guage to the images and ideas which Irving
desired to convey. To render the Far West of that epoch this style is
perhaps not "big" and broad enough, but when used as Irving uses it in
describing Stratford and Westminster Abbey and an Old English Christmas,
it becomes again a perfect medium. Hawthorne adopted it for "Our Old
Home," and Englishmen recognized it at once as a part of their own
inheritance, enriched, like certain wines, by the voyage across the
Atlantic and home again. Irving wrote of England, Mr. Warner once said,
as Englishmen would have liked to write about it. When he described
the Alhambra and Granada and the Moors, it was the style, rich both in
physical sensation and in dreamlike reverie, which revealed to the world
the quick American appreciation of foreign scenes and characters. Its
key is sympathy.

Irving's popularity has endured in England. It suffered during the
middle of the century in his own country, for the strongest New England
authors taught the public to demand more thought and passion than were
in Irving's nature. Possibly the nervous, journalistic style of the
twentieth century allows too scanty leisure of mind for the full
enjoyment of the Knickerbocker flavor. Yet such changes as these in
literary fashion scarcely affect the permanent service of Irving to our
literature. He immortalized a local type--the New York Dutchman--and
local legends, like that of Rip van Winkle; he used the framework of
the narrative essay to create something almost like the perfected short
story of Poe and Hawthorne; he wrote prose with unfailing charm in an
age when charm was lacking; and, if he had no message, it should be
remembered that some of the most useful ambassadors have had none save
to reveal, with delicacy and tact and humorous kindness, the truth that
foreign persons have feelings precisely like our own.

Readers of Sir Walter Scott's "Journal" may remember his account of an
evening party in Paris in 1826 where he met Fenimore Cooper, then in
the height of his European reputation. "So the Scotch and American lions
took the field together," wrote Sir Walter, who loved to be generous.
"The Last of the Mohicans," then just published, threatened to eclipse
the fame of "Ivanhoe." Cooper, born in 1789, was eighteen years younger
than the Wizard of the North, and was more deeply indebted to him than
he knew. For it was Scott who had created the immense nineteenth century
audience for prose fiction, an