for his fancy to work upon. He had not the analytic and
philosophical mind of a great historian, and the merits of his
_Conquest of Granada_ and _Life of Columbus_ are rather
_belletristisch_ than scientific. But he brought to these undertakings
the same eager love of the romantic past which had determined the
character of his writings in America and England, and the
result--whether we call it history or romance--is at all events
charming as literature. His _Life of Washington_--completed in
1859--was his _magnum opus_, and is accepted as standard authority.
_Mahomet and His Successors_, 1850, was comparatively a failure. But
of all Irving's biographies his _Life of Oliver Goldsmith_, 1849, was
the most spontaneous and perhaps the best. He did not impose it upon
himself as a task, but wrote it from a native and loving sympathy with
his subject, and it is, therefore, one of the choicest literary memoirs
in the language.

When Irving returned to America, in 1832, he was the recipient of
almost national honors. He had received the medal of the Royal Society
of Literature and the degree of D.C.L. from Oxford University, and had
made American literature known and respected abroad. In his modest
home at Sunnyside, on the banks of the river over which he had been the
first to throw the witchery of poetry and romance, he was attended to
the last by the admiring affection of his countrymen. He had the love
and praises of the foremost English writers of his own generation and
the generation which followed--of Scott, Byron, Coleridge, Thackeray,
and Dickens, some of whom had been among his personal friends. He is
not the greatest of American authors, but the influence of his writings
is sweet and wholesome, and it is in many ways fortunate that the first
American man of letters who made himself heard in Europe should have
been in all particulars a gentleman.

Connected with Irving, at least by name and locality, were a number of
authors who resided in the city of New York, and who are known as the
Knickerbocker writers, perhaps because they were contributors to the
_Knickerbocker Magazine_. One of these was James K. Paulding, a
connection of Irving by marriage, and his partner in the _Salmagundi_
papers. Paulding became Secretary of the Navy under Van Buren, and
lived down to the year 1860. He was a voluminous author, but his
writings had no power of continuance, and are already obsolete, with
the possible exception