For his lively spirits and quick fancy could not easily be subdued.  He would get out of his bed-room window at night, walk along a coping, and climb over the roof to the top of the next house, only for the high purpose of astonishing a neighbor by dropping a stone down his chimney.  As a young school-boy he came upon Hoole’s translation of Ariosto, and achieved in his father’s back yard knightly adventures.  “Robinson Crusoe” and “Sindbad the Sailor” made him yearn to go to sea.  But this was impossible unless he could learn to lie hard and eat salt pork, which he detested.  He would get out of bed at night and lie on the floor for an hour or two by way of practice.  He also took every opportunity that came in his way of eating the detested food.  But the more he tried to like it the nastier it grew, and he gave up as impracticable his hope of going to sea.  He fastened upon adventures of real travelers; he yearned for travel, and was entranced in his youth by first sight of the beauties of the Hudson River.  He scribbled jests for his school friends, and, of course, he wrote a school-boy play.  At sixteen his schooling was at an end, and he was placed in a lawyer’s office, from which he was transferred to another, and then, in January, 1802, to another, where he continued his clerkship with a Mr. Hoffman, who had a young wife, and two young daughters by a former marriage.  With this family Washington Irving, a careless student, lively, clever, kind, established the happiest relations, of which afterwards there came the deep grief of his life and a sacred memory.

Washington Irving’s eldest brothers were beginning to thrive in business.  A brother Peter shared his frolics with the pen.  His artist pleasure in the theater was indulged without his father’s knowledge.  He would go to the play, come home for nine o’clock prayers, go up to bed, and climb out of his bed-room window, and run back and see the after-piece.  So come evasions of undue restraint.  But with all this impulsive liveliness, young Washington Irving’s life appeared, as he grew up, to be in grave danger.  When he was nineteen, and taken by a brother-in-law to Ballston springs, it was determined by those who heard his incessant night cough that he was “not long for this world.”  When he had come of age, in April, 1804, his brothers, chiefly his eldest brother, who was prospering, provided money to send him to Europe that he might recover health by restful travel in France, Italy and England.  When he was helped up the side of the vessel that was to take him from New York to Bordeaux, the captain looked at him with pity and said, “There’s a chap who will go overboard before we get across.”  But Washington Irving returned to New York at the beginning of the year 1806 with health restored.

What followed will be told in the Introduction to the of her volume of this History of New York, by Diedrich Knickerbocker.

H.M.

THE AUTHOR’S APOLOGY.