from these
his biographer has found ample materials for constructing the fabric of
his life from the foundation.

Many of Irving's letters, especially in the second volume, are long and
elaborate productions, which read like chapters from a book of travels,
or like essays, and yet do not on that account lose the peculiar charm
which we demand in such productions. They are perfectly natural in tone
and feeling, though evidently written with some care. They are not in
the least artificial, and yet not careless or hasty. They have all that
easy and graceful flow, that transparent narrative, that unconscious
charm, which we find in his published writings; and we not unfrequently
discern gleams and touches of that exquisite humor which was the best
gift bestowed upon his mind. Brief as our notice is, we cannot refrain
from quoting in illustration of our remark a few sentences from a letter
to Thomas Moore, written in 1824:--

"I went a few evenings since to see Kenney's new piece, 'The Alcaid.' It
went off lamely, and the Alcaid is rather a bore, and comes near to be
generally thought so. Poor Kenney came to my room next evening, and
I could not have believed that one night could have ruined a man so
completely. I swear to you I thought at first it was a flimsy suit of
clothes had left some bedside and walked into my room without waiting
for the owner to get up, or that it was one of those frames on which
clothiers stretch coats at their shop-doors, until I perceived _a thin
face, sticking edgeways out of the collar of the coat like the axe in
a bundle of fasces._ He was so thin, and pale, and nervous, and
exhausted,--he made a dozen difficulties in getting over a spot in the
carpet, and never would have accomplished it, if he had not lifted
himself over by the points of his shirt-collar."

The illustration we have Italicized is rather wit than humor; but be it
as it may, it is capital; and the whole paragraph has that quaint and
grotesque exaggeration which reminds us of the village-tailor in "The
Sketch-Book," "who played on the clarionet, and seemed to have blown his
face to a point," or of Mud Sam, who "knew all the fish in the river by
their Christian names."

We think no one can read these volumes without having a higher
impression of Washington Irving as a man. There was no inconsistency
between the author and the man. The tenderness, the purity of feeling,
the sensibility, which gave his works an entrance into s