[28]
been removed by death.
I have even heard that the lady in question was a beautiful Jewess, the same one whom Walter Scott has depicted in his well-known Rebecca.
This legend of the beautiful Jewess was current in my youth.
A later authority informs us that Mr. Irving was really engaged to Matilda, daughter of Josiah Ogden Hoffman, a noted lawyer of New York, and that the death of the lady prevented the intended marriage from taking place.
‘He could never, to his dying day, endure to hear her name mentioned,’ it is said, ‘and, nearly thirty years after her death, the accidental discovery of a piece of her embroidery saddened him so that he could not speak.’
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