the engaging sight
of Irving playing the flute for the little Van Warts to dance. During
the holidays Irving paid another visit to the haunts of Isaac Walton,
and his description of the adventures and mishaps of a pleasure party on
the banks of the Dove suggest that the incorrigible bachelor was still
sensitive to the allurements of life; and liable to wander over the
"dead-line" of matrimonial danger. He confesses that he was all day in
Elysium. "When we had descended from the last precipice," he says,
"and come to where the Dove flowed musically through a verdant
meadow--then--fancy me, oh, thou 'sweetest of poets,' wandering by
the course of this romantic stream--a lovely girl hanging on my arm,
pointing out the beauties of the surrounding scenery, and repeating
in the most dulcet voice tracts of heaven-born poetry. If a strawberry
smothered in cream has any consciousness of its delicious situation, it
must feel as I felt at that moment." Indeed, the letters of this doleful
year are enlivened by so many references to the graces and attractions
of lovely women, seen and remembered, that insensibility cannot be
attributed to the author of the "Sketch-Book."

The death of Irving's mother in the spring of 1817 determined him to
remain another year abroad. Business did not improve. His brother-in-law
Van Wart called a meeting of his creditors, the Irving brothers
floundered on into greater depths of embarrassment, and Washington, who
could not think of returning home to face poverty in New York, began to
revolve a plan that would give him a scanty but sufficient support.
The idea of the "Sketch-Book" was in his mind. He had as yet made few
literary acquaintances in England. It is an illustration of the warping
effect of friendship upon the critical faculty that his opinion of Moore
at this time was totally changed by subsequent intimacy. At a later date
the two authors became warm friends and mutual admirers of each other's
productions. In June, 1817, "Lalla Rookh" was just from the press, and
Irving writes to Brevoort: "Moore's new poem is just out. I have not
sent it to you, for it is dear and worthless. It is written in the most
effeminate taste, and fit only to delight boarding-school girls and lads
of nineteen just in their first loves. Moore should have kept to songs
and epigrammatic conceits. His stream of intellect is too small to
bear expansion--it spreads into mere surface." Too much cream for the
strawberry!