his partner, Colburn. They were, for the copyright of the Alhambra, £1,050; for Astoria, £500; for Captain Bonneville's Adventures, £900.

Washington Irving was so lucky in his choice of subjects, and treated them so happily, that his name and fame are associated with some of the

AT THE ALHAMBRA.-LOVE OF THE HUDSON.