yon is the
most fashionable fellow of the day," wrote the painter Leslie. Lord
Byron, in a letter to Murray, underscored his admiration of the author,
and subsequently said to an American: "His Crayon,--I know it by heart;
at least, there is not a passage that I cannot refer to immediately."
And afterwards he wrote to Moore, "His writings are my delight." There
seemed to be, as some one wrote, "a kind of conspiracy to hoist him over
the heads of his contemporaries." Perhaps the most satisfactory evidence
of his popularity was his publisher's enthusiasm. The publisher is an
infallible contemporary barometer.

It is worthy of note that an American should have captivated public
attention at the moment when Scott and Byron were the idols of the
English-reading world.

In the following year Irving was again in England, visiting his sister
in Birmingham, and tasting moderately the delights of London. He was,
indeed, something of an invalid. An eruptive malady,--the revenge of
nature, perhaps, for defeat in her earlier attack on his
lungs,--appearing in his ankles, incapacitated him for walking,
tormented him at intervals, so that literary composition was impossible,
sent him on pilgrimages to curative springs, and on journeys undertaken
for distraction and amusement, in which all work except that of seeing
and absorbing material had to be postponed. He was subject to this
recurring invalidism all his life, and we must regard a good part of the
work he did as a pure triumph of determination over physical
discouragement. This year the fruits of his interrupted labor appeared
in "Bracebridge Hall," a volume that was well received, but did not add
much to his reputation, though it contained "Dolph Heyliger," one of his
most characteristic Dutch stories, and the "Stout Gentleman," one of
his daintiest and most artistic bits of restrained humor.[1]

[Footnote 1: I was once [says his biographer] reading aloud in
his presence a very flattering review of his works, which had
been sent him by the critic in 1848, and smiled as I came to
this sentence: "His most comical pieces have always a serious
end in view." "You laugh," said he, with that air of whimsical
significance so natural to him, "but it is true. I have kept
that to myself hitherto, but that man has found me out. He has
detected the moral of the _Stout Gentleman_."]

Irving sought relief from his malady by an extended tour in German