ree
church services on Sunday was the reading of "Pilgrim's Progress." This
cold and severe discipline at home would have been intolerable but for
the more lovingly demonstrative and impulsive character of the mother,
whose gentle nature and fine intellect won the tender veneration of her
children. Of the father they stood in awe; his conscientious piety
failed to waken any religious sensibility in them, and they revolted
from a teaching which seemed to regard everything that was pleasant as
wicked. The mother, brought up an Episcopalian, conformed to the
religious forms and worship of her husband but she was never in sympathy
with his rigid views. The children were repelled from the creed of their
father, and subsequently all of them except one became attached to the
Episcopal Church. Washington, in order to make sure of his escape, and
feel safe while he was still constrained to attend his father's church,
went stealthily to Trinity Church at an early age, and received the rite
of confirmation. The boy was full of vivacity, drollery, and innocent
mischief. His sportiveness and disinclination to religious seriousness
gave his mother some anxiety, and she would look at him, says his
biographer, with a half mournful admiration, and exclaim, "O Washington!
if you were only good!" He had a love of music, which became later in
life a passion, and great fondness for the theatre. The stolen delight
of the theatre he first tasted in company with a boy who was somewhat
his senior, but destined to be his literary comrade,--James K. Paulding,
whose sister was the wife of Irving's brother William. Whenever he could
afford this indulgence, he stole away early to the theatre in John
Street, remained until it was time to return to the family prayers at
nine, after which he would retire to his room, slip through his window
and down the roof to a back alley, and return to enjoy the after-piece.

Young Irving's school education was desultory, pursued under several
more or less incompetent masters, and was over at the age of sixteen.
The teaching does not seem to have had much discipline or solidity; he
studied Latin a few months, but made no other incursion into the
classics. The handsome, tender-hearted, truthful, susceptible boy was no
doubt a dawdler in routine studies, but he assimilated what suited him.
He found his food in such pieces of English literature as were floating
about, in "Robinson Crusoe" and "Sinbad;" at ten he was ins