us names, affected from the start complete
indifference to fame or profit. Their purpose, they said with
whimsical assurance, was simply "to instruct the young, reform the
old, correct the town, and castigate the age." The audacity of the
thing caught the town; it was a decided success, and very
profitable--for the publisher. There is a mildly sophomoric flavor
about the "Salmagundi" papers, as there is about Irving's letters of
the same period. But they are full of amusing things, and worth
reading, too, for the odd side-lights they throw upon the foibles of
that old New York.

As he grew older, Irving came to feel the shallowness of fashionable
society, but in the Salmagundi days he appears to have asked for
nothing better. He had good looks, good humor, and good manners,
showed a proper susceptibility, and knew how to turn a compliment or
write a graceful letter. No wonder he found himself welcome wherever
he went. After a visit to Philadelphia one of the ladies to whom he
had made himself agreeable wrote, "Half the people exist but in the
idea that _you_ will one day return."

Early in the following year he had a little experience of the
practical working of ward politics, which he described in a letter to
a certain charming Mary Fairlie: "Truly, this saving one's country is
a nauseous piece of business, and if patriotism is such a dirty
virtue,--prythee, no more of it.... Such haranguing and puffing and
strutting among the little great men of the day. Such shoals of
unfledged heroes from the lower wards, who had broke away from their
mammas, and run to electioneer with a slice of bread and butter in
their hands." Irving's patriotism was not found wanting when the time
came, but he had a life-long contempt for the petty trickery of party
politics. That year he made another of his leisurely jaunts,
nominally on business, this time to Virginia. His letters record the
usual round of social gallantries, and some graver matter. Burr's
trial was on in Richmond. Irving made his acquaintance, and was
retained in some ornamental sense among his counsel. One or two
letters from Richmond show a sentimental sympathy for his client of
which the less said the better. A characteristic weakness of Irving's
was always an unreasoning fondness for the under dog. In the autumn of
1807 his father died, one of the most sincere among the "unco guid," a
man whom few people loved and everybody respected.

Not long after the discontinuan