annual scarification by fire, promoting the growth of forests, and elevating the nature of man.

Supplementing this material improvement is an evident advance in manners and morals. The little log schoolhouse is replaced by magnificent structures furnished with every educational appliance. Churches multiply. The commercial element has disappeared from politics. The intellectual standard of the press has advanced, and with the general diffusion of Blue Grass we may reasonably anticipate a career of unexampled and enduring prosperity.

The drama has opened with a stately procession of historic events. No ancient issues confuse the theme. No buried nations sleep in the untainted soil, vexing the present with their phantoms, retarding progress with the burden of their outworn creeds, depressing enthusiasm by the silent reproof of their mighty achievements. Heirs of the greatest results of time, we are emancipated from all allegiance to the past. Unincumbered by precedents, we stand in the vestibule of a future which is destined to disclose upon this arena time's noblest offspring,- the perfected flower of American manhood.

From the Kansas Magazine

September, 1872

WASHINGTON IRVING

(1783-1859)

EXT to Addison himself, Washington Irving is the most thorough master of Addison's prose style. Indeed, it is not a

paradox to say that at times he writes the Addisonian essay better than Addison himself, for he has a delicacy of touch in portrait drawing and character sketching which he does not lose even when he is most serious; while Addison's tender humor is far from being a characteristic of all his Spectator essays. This in Addison is not an indication of inferiority, but an incident of that solidity of judgment and loftiness of thought which are as characteristic of him at his very best as parody and burlesque are of Irving when he throws off the restraints of his classical training. Addison could not have written the Knickerbocker "History of New York," nor could Irving have written Addison's essay "On the Message of the Stars" in the Spectator of August 22d, 1712. We can see, too, that Irving's best characters in "Bracebridge Hall" are the near relations of Sir Roger de Coverley's family and friends. But if Irving takes pleasure in openly imitating the manner of the Spectator, he succeeds to an eminent degree in doing what no one else has been able to do at all,—in giving new vitality and a distinct individuality to everything he borrows from the masters of Queen Anne's reign.

Irving differs from the Spectator school much more in character than in style. To them the essay was to be the means of reforming a depraved generation. They had a deep consciousness of a serious mission, and as a result they often cease to amuse in their anxiety to instruct. Irving has little of the reformer in him. He saw the inconsistencies and incongruities of human character and of the history which grows out of them; but instead of preaching, he laughed. He is, by nature a story-teller rather than a "Vates," as Addison was, and all his essays tend to become stories. In the "Alhambra," the essay and the tale are so blended that it is impossible to separate them. So in his masterpieces, "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," Irving, though he is still a pupil of Addison, is no longer an essayist at all, but a story-teller, illustrating a highly developed faculty of inventing plots of which Addison shows only a rudimentary trace. Charming as he is in essay writing, Irving's great strength lies in easy narrative. This he understood so thoroughly that when his

extensive writings are analyzed they are found to be nearly all narrative. Even his lightest sketches have a tendency to develop a plot. His portraits will not stay upon his easel. They "come to life," step down and begin to act in the most animated manner before they are more than half drawn. In this he resembles Hawthorne, and it is this chiefly which differentiates him from the "wits" of Queen Anne's reign. We believe in Sir Roger de Coverley-as the most admirable literary portrait ever painted. But we accept Rip Van Winkle, with all his improbabilities, as one of the high realities of a supernatural world,- not a portrait, but an absolute illogical necessity, who, when once created by Irving, is as much alive as we are. What this means we can the better realize by remembering that the difficulty of presenting Sir Roger on the stage would be as insuperable as that of keeping Rip Van Winkle off.

Irving was born at New York, April 3d, 1783. His father, William Irving, was an Englishman, and Irving at early maturity had none of the prejudice against English manners and institutions which often characterized young Americans of that time. In 1804, when he went abroad for two years for his health, he received the first impulse towards a mode of writing in which he excels,— that of describing the customs of other countries in such sketches and essays as those of "Bracebridge Hall" and the "Alhambra." In 1815 he went abroad again, and "Bracebridge Hall," which appeared seven years later, made him a great favorite with the aristocratic party in England. His Knickerbocker "History of New York," which appeared in 1809, had made him famous in America. "The Sketch Book" appeared in parts in 1819, and was published in book form in 1820. Until his death, November 28th, 1859, he continued to write one volume after another of sketches, biographies, and histories with hardly a dull line in them. It is not necessary and it would be ungrateful to complain that he lacks depth, while no doubt it is true that no other author of his generation has written so voluminously and so entertainingly on such a wide range of subjects.

