Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Walcott Boynton, Reader's History of American Literature

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[90] Goldsmith in simplicity and surpassed him in variety, for the very first number of The sketch book had half a dozen papers each of a different type. He struck out paths for himself; thus Sir Walter Scott, for instance, in his paper on Supernatural and fictitious composition, praised Irving's sketch of The bold Dragoon as the only instance of the fantastic then to be found in the English language. Irving did not create the legends of the Hudson, for as Mrs. Josiah Quincy tells us, writing when Irving was a little boy, the captains on the Hudson had even then a tradition for every hillside; but he immortalized them. Longfellow, Hawthorne, and even Poe, in their short stories, often showed glimpses of his influence, and we see in the Dingley Dell scenes in The Pickwick papers how much Dickens owed to them. The style is a little too deliberate and measured for these days, but perhaps it never wholly loses its charm. The fact that its character varies little whether his theme be derived from America, or England, or Spain, shows how genuine it is. To this day the American finds himself at home in the Alhambra, from his early reading of this one writer. The