“The outline of this story,” says his nephew Pierre Irving, “had been sketched more than a year before[+] at Birmingham, after a conversation with his brother-in-law, Van Wart, who had been dwelling on some recollections of his early years at Tarrytown, and had touched upon a waggish fiction of one Brom Bones, a wild blade, who professed to fear nothing, and boasted of his having once met the devil on a return from a nocturnal frolic, and run a race with him for a bowl of milk punch.  The imagination of the author suddenly kindled over the recital, and in a few hours he had scribbled off the framework of his renowned story, and was reading it to his sister and her husband.  He then threw it by until he went up to London, where it was expanded into the present legend.”

[Footnote +:  That is, before it was finally written and published.]

No sooner had the first number of the “Sketch Book,” as published in New York, come to England, than a periodical began reprinting it, and Irving heard that a publisher intended to bring it out in book form.  That made him decide to publish it in England himself, and he did so at his own expense.  The publisher soon failed, and by Scott’s help, as already explained, Irving got his book into the hands of Murray.  Murray finally gave him a thousand dollars for the copyright.  But when it was published, it proved so very popular that Murray paid him five hundred more.  From that time forward he received large sums for his writings, both in the United States and in England.

The “Sketch Book” was followed by “Bracebridge Hall,” consisting of stories and sketches of the same character; and later by the “Tales of a Traveller.”

In the “Tales of a Traveller” we are most interested in “Buckthorne and his Friends,” a series of English stories, with descriptions of literary life in London.  Most famous of all is the account of a publishers’ dinner, with a description of the carving partner sitting gravely at one end, with never a smile on his face, while at the other end of the table sits the laughing partner; and the poor authors are arranged at the table and are treated by the partners according to the number of editions their books have sold.

Irving’s father was a Scotchman, and his mother was an Englishwoman; and one of his sisters and one of his brothers, as we have already learned, lived in England for many years.  It is not strange, then, that England became to him a second home, and that many of his best stories and descriptions in the “Sketch Book,” “Bracebridge Hall,” and the “Tales of a Traveller” relate to English characters and scenes.

CHAPTER XII

IRVING GOES TO SPAIN

When Irving went to Liverpool in 1815, it was his intention to travel on the continent of Europe.  As we have seen, business reasons made that impossible.  But after the publication and success of the “Sketch Book” he was free.  He was now certain of an income, and his reputation was so great that he attracted notice wherever he went.