dingly. Being very much
importuned to go to church, he resolutely refused, observing that it was
the same thing whether he went or stayed at home. "If I don't go," said
he, "the minister says I'll be d----d, and I'll be d----d if I do go."

This same letter contains a pretty picture, and the expression of
Irving's habitual kindly regard for his fellow-men:--

"I was out visiting with Ann yesterday, and met that little
assemblage of smiles and fascinations, Mary Jackson. She was
bounding with youth, health, and innocence, and good humor. She had
a pretty straw hat, tied under her chin with a pink ribbon, and
looked like some little woodland nymph, just turned out by spring
and fine weather. God bless her light heart, and grant it may never
know care or sorrow! It's enough to cure spleen and melancholy only
to look at her.

"Your familiar pictures of home made me extremely desirous again
to be there.... I shall once more return to sober life, satisfied
with having secured three months of sunshine in this valley of
shadows and darkness. In this space of time I have seen
considerable of the world, but I am sadly afraid I have not grown
wiser thereby, inasmuch as it has generally been asserted by the
sages of every age that wisdom consists in a knowledge of the
wickedness of mankind, and the wiser a man grows the more
discontented he becomes with those around him. Whereas, woe is me,
I return in infinitely better humor with the world than I ever was
before, and with a most melancholy good opinion and good will for
the great mass of my fellow-creatures!"

Free intercourse with men of all parties, he thought, tends to divest a
man's mind of party bigotry.

"One day [he writes] I am dining with a knot of honest, furious
Federalists, who are damning all their opponents as a set of
consummate scoundrels, panders of Bonaparte, etc. The next day I
dine, perhaps, with some of the very men I have heard thus
anathematized, and find them equally honest, warm, and indignant;
and if I take their word for it, I had been dining the day before
with some of the greatest knaves in the nation, men absolutely paid
and suborned by the British government."

His friends at this time attempted to get him appointed secretary of
legation to the French mission, under Joel Barlow, then minister, but he
made