work which he was well qualified to write, for in temperament, in tastes, and in clearness and charm of literary style, he had much in common with the author of the Citizen of the World and the Vicar of Wakefield. The Life of Washington, the life of the pioneer of freedom in America, was a most fitting task to crown the labors of the pioneer of American literature, who had told also the life-story of him who discovered the New World to the Old.

Toward the close of the year which saw the publication of the fifth and final volume of the last named work, on November 28, 1859, Irving died at his home on the Hudson. He was buried on a hill overlooking the river and a portion of the Sleepy Hollow valley.

It is not at once easy to say which is the strongest among Irving's several titles to our praise. It has sometimes been the

Summary

and Estimate.

fashion to regard the Knickerbocker History as his best work, and it is easy to understand the temptations which have led to such a judgment. The book was wholly American in its inspiration, it was written with manifest spontaneity and an almost reckless gaiety, its plan is highly original, its humor genuine and all-pervading, and it has a largeness of scope and wholeness of texture that were not always found in his writings. The fact remains, however, that the majority of his readers have taken the Sketch-Book most closely to heart, and perhaps they are right. The latter book is admittedly wanting in unity, but it makes up for that in variety; and while the stories of Rip Van Winkle, Ichabod Crane, and the Christmas Dinner may seem but trifles in extent, they are not trifles when measured by the standards of literary art. Nor does it matter greatly that the whole series is in some sense the Spectator revived: the masters of English prose have never been so many as to make such revivals unwelcome.

We may readily grant, indeed, that Irving's greatness did

not lie in originality. He was not so well fitted to create a tradition as to perpetuate one or give it a new direction. There was nothing revolutionary in his make-up; literature was good enough as he found it, and he preserved to the end a conservative, almost aristocratic ideal of its office. It is well, too, that he did so, since it was to be his task to force from English readers the first reluctant approval. Largely because he was not revolutionary, he was admitted at once to their favor; his homely, sentimental, or mediæval themes were entirely safe ones; and his style, formed upon familiar British models, found its audience prepared. At the same time, the American atmosphere lurked about it all, and so, almost imperceptibly, he bridged the gulf between the two nations and linked our literature to theirs. That this service

was a great one is unquestionable.

Of the sentimentalism which pervades so much of his work, little need be said in apology. Its influence has sometimes been bad; young admirers of Irving and his weak imitators have very often fallen into a style of effusive tenderness and namby-pamby moralizing that is anything but agreeable. But for the man who would seek out the tomb of Petrarch's Laura, and grieve over the downfall of Napoleon, it seems only a natural and inoffensive self-expression. Irving is saved, indeed, from mawkishness, by his underlying manliness and sincerity and his fund of humor. The blend of sentiment and humor which made a perfect tale of the "Legend of Sleepy Hollow" was a blend native to the man. And after all, there is far more health than morbidness in his sentiment. It is impossible to read even those passages of the Sketch-Book which describe his voyage across the ocean in search of health, without catching the infection of his energy and buoyant spirits. What a good thing it is to be alive, he seems to say-what a busy, brilliant, bounteous world it is! Such a personality as this was sure to make its

way in the world of men, and, with the gift of a style as lucid and winning as itself, no less in the world of letters.

Further characterization of his writings seems almost idle. They are very easily classified, since they require no profound study, offer no puzzles, and excite no hostility. Everybody reads them and likes them, and there the matter ends. They are works of the heart rather than of the head-gentle, human books, that belong on the same shelf with the writings of Addison and Goldsmith. If we desire to satisfy the hunger of the intellect, to be thrilled with a new hope, or to get solace for a lost faith, we do not go to Irving. He has little food and few stimulants, and no medicines save such as the wisest doctors always prescribe-fresh air and sunshine and a cheerful spirit. He is an entertainer for the idle hour, not a companion of the unsatisfied years. Yet, without being either a poet or a scholar, be goes so directly to all that is best in human nature that he wins for his admirers both poets and scholars, and at the same time that great audience of the uncritical that poets and scholars cannot always win.

