versity of Virginia which
Jefferson had just founded, was doubtless revising "Tamerlane and Other
Poems" which he was to publish in Boston in the following year. Holmes
was a Harvard undergraduate. Garrison had just printed Whittier's first
published poem in the Newburyport "Free Press." Walt Whitman was a
barefooted boy on Long Island, and Lowell, likewise seven years of age,
was watching the birds in the treetops of Elmwood. But it was Washington
Irving who showed all of these men that nineteenth century England would
be interested in American books.

The very word Knickerbocker is one evidence of the vitality of Irving's
happy imaginings. In 1809 he had invented a mythical Dutch historian
of New York named Diedrich Knickerbocker and fathered upon him a witty
parody of Dr. Mitchill's grave "Picture of New York." To read Irving's
chapters today is to witness one of the rarest and most agreeable of
phenomena, namely, the actual beginning of a legend which the world is
unwilling to let die. The book made Sir Walter Scott's sides ache with
laughter, and reminded him of the humor of Swift and Sterne. But certain
New Yorkers were slow to see the joke.

Irving was himself a New Yorker, born just at the close of the
Revolution, of a Scotch father and English mother. His youth was
pleasantly idle, with a little random education, much theater-going,
and plentiful rambles with a gun along the Hudson River. In 1804 he went
abroad for his health, returned and helped to write the light social
satire of the "Salmagundi Papers," and became, after the publication of
the "Knickerbocker History," a local celebrity. Sailing for England in
1815 on business, he stayed until 1832 as a roving man of letters in
England and Spain and then as Secretary of the American Legation in
London. "The Sketch Book," "Bracebridge Hall," and "Tales of a Traveler"
are the best known productions of Irving's fruitful residence in
England. The "Life of Columbus," the "Conquest of Granada," and "The
Alhambra" represent his first sojourn in Spain. After his return to
America he became fascinated with the Great West, made the travels
described in his "Tour of the Prairies," and told the story of roving
trappers and the fur trade in "Captain Bonneville" and "Astoria."
For four years he returned to Spain as American Minister. In his last
tranquil years at Sunnyside on the Hudson, where he died in 1859, he
wrote graceful lives of Goldsmith and of Washington.

Suc