W. V. B.

BRACEBRIDGE HALL

The ancientest house, and the best for housekeeping, in this county or the next; and though the master of it write but Squire, I know no lord like him.-" Merry Beggars."

THE

HE reader, if he has perused the volumes of "The Sketch Book," will probably recollect something of the Bracebridge family, with which I once passed a Christmas. I am now on another visit at the Hall, having been invited to a wedding which is shortly to take place. The Squire's second son, Guy, a fine, spirited young captain in the army, is about to be married to his father's ward. the fair Julia Templeton. A gathering of relations and friends has already commenced, to celebrate the joyful occasion; for the oíá gentleman is an enemy to quiet, private weddings. There is nothing," he says, "like launching a young couple gayly, and cheering them from the shore; a good outset is half the voyage."

Before proceeding any further, I would beg that the Squire might not be confounded with that class of hard-riding, foxhunting gentlemen so often described, and, in fact, so nearly extinct in England. I use this rural title partly because it is his universal appellation throughout the neighborhood, and partly because it saves me the frequent repetition of his name, which is one of those rough old English names at which Frenchmen exclaim in despair.

The Squire is, in fact, a lingering specimen of the old English country gentleman; rusticated a little by living almost entirely on his estate, and something of a humorist, as Englishmen are apt to become when they have an opportunity of living in their own way. I like his hobby passing well, however, which is at bigoted devotion to old English manners and customs; it jumps a little with my own humor, having as yet a lively and unsated curiosity about the ancient and genuine characteristics of my "fatherland."

There are some traits about the Squire's family, also, which appear to me to be national. It is one of those old aristocratical families, which, I believe, are peculiar to England, and scarcely understood in other countries; that is to say, families of the ancient gentry. who, though destitute of titled rank, maintain a high

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ancestral pride; who look down upon all nobility of recent creation, and would consider it a sacrifice of dignity to merge the venerable name of their house in a modern title.

This feeling is very much fostered by the importance which they enjoy on their hereditary domains. The family mansion is an old manor house, standing in a retired and beautiful part of Yorkshire. Its inhabitants have been always regarded, through the surrounding country, as "the great ones of the earth"; and the little village near the Hall looks up to the Squire with almost feudal homage. An old manor house, and an old family of this kind, are rarely to be met with at the present day; and it is probably the peculiar humor of the Squire that has retained this secluded specimen of English housekeeping in something like the genuine old style.

I am again quartered in the paneled chamber, in the antique wing of the house. The prospect from my window, however, has quite a different aspect from that which it wore on my winter visit. Through the early month of April, yet a few warm, sunshiny days have drawn forth the beauties of the spring, which, I think, are always most captivating on their first opening. The parterres of the old-fashioned garden are gay with flowers; and the gardener has brought out his exotics, and placed them along the stone balustrades. The trees are clothed with green buds and tender leaves. When I throw open my jingling casement, I smell the odor of mignonette, and hear the hum of the bees from the flowers against the sunny wall, with the varied song of the throstle, and the cheerful notes of the tuneful little wren.

While sojourning in this stronghold of old fashions, it is my intention to make occasional sketches of the scenes and characters before me. I would have it understood, however, that I am not writing a novel, and have nothing of intricate plot or marvelous adventure to promise the reader. The Hall of which I treat has, for aught I know, neither trapdoor, nor sliding panel, nor donjon keep; and, indeed, appears to have no mystery about it. The family is a worthy well-meaning family, that, in all probability, will eat and drink, and go to bed, and get up regularly, from one end of my work to the other; and the Squire is so kind-hearted that I see no likelihood of his throwing any kind of distress in the way of the approaching nuptials. In a word, I cannot foresee a single extraordinary event that is likely to occur in the whole term of my sojourn at the Hall.