now; but it is
safe to say that their position and that of Irving as well will depend
largely upon the affirmation or the reversal of their views of life and
their judgments of character. I think the calm work of Irving will stand
when much of the more startling and perhaps more brilliant intellectual
achievement of this age has passed away.

And this leads me to speak of Irving's moral quality, which I cannot
bring myself to exclude from a literary estimate, even in the face of
the current gospel of art for art's sake. There is something that made
Scott and Irving personally loved by the millions of their readers, who
had only the dimmest ideas of their personality. This was some quality
perceived in what they wrote. Each one can define it for himself;
there it is, and I do not see why it is not as integral a part of the
authors--an element in the estimate of their future position--as what
we term their intellect, their knowledge, their skill, or their art.
However you rate it, you cannot account for Irving's influence in the
world without it. In his tender tribute to Irving, the great-hearted
Thackeray, who saw as clearly as anybody the place of mere literary
art in the sum total of life, quoted the dying words of Scott to
Lockhart,--"Be a good man, my dear." We know well enough that the
great author of "The Newcomes" and the great author of "The Heart of
Midlothian" recognized the abiding value in literature of integrity,
sincerity, purity, charity, faith. These are beneficences; and
Irving's literature, walk round it and measure it by whatever critical
instruments you will, is a beneficent literature. The author loved
good women and little children and a pure life; he had faith in his
fellow-men, a kindly sympathy with the lowest, without any subservience
to the highest; he retained a belief in the possibility of chivalrous
actions, and did not care to envelop them in a cynical suspicion; he was
an author still capable of an enthusiasm. His books are wholesome, full
of sweetness and charm, of humor without any sting, of amusement without
any stain; and their more solid qualities are marred by neither pedantry
nor pretension.

Washington Irving died on the 28th of November, 1859, at the close of
a lovely day of that Indian summer which is nowhere more full of a
melancholy charm than on the banks of the lower Hudson, and which was
in perfect accord with the ripe and peaceful close of his life. He was
buried on a lit