ves pleasure; not as the product of a
"standard author," but as the expression of a rich and engaging
personality, which has written itself like an indorsement across the
face of a young nation's literature. It is that of a man so sensitive
that the scornful finger of a child might have left him sleepless; so
kindly that nobody ever applied to him in vain for sympathy; so modest
that the smallest praise embarrassed him. His manner and tastes were
simple and unassuming. He had no great passions; the brother was
stronger in him than the lover. To these qualities, which might by
themselves belong to ineffectiveness, he added courage, firmness,
magnanimity. It was because he was such a man, and because what he was
shines on every page he wrote, that the world still warms to him.

Not that so elusive a thing as personal charm can be neatly plotted by
the card. We love certain people because we love them; and since that
is so, everything they do is interesting to us. A great writer lives
in his books, to be sure, but we want to know what he actually did in
the flesh. Did he walk, eat, sleep, like other men? Was he as strong,
as human, as lovable as one would think? What sort of boy was he? Did
he marry a wife, and was she good enough for him? The world will never
believe that such questions are impertinent.

There are, of course, more formal matters to be considered,--his debt
to circumstance, his place in the practical world, his influence on
the moral or intellectual or national life of his day. Some of these
themes may be touched on, even within the narrow limits of the present
sketch; not categorically, but rather by way of such suggestion and
indirection as may be consistent with a compact narrative.

* * * * *

One of those apparent chances which are the commonplaces of history
led William Irving from his far home in the Orkneys, married him to
Sarah Sanders, and made him the father of Washington Irving. The
Irvings--a branch of the well-known Scotch Irvines--had been for
generations the leading family on the Island of Shapinsha. Finally
they had gone threadbare, and with a fortune to seek, William Irving
chose the natural ordeal for an islander, the trial by sea. Toward the
close of the French War he had become petty officer on an armed
English packet. In New York he met Mistress Sanders, who was also
English-born, and in 1761 they were married. He must have saved money,
for at the en