Mr. Irving went down to Yonkers, to hear Thackeray’s lecture in the evening, after we had all had a slice of bear at Mr. Sparrowgrass’s, to say nothing of sundry other courses, with a slight thread of conversation between.  At the lecture, he was so startled by the eulogistic presentation of the lecturer to the audience, by the excellent chief of the committee, that I believe he did not once nod during the evening.  We were, of course, proud to have as our own guest for the night such an embodiment of “Charity and Humor” as Mr. Thackeray saw in the front bench before him, but whom he considerately spared from holding up as an illustration of his subject.

Charity, indeed, practical “good-will toward men,” was an essential part of Mr. Irving’s Christianity,—­and in this Christian virtue he was sometimes severely tested.  Nothing was more irksome to him than to be compelled to endure calls of mere curiosity, or to answer letters either of fulsome eulogy of himself or asking for his eulogy of the MSS. or new work of the correspondent.  Some letters of that kind he probably never did answer.  Few had any idea of the fagging task they imposed on the distinguished victim.  He would worry and fret over it trebly in anticipation, and the actual task itself was to him probably ten times as irksome as it would be to most others.  Yet it would be curious to know how many letters of suggestion and encouragement he actually did write in reply to solicitations from young authors for his criticism and advice, and his recommendation, or, perhaps, his pecuniary aid.  Always disposed to find merit, even where any stray grains of the article lay buried in rubbish, he would amiably say the utmost that could justly be said in favor of “struggling genius.”  Sometimes his readiness to aid meritorious young authors into profitable publicity was shamefully abused,—­as in the case of Maitland, an Englishman, who deliberately forged an absurdly distorted paraphrase of a note of Mr. Irving’s, besides other disreputable use of the signature which he had enticed from him in answer to urgent appeals.  But these were among the penalties of honorable fame and influence which he might naturally expect to pay.  The sunny aspect on the “even tenor of his way” still prevailed; and until the hand of disease reached him in the last year of his life, very few probably enjoyed a more tranquil and unruffled existence.

It became almost a proverb, that Mr. Irving was a nearly solitary instance of a long literary career (half a century) untouched by even a breath of ill-will or jealousy on the part of a brother-author.  The annals of the genus irritabile scarcely show a parallel to such a career.  The most prominent American contemporary of Mr. Irving in imaginative literature, I suppose, was Fenimore Cooper,—­whose genius raised the American name in Europe more effectively even than Irving’s, at least on the Continent.  Cooper had a right to claim respect and admiration,