“The best thing of the evening (as far as I was concerned) occurred after the whole grand show was over.  Irving and I came away together, and we had hardly got into the street, when a most pelting shower came on, and cabs and umbrellas were in requisition in all directions.  As we were provided with neither, our plight was becoming serious, when a common cad ran up to me, and said,—­’Shall I get you a cab, Mr. Moore?  Sure, a’n’t I the man that patronizes your Melodies?’ He then ran off in search of a vehicle, while Irving and I stood close up, like a pair of male caryatides, under the very narrow protection of a hall-door ledge, and thought, at last, that we were quite forgotten by my patron.  But he came faithfully back, and while putting me into the cab, (without minding at all the trifle I gave him for his trouble,) he said confidentially in my ear,—­’Now mind, whenever you want a cab, Misthur Moore, just call for Tim Flaherty, and I’m your man.’—­Now, this I call fame, and of somewhat more agreeable kind than that of Dante, when the women in the street found him out by the marks of hell-fire on his beard.”

When I said that Mr. Irving could not speak in public, I had forgotten that he did once get through with a very nice little speech on such an occasion as that just alluded to.  It was at an entertainment given in 1837, at the old City Hotel in New York, by the New York booksellers to American authors.  Many of “the Trade” will remember the good things said on that evening, and among them Mr. Irving’s speech about Halleck, and about Rogers the poet, as the “friend of American genius.”  At my request, he afterwards wrote out his remarks, which were printed in the papers of the day.  Probably this was his last, if not his best effort in this line; for the Dickens-dinner remarks were not complete.

In 1845, Mr. Irving came to London from his post at Madrid, on a short visit to his friend, Mr. McLane, then American Minister to England.  It was my privilege at that time to know him more domestically than before.  It was pleasant to have him at my table at “Knickerbocker Cottage.”  With his permission, a quiet party of four was made up;—­the others being Dr. Beattie, the friend and biographer of Campbell; Samuel Carter Hall, the litterateur, and editor of the “Art Journal”; and William Howitt.  Irving was much interested in what Dr. Beattie had to tell about Campbell, and especially so in Carter Hall’s stories of Moore and his patron, Lord Lansdowne.  Moore, at this time, was in ill-health and shut up from the world.  I need not attempt to quote the conversation.  Irving had been somewhat intimate with Moore in former days, and found him doubtless an entertaining and lively companion,—­but his replies to Hall about the “patronage” of my Lord Lansdowne, etc., indicated pretty clearly that he had no sympathy with the small traits and parasitical tendencies of Moore’s character.  If there was anything specially detestable to Irving and at variance with his very nature, it was that self-seeking deference to wealth and station which was so characteristic of the Irish poet.