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“ [89] that hung from the shoulders like the cape of a coat. There was a chirping, cheery, oldschool air in his appearance which was undeniably Dutch, and most harmonious with the associations of his writings.” My only personal observation of Washington Irving was too much like his description of his only glimpse of “the Stout Gentleman,” after watching for him through a whole wet Sunday in a country inn, to be of much real value. He came to Cambridge for a hurried visit at the house of his kinsman Henry Van Wart, a singularly handsome young Englishman who had married an American wife, a relative of my own. I remember that he called briefly at my mother's house and that I saw him getting in and out of the chaise. I remember the general testimony of the ladies of the house that he was a nice, kindly, elderly gentleman — perhaps about sixtyand did not seem a bit like a man of genius.


Irving's originality.

It is common to criticise Washington Irving as being a mere copyist of Goldsmith, which is as idle as if we were to call Lowell a copyist of Longfellow. They belonged to the same period, that of the eighteenth-century essay. Irving equaled

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