At the outset of Washington Irving's Bracebridge Hall (1822) Geoffrey Crayon, the author's quasi-autobiographical persona, makes the following observation: "I have always had an opinion that much good might be done by keeping mankind in good humor with one another." Precisely such an awareness of the saving grace of humor and of the corresponding power of laughter to meliorate the human situation lies at the foundation of Irving's art. Indeed, from first to last, the vision of human experience articulated in Irving's writing is profoundly comic. He made his literary debut as a perceptive, though essentially benign, social satirist in the tradition of eighteenth-century English writers such as Addison, Steele, Sterne, and Goldsmith; and though he spent the latter part of his career in researching and writing voluminous histories and biographies, even these more serious works are occasionally leavened with the "half-concealed" humor that became his trademark early on...