fashion: "I was
always fond of visiting new scenes and observing strange characters and
manners."

But though never violently "American," like some later writers who have
consciously sought to throw off the trammels of English tradition,
Irving was in a real way original. His most distinct addition to our
national literature was in his creation of what has been called "the
Knickerbocker legend." He was the first to make use, for literary
purposes, of the old Dutch traditions which clustered about the
romantic scenery of the Hudson. Colonel T. W. Higginson, in his
_History of the United States_, tells how "Mrs. Josiah Quincy, sailing
up that river in 1786, when Irving was a child three years old, records
that the captain of the sloop had a legend, either supernatural or
traditional, for every scene, 'and not a mountain reared its head
unconnected with some marvelous story.'" The material thus at hand
Irving shaped into his _Knickerbocker's History of New York_, into the
immortal story of _Rip Van Winkle_ and the _Legend of Sleepy Hollow_
(both published in the _Sketch Book_), and into later additions to the
same realm of fiction, such as _Dolph Heyliger_ in _Bracebridge Hall_,
the _Money Diggers_, _Wolfert Webber_, and _Kidd the Pirate_, in the
_Tales of a Traveler_, and some of the miscellanies from the
_Knickerbocker Magazine_, collected into a volume, in 1855, under the
title of _Wolfert's Roost_.

The book which made Irving's reputation was his _Knickerbocker's
History of New York_, 1809, a burlesque chronicle, making fun of the
old Dutch settlers of New Amsterdam, and attributed, by a familiar and
now somewhat threadbare device,[1] to a little old gentleman named
Diedrich Knickerbocker, whose manuscript had come into the editor's
hands. The book was gravely dedicated to the New York Historical
Society, and it is said to have been quoted, as authentic history, by a
certain German scholar named Goeller, in a note on a passage in
Thucydides. This story, though well vouched, is hard of belief; for
_Knickerbocker_, though excellent fooling, has nothing of the grave
irony of Swift in his _Modest Proposal_ or of Defoe in his _Short Way
with Dissenters_. Its mock-heroic intention is as transparent as in
Fielding's parodies of Homer, which it somewhat resembles, particularly
in the delightfully absurd description of the mustering of the clans
under Peter Stuyvesant and the attack on the Swedish Fort Christina.
_Kn