In 1820, after having spent five years in England, he at last set out on his European journey.  We cannot follow him in all his wanderings; but one country that he visited furnished him the materials for the most serious, and in one way the most important part of his literary work.  This was Spain.  Here he spent a great deal of time, returning again and again; and finally he was appointed United States minister to that country.

He first went to Spain to collect materials for the “Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus.”  This was a much more serious work than anything he had before undertaken.  It was, unlike the history of New York, a genuine investigation of facts derived from the musty old volumes of the libraries of Spanish monasteries and other ancient collections.  It was a record of the life of the discoverer of America that was destined to remain the highest authority on that subject.  Murray, the London publisher, paid him over fifteen thousand dollars for the English copyright alone.

In his study among the ruins of Spain, Irving found many other things which greatly interested him—­legends, and tales of the Moors who had once ruled there, and of the ruined beauties of the Moorish palace of the Alhambra.  His imagination was set on fire, he was delighted with the images of by-gone days of glittering pageantry which his fancy called up.  Before his history of Columbus was finished, he began the writing of a book so precisely to his taste that he could not restrain himself until it was finished.  This was the “Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada”—­a true history, but one which reads more like a romance of the Middle Ages than a simple record of facts.

This was followed by four other books based on Spanish history and legend.  It seemed as if Irving could never quite abandon this entrancing subject, for during the entire remainder of his life he went back to it constantly.

When his great history of the life of Columbus was published and proved its merit, Irving was honored in a way he had little expected in his more idle days.  The Royal Society of Literature bestowed upon him one of two fifty-guinea[+] gold medals awarded annually, and the University of Oxford conferred the degree of L.L.D.

[Footnote +:  Two hundred and fifty dollars.]

The “Life of Columbus” was followed in 1831 by the “Voyages of the Companions of Columbus.”  In the following year Irving returned to the United States after an absence of seventeen years.

He was no longer an idle young man unable to fix his mind on any serious work; he had become the most famous of American men of letters.  When he reached New York his countrymen hastened to heap honors upon him, and almost overwhelmed him with public attentions.

CHAPTER XIII

“The Alhambra”