be true that he was one of the impossibles, as he may
easily be conceived to have been from reading his wayward biography and
voluminous correspondence.

To a young Kentuckian, one of "my boys," was given the opportunity to
see the last of him and to bury him in far-away Samoa, whither he had
taken himself for the final adventure and where he died, having attained
some measure of the dreams he had cherished, and, let us hope, happy in
the consciousness of the achievement.

I rather think Stevenson should be placed at the head of the latter-day
fictionists. But fashions in literature as in dress are ever changing.
Washington Irving was the first of our men of letters to obtain foreign
recognition. While the fires of hate between Great Britain and America
were still burning he wrote kindly and elegantly of England and the
English, and was accepted on both sides of the ocean. Taking his style
from Addison and Goldsmith, he emulated their charity and humor; he went
to Spain and in the same deft way he pictured the then unknown byways of
the land of dreams; and coming home again he peopled the region of the
Hudson with the beings of legend and fancy which are dear to us.

He became our national man of letters. He stood quite at the head of our
literature, giving the lie to the scornful query, "Who reads an American
book?" As a pioneer he will always be considered; as a simple and vivid
writer of things familiar and entertaining he will probably always be
read; but as an originator literary history will hardly place him very
high. There Bret Harte surely led him. The Tales of the Argonauts as
works of creative fancy exceed the Sketches of Washington Irving alike
in wealth of color and humor, in pathos and dramatic action.

Some writers make an exception of the famous Sleepy Hollow story. But
they have in mind the Rip Van Winkle of Jefferson and Boucicault, not
the rather attenuated story of Irving, which--as far as the twenty years
of sleep went--was borrowed from an old German legend.

Mark Twain and Bret Harte, however, will always be bracketed with
Washington Irving. Of the three I incline to the opinion that Mark Twain
did the broadest and strongest work. His imagination had wider reach
than Irving's. There is nowhere, as there is in Harte, the suspicion
either of insincerity or of artificiality. Irving's humor was the humor
of Sir Roger de Coverley and the Vicar of Wakefield. It is old English.
Mark Twain's is his ow