rve the little sturdy English women, trudging about in their
stout leather shoes, and to study the various 'understandings'
betrayed to view by this mischievous fashion."

The years passed rather wearily in England. Peter continued to be an
invalid, and Washington himself, never robust, felt the pressure more
and more of the irksome and unprosperous business affairs. Of his own
want of health, however, he never complains; he maintains a patient
spirit in the ill turns of fortune, and his impatience in the business
complications is that of a man hindered from his proper career. The
times were depressing.

"In America [he writes to Brevoort] you have financial
difficulties, the embarrassments of trade, the distress of
merchants, but here you have what is far worse, the distress of the
poor--not merely mental sufferings, but the absolute miseries of
nature: hunger, nakedness, wretchedness of all kinds that the
laboring people in this country are liable to. In the best of times
they do but subsist, but in adverse times they starve. How the
country is to extricate itself from its present embarrassment, how
it is to escape from the poverty that seems to be overwhelming it,
and how the government is to quiet the multitudes that are already
turbulent and clamorous, and are yet but in the beginning of their
real miseries, I cannot conceive."

The embarrassments of the agricultural and laboring classes and of the
government were as serious in 1816 as they have again become in 1881.

During 1817 Irving was mostly in the depths of gloom, a prey to the
monotony of life and torpidity of intellect. Rays of sunlight pierce the
clouds occasionally. The Van Wart household at Birmingham was a frequent
refuge for him, and we have pretty pictures of the domestic life there;
glimpses of Old Parr, whose reputation as a gourmand was only second to
his fame as a Grecian, and of that delightful genius, the Rev. Rann
Kennedy, who might have been famous if he had ever committed to paper
the long poems that he carried about in his head, and 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, a