JAMES FENIMORE COOPER, 1789-1851

In James Fenimore Cooper we have once more a romancer who approaches the novelist type, inviting comparison with Brockden Brown and his tardy successors. But Cooper stands out from the group of pioneer novelists in strong relief as the one man who, to a thorough knowledge of primitive conditions on the frontier, added both a quick discernment of their romantic elements and the artist's power of broad and serious imaginative treatment. He lacked Brown's subtlety of mental analysis, but he was in every way saner and wholesomer, with a stronger grasp upon the realities of life. Whatever he did was done in a large, free way; and Brown's Philadelphia scenes, Miss Sedgwick's pictures of New England home and school life, and the Dutch interiors of Paulding, pale before the sweeps of forest and ocean that fill the background of Cooper's canvas.

This eminently befits the man whose father believed himself to have settled more acres than any other man in America, and who spent the first thirty-one years Youth. of his own life mostly out of doors, in unconscious preparation for the writing of the thirty-one years to follow. He was born at Burlington, New Jersey, September 15, 1789, the eleventh of twelve children. He was christened simply James,-Fenimore, the name of his mother, who was of Swedish descent, not being assumed until 1826. When he was but fourteen months old, his father, who had come into possession of large tracts of land about the head-waters of the Susquehanna in central New York, moved thither with his entire household. There, on the southeastern shore of Otsego Lake, had already been founded Cooperstown, and there, within a few years, was erected the large, baronial-like family mansion, Otsego Hall-America's Abbotsford, it has sometimes been called the home of Cooper's youth and of his later manhood. It was the advance of civilization upon the wilderness. The charm of the region, to this day remarkably picturesque, made a deep impression on the growing boy. The "beauteous valley" in the uplands, the lake that "lay imbedded in mountains of evergreen, with the long shadows of the pines on its surface," the "dark ribbon of water that gushed from the lake's outlet and wound its way toward the distant Chesapeake," are all faithfully and lovingly described in the opening chapters of The Pioneers—a story in which it is easy to substitute for Judge Marmaduke Temple of Templeton the name of Judge William Cooper of Cooperstown. In the settlement itself was a motley population-traders, trappers, and woodcutters-gathered from all quarters of the globe; while to the north and west stretched the seemingly interminable forests of beech and maple, oak and pine, with their denizens of the wild deer, wolf, bear, and panther, and the scarcely less wild Indian.

Cooper's schooling began at the village "Academy," was continued in the family of an English rector at Albany, and was concluded, though not completed, with three years at Yale. entered Yale at the age of thirteen, but as he distinguished himself throughout his course more for mischief than for scholarship, he was dismissed without being allowed to graduate. He was thus left, like most of the writers of the central and southern states, without the rigorous college training that fell, with the single exception of Whittier, to the lot of the New Englanders. But the young Cooper had little thought of becoming a professional man, and probably took his dismissal from Yale with a light heart, the more so as it resulted in securing for him an education better suited to his temperament. His father, who, as a Congressional representative and public man, would have some political influence, decided that he should fit himself for the navy, and, as a preliminary, the youth of seventeen shipped before the mast of a merchant vessel in the autumn of 1806. The year's voyage, which, fortunately in this case, was exceptionally stormy, took him from New York to London, thence to Gibraltar, and by way again of London, back to Philadelphia. His commission as midshipman in the navy promptly followed. He served for three years, occupied part of the time in building a brig on Lake Ontario, and part of the time in charge of the gunboats on Lake Champlain. After his marriage in 1811, he resigned his commission, and settled down to a happy domestic life, residing alternately near his old home in Otsego County, and near the home of his wife's parents in Westchester County. He was engaged in the somewhat aimless occupations of a gentleman farmer, with no thought of duties or interests extending beyond his own household. But suddenly, after nine years of sheep-shearing and tree-planting, by what seems the merest freak of fancy he found himself launched on a literary career.

It must have been in 1819 or 1820. He had been reading