We have arrived, too, at a time when we may apply a more cosmopolitan standard to the works of American writers, and may disregard many a minor author whose productions would have cut some figure had they come to light amid the poverty of our colonial age.  Hundreds of these forgotten names, with specimens of their unread writings, are consigned to a limbo of immortality in the pages of Duyckinck’s Cyclopedia and of Griswold’s Poets of America and Prose Writers of America.  We may select here for special mention, and as most representative of the thought of their time, the names of Irving, Cooper, Webster, and Channing.

A generation was now coming upon the stage who could recall no other government in this country than the government of the United States, and to whom the Revolutionary War was but a tradition.  Born in the very year of the peace, it was a part of Irving’s mission, by the sympathetic charm of his writings and by the cordial recognition which he won in both countries, to allay the soreness which the second war, of 1812-15, had left between England and America.  He was well fitted for the task of mediator.  Conservative by nature, early drawn to the venerable worship of the Episcopal Church, retrospective in his tastes, with a preference for the past and its historic associations, which, even in young America, led him to invest the Hudson and the region about New York with a legendary interest, he wrote of American themes in an English fashion, and interpreted to an American public the mellow attractiveness that he found in the life and scenery of Old England.  He lived in both countries, and loved them both; and it is hard to say whether Irving is more of an English or of an American writer.  His first visit to Europe, in 1804-6, occupied nearly two years.  From 1815 to 1832 he was abroad continuously, and his “domicile,” as the lawyers say, during these seventeen years was really in England, though a portion of his time was spent upon the Continent, and several successive years in Spain, where he engaged upon the Life of Columbus, the Conquest of Granada, the Companions of Columbus, and the Alhambra, all published between 1828 and 1832.  From 1842 to 1846 he was again in Spain as American minister at Madrid.

Irving was the last and greatest of the Addisonians.  His boyish letters, signed “Jonathan Oldstyle,” contributed in 1802 to his brother’s newspaper, the Morning Chronicle, were, like Franklin’s Busybody, close imitations of the Spectator.  To the same family belonged his Salmagundi papers, 1807, a series of town-satires on New York society, written in conjunction with his brother William and with James K. Paulding.  The little tales, essays, and sketches which compose the Sketch Book were written in England, and published in America, in periodical numbers, in 1819-20.  In this, which is in some respects his best book, he still maintained