Moors, or whether in his time the legend itself had migrated to the Hudson Valley, makes no difference. He assumed that it belonged in the Catskills. He placed it, as a little earlier Brockden Brown placed his less significant romances, in at real background; and he infused into it the romantic spirit which was already characteristic of European letters, and soon to be almost more so of American. He enlivened the tale, meanwhile, with a subdued form of such humour as runs riot in the "Knickerbocker History;" and all this modern sentiment, he phrased as he had phrased his first book, in terms modelled on the traditional style of a generation or two before. The peculiar trait of the "Sketch Book," in short, is its combination of fresh romantic feeling with traditional Augustan style.

The passages of the "Sketch Book" which deal with England reveal so sympathetic a sense of old English tradition that some of them, like those concerning Stratford and Westminster Abbey, have become almost classical; just as Irving's later work, "Bracebridge Hall," is now generally admitted to typify a pleasant phase of country life in England almost as well as Sir Roger de Coverley typified another, a century earlier. There are papers in the "Sketch Book," however, which from our point of view are more significant. Take those, for example, on "John Bull" and on "English Writers concerning America." Like the writing of Hopkinson at the time of the American Revolution, these reveal a distinct sense on the part of an able and cultivated American that the contemporary English differ from our countrymen. The eye which observed John Bull in the aspect which follows, is foreign to England: —

"Though really a good-hearted, good-tempered old fellow at bot tom, yet he is singularly fond of being in the midst of contention. It is one of his peculiarities, however, that he only relishes the begin ning of an affray; he always goes into a fight with alacrity, but comes out of it grumbling even when victorious; and though no one fights with more obstinacy to carry a contested point, yet, when the battle

of life and of ideals more vivid, more complete, more varied, or more prolonged. In the third place, the decline of Spain. began almost immediately; so in the early nineteenth century Spain had altered less since the middle ages than any other part of Europe. Elsewhere an American traveller could find traces of the picturesque, romantic, vanished past. In Spain he could find a state of life so little changed from olden time that he seemed almost to travel into that vanished past itself.

Now, as the American character of the nineteenth century has declared itself, few of its æsthetic traits are more marked than eager delight in olden splendours. Such delight, of course, has characterised the nineteenth century in Europe as well as among ourselves. A modern Londoner, however, who can walk in a forenoon from Westminster Abbey to the Temple Church and so to the Tower, can never dream of what such monuments mean to an imagination which has grown up amid no grander relics of antiquity than King's Chapel or Independence Hall, than gray New England farmhouses and the moss-grown gravestones of Yankee buryinggrounds. To any sensitive nature, brought up in nineteenthcentury America, the mere sight of anything so immemorially human as a European landscape must have in it some touch of that stimulating power which the Europe of the Renaissance found in the fresh discovery of classical literature and art. Americans can still feel the romance even of modern London or Paris; and to this day there is no spot where our starved craving for human antiquity can be more profusely satisfied than amid the decaying but not vanished monuments of Christian and of Moorish Spain. No words have ever expressed this satisfaction more sincerely or more spontaneously than the fantastic stories of old Spain which Irving has left us.

His later work was chiefly biographical. His "Life of Goldsmith" and his "Life of Washington" alike are written with all his charm and with vivid imagination. Irving, how

ever, was no trained scholar. He was far even from the critical habit of the New England historians, and further still from such learning as is now apt to make history something like exact science. It may be doubted whether Irving's Goldsmith or his Washington can be accepted as the Goldsmith or the Washington who once trod the earth; yet his Goldsmith and Washington, and the other personages whom he introduced into their stories, are at least living human beings. His work is perhaps halfway between history and fiction; imaginative history is perhaps the best name for it. As usual, he was preoccupied almost as much with a desire to write charmingly as with a purpose to write truly; but in itself this desire was beautifully true. Throughout, one feels, Irving wrote as well as he could, and he knew how to write better than almost any contemporary Englishman.

No doubt a great deal of English work contemporary with Irving's is of deeper value. Our hasty glance at his literary career has perhaps shown what this first of our recognised men of letters- the first American who in his own lifetime established a lasting European reputation really accomplished. His greatest merits, which nothing can abate, are pervasive artistic conscience, admirable and persistent sense of form, and constant devotion to his literary ideals. If we ask ourselves, however, what he used his admirable style to express, we find in the first place a quaintly extravagant sort of humour growing more delicate with the years; next we find romantic sentiment set forth in the beautifully polished phrases of a past English generation whose native temper had been rather classical than romantic; then we find a deeply lasting delight in the splendours of an unfathomably romantic past; and finally we come to pleasantly vivid romantic biographies. One thing here is pretty clear: the man had no message. From beginning to end he was animated by no profound sense of the mystery of existence. Neither the solemn eternities which stir philosophers and theologians, nor the actual lessons as dis

tinguished from the superficial circumstances of human experience, ever much engaged his thought. Delicate, refined, romantic sentiment he set forth in delicate, refined classic style. One may often wonder whether he had much to say; one can never question that he wrote beautifully.

This was the first recognised literary revelation of the New World to the Old. In a previous generation, Edwards had made American theology a fact for all Calvinists to reckon with. The political philosophers of the Revolution had made our political and legal thought matters which even the Old World could hardly neglect. When we come to pure literature, however, in which America should at last express to Europe what life meant to men of artistic sensitiveness living under the conditions of our new and emancipated society, what we find is little more than greater delicacy of form than existed in contemporary England. Irving is certainly a permanent literary figure. What makes him so is not novelty or power, but charming refinement.

III

JAMES FENIMORE COOPER

IN 1820, American literature, at least so far as it has survived even in tradition, consisted of the work of Brockden Brown, then ten years dead, and of Irving's "Sketch Book," the first edition of which had appeared the year before. Apart from these works, what had been produced in this country was so obviously imitative as to express only a sense on the part of our numerous writers that they ought to copy the eminent authors of England. In 1820 appeared the first work of a new novelist, soon to attain not only permanent reputation in America, but also a European recognition more general than Irving's, if not so critically admiring. This was James Fenimore Cooper.

He was born in New Jersey in 1789. When he was about a year old his father, a gentleman of means, migrated to that region in the wilderness of Central New York where Cooperstown now preserves his name. Here the father founded and christened the settlement where for the rest of his life he maintained a position of almost feudal superiority. Here, in a country so wild as to be almost primeval, Cooper was brought up. Before he was fourteen years old he went to Yale College, then in charge of its great President, Timothy Dwight; but some academic trouble brought his college career to a premature end. The years between 1806 and 1810 he spent at sea, first as a kind of apprentice on a merchant vessel, afterward as an officer in the navy. In 1811, having married a lady of the Tory family of De Lancey, he resigned his commission.