er than his
resemblance in manner. Like Addison and Goldsmith, he wins his
audience through sheer charm of personality. To open one of his books
is like meeting a congenial stranger. You like his looks at first
glance, you feel somehow that he likes yours; and while you may be
hesitating about advances, he is at your side, and there is nothing
more to be said. You do not care whether he is American or English,
you are not particular what he talks about, but you do not willingly
part with him.

The charm of creative genius is less the charm of mind than of
feeling. And it is to feeling refined and colored by temperament, that
the more delicate modes of belles-lettres owe their whole power. That
is, a writer in this sort is admirable as he subdues language and
subordinates thought to his own temper, not as he gives elegant
utterance to thought or feeling in their abstracted and general
estate. Through a surface artificiality of style, which is far more
marked in his earliest work, and from which at times he quite escapes,
Irving's personality shines clearly. He has so employed a conventional
medium as to make it serve his original purposes. He possessed, to be
sure, a faculty of strong vernacular speech, which is little suggested
in his to-be-published writing, or even in his private letters. The
Oregon embroilment had led certain British journals into gross speech
about America. Irving was much disturbed. What he wrote was, "A
rancorous prejudice against us has been diligently inculcated of late
years by the British press, and it is daily producing its fruits of
bitterness." What he said was: "Bulwer,"--then English minister to
Spain,--"I should deplore exceedingly a war with England, for depend
upon it, if we must come to blows, it will be serious work for both.
You might break our head at first, but by Heaven! we would break your
back in the end!"

But one need not write in the vernacular to be sincere and effective;
personality may utter itself through different media, whether in
different tongues or in distinct strata of the same tongue. Just now
we have a bent toward colloquialism on paper; it was not the bent of
Irving's day.

As far as the external features of his style are concerned, he has had
praise enough, and more than enough. Clearness, ease, a certain Gallic
grace it has; the ink flows readily, the thing says itself without
crabbedness or constraint. On the other hand this ready writer is
often convent