is collection (a volume of this, at my hand, is one of a series
entitled a "Collection of Ancient and Modern _British_ Authors"), they
were not to be found. The Philadelphia publishers did not think there
was sufficient demand to warrant a new edition. Mr. Irving and his
friends judged the market more wisely, and a young New York publisher
offered to assume the responsibility. This was Mr. George P. Putnam. The
event justified his sagacity and his liberal enterprise; from July,
1848, to November, 1859, the author received on his copyright over
eighty-eight thousand dollars. And it should be added that the relations
between author and publisher, both in prosperity and in times of
business disaster, reflect the highest credit upon both. If the like
relations always obtained we should not have to say: "May the Lord pity
the authors in this world, and the publishers in the next."

I have outlined the life of Washington Irving in vain, if we have not
already come to a tolerably clear conception of the character of the man
and of his books. If I were exactly to follow his literary method I
should do nothing more. The idiosyncrasies of the man are the strength
and weakness of his works. I do not know any other author whose writings
so perfectly reproduce his character, or whose character may be more
certainly measured by his writings. His character is perfectly
transparent: his predominant traits were humor and sentiment; his
temperament was gay with a dash of melancholy; his inner life and his
mental operations were the reverse of complex, and his literary method
is simple. He _felt_ his subject, and he expressed his conception not so
much by direct statement or description as by almost imperceptible
touches and shadings here and there, by a diffused tone and color, with
very little show of analysis. Perhaps it is a sufficient definition to
say that his method was the sympathetic. In the end the reader is put in
possession of the luminous and complete idea upon which the author has
been brooding, though he may not be able to say exactly how the
impression has been conveyed to him; and I doubt if the author could
have explained his sympathetic process. He certainly would have lacked
precision in any philosophical or metaphysical theme, and when, in his
letters, he touches upon politics there is a little vagueness of
definition that indicates want of mental grip in that direction. But in
the region of feeling his genius is suffi