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light in an era marked by bitterness and obscuration.
It was a triumph of character as well as of literary skill.
But the skill was very noticeable also.
Irving's prose is not that of the Defoe-Swift-Franklin-Paine type of plain talk to the crowd.
It is rather an inheritance from that other eighteenth century tradition, the conversation of the select circle.
Its accents were heard in Steele and Addison and were continued in Goldsmith, Sterne, Cowper, and Charles Lamb.
Among Irving's successors, George William Curtis and Charles Dudley Warner and William Dean Howells have been masters of it likewise.
It is mellow human talk, delicate, regardful, capable of exquisite modulation.
With instinctive artistic taste, Irving used this old and sound style upon fresh American material.
In Rip van Winkle and The legend of Sleepy Hollow he portrayed his native valley of the Hudson, and for a hundred years connoisseurs of style have perceived the exquisite fitness of the language 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
New Haven. Yale University. Press. 1921.
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