sh
tongue, will be determined only by the slow settling of opinion, which
no critic can foretell, and the operation of which no criticism seems
able to explain. I venture to believe, however, that the verdict will
not be in accord with much of the present prevalent criticism. The
service that he rendered to American letters no critic disputes; nor is
there any question of our national indebtedness to him for investing a
crude and new land with the enduring charms of romance and tradition.
In this respect, our obligation to him is that of Scotland to Scott and
Burns; and it is an obligation due only, in all history, to here and
there a fortunate creator to whose genius opportunity is kind. The
Knickerbocker Legend and the romance with which Irving has invested the
Hudson are a priceless legacy; and this would remain an imperishable
possession in popular tradition if the literature creating it were
destroyed. This sort of creation is unique in modern times. New York
is the Knickerbocker city; its whole social life remains colored by
his fiction; and the romantic background it owes to him in some measure
supplies to it what great age has given to European cities. This
creation is sufficient to secure for him an immortality, a length of
earthly remembrance that all the rest of his writings together might not
give.

Irving was always the literary man; he had the habits, the
idiosyncrasies, of his small genus. I mean that he regarded life not
from the philanthropic, the economic, the political, the philosophic,
the metaphysic, the scientific, or the theologic, but purely from the
literary point of view. He belongs to that small class of which Johnson
and Goldsmith are perhaps as good types as any, and to which America
has added very few. The literary point of view is taken by few in any
generation; it may seem to the world of very little consequence in the
pressure of all the complex interests of life, and it may even seem
trivial amid the tremendous energies applied to immediate affairs; but
it is the point of view that endures; if its creations do not mold human
life, like the Roman law, they remain to charm and civilize, like the
poems of Horace. You must not ask more of them than that. This attitude
toward life is defensible on the highest grounds. A man with Irving's
gifts has the right to take the position of an observer and describer,
and not to be called on for a more active participation in affairs than
he chooses t