Many of Irving’s letters, especially in the second volume, are long and elaborate productions, which read like chapters from a book of travels, or like essays, and yet do not on that account lose the peculiar charm which we demand in such productions.  They are perfectly natural in tone and feeling, though evidently written with some care.  They are not in the least artificial, and yet not careless or hasty.  They have all that easy and graceful flow, that transparent narrative, that unconscious charm, which we find in his published writings; and we not unfrequently discern gleams and touches of that exquisite humor which was the best gift bestowed upon his mind.  Brief as our notice is, we cannot refrain from quoting in illustration of our remark a few sentences from a letter to Thomas Moore, written in 1824:—­

“I went a few evenings since to see Kenney’s new piece, ‘The Alcaid.’  It went off lamely, and the Alcaid is rather a bore, and comes near to be generally thought so.  Poor Kenney came to my room next evening, and I could not have believed that one night could have ruined a man so completely.  I swear to you I thought at first it was a flimsy suit of clothes had left some bedside and walked into my room without waiting for the owner to get up, or that it was one of those frames on which clothiers stretch coats at their shop-doors, until I perceived a thin face, sticking edgeways out of the collar of the coat like the axe in a bundle of fasces. He was so thin, and pale, and nervous, and exhausted,—­he made a dozen difficulties in getting over a spot in the carpet, and never would have accomplished it, if he had not lifted himself over by the points of his shirt-collar.”

The illustration we have Italicized is rather wit than humor; but be it as it may, it is capital; and the whole paragraph has that quaint and grotesque exaggeration which reminds us of the village-tailor in “The Sketch-Book,” “who played on the clarionet, and seemed to have blown his face to a point,” or of Mud Sam, who “knew all the fish in the river by their Christian names.”

We think no one can read these volumes without having a higher impression of Washington Irving as a man.  There was no inconsistency between the author and the man.  The tenderness, the purity of feeling, the sensibility, which gave his works an entrance into so many hearts, had their source in his mind and character.  It is a very truthful record that we have before us.  The delineation is that of a man certainly not without touches of human infirmity, but as certainly largely endowed with virtues as well as with gifts and graces.  It is very evident that it is a truthful biography, and that the hand of faithful affection has found nothing to suppress or conceal.  When we have laid down the book, we feel that we know the man.  And we can understand why it was that he was so loved.  Enemies, it seems, he had, or at least ill-wishers; since we learn—­and it is one of the indications