head unconnected with some marvellous
story." Irving, therefore, did not have to manufacture local traditions;
he only gave them wider currency and fitted them more artistically into
their natural settings.

Irving chose for his setting the twenty years that embrace the
Revolutionary War because the numerous social and political changes that
took place then enabled him to bring Rip back after his sleep into a
"world not realized." You will appreciate much better the art of this
time-setting if you will try your hand on a somewhat similar story and
place it between 1820 and 1840, when railroads, telegraph lines, and
transatlantic steamers made a new world out of the old; or, if your
story takes place in the South, you might make your background include
the interval between 1855 and 1875, when slavery was abolished, when the
old plantation system was changed, when the names of new heroes emerged,
and when new social and political and industrial problems had to be
grappled with.

_Plot_. The plot is divided into two almost equal parts, which we may
call "before and after taking." A recent critic has said: "The actual
forward movement of the plot does not begin until the sentence, 'In a
long ramble of the kind on a fine autumnal day, Rip had unconsciously
scrambled to one of the highest parts of the Kaatskill Mountains.'" The
critic has missed, I think, the main structural excellence of the story.
Dame Van Winkle, the children who hung around Rip, his own children, his
dog, the social club at the inn with the portrait of George the Third,
Van Bummel, and Nicholas Vedder, all had to be mentioned before Rip
began the ascent of the mountain. Otherwise, when he returned, we should
have had no means of measuring the swift passage of time during his
sleep. Each is a skillfully set timepiece or milepost which, on Rip's
return, misleads the poor fellow at every turn and thus produces the
exact kind of "totality of effect" that Irving intended. The forward
movement of the plot begins with this careful planning of the route that
Rip is to take on his return trip, when twenty years shall have done
their work. Cut out these _points de repere_ and see how effectively the
forward movement of the plot is retarded.

_Characters_. Rip was the first character in American fiction to be
known far beyond our own borders, and he remains one of the best known.
In the class with him belong James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking (or
Natty Bump