Irving’s position in American literature, or in that of the English tongue, will only be determined by the slow settling of opinion, which no critic can foretell, and the operation of which no criticism seems able to explain.  I venture to believe, however, that the verdict will not be in accord with much of the present prevalent criticism.  The service that he rendered to American letters no critic disputes; nor is there any question of our national indebtedness to him for investing a crude and new land with the enduring charms of romance and tradition.  In this respect, our obligation to him is that of Scotland to Scott and Burns; and it is an obligation due only, in all history, to here and there a fortunate creator to whose genius opportunity is kind.  The Knickerbocker Legend and the romance with which Irving has invested the Hudson are a priceless legacy; and this would remain an imperishable possession in popular tradition if the literature creating it were destroyed.  This sort of creation is unique in modern times.  New York is the Knickerbocker city; its whole social life remains colored by his fiction; and the romantic background it owes to him in some measure supplies to it what great age has given to European cities.  This creation is sufficient to secure for him an immortality, a length of earthly remembrance that all the rest of his writings together might not give.

Irving was always the literary man; he had the habits, the idiosyncrasies, of his small genus.  I mean that he regarded life not from the philanthropic, the economic, the political, the philosophic, the metaphysic, the scientific, or the theologic, but purely from the literary point of view.  He belongs to that small class of which Johnson and Goldsmith are perhaps as good types as any, and to which America has added very few.  The literary point of view is taken by few in any generation; it may seem to the world of very little consequence in the pressure of all the complex interests of life, and it may even seem trivial amid the tremendous energies applied to immediate affairs; but it is the point of view that endures; if its creations do not mould human life, like the Roman law, they remain to charm and civilize, like the poems of Horace.  You must not ask more of them than that.  This attitude toward life is defensible on the highest grounds.  A man with Irving’s gifts has the right to take the position of an observer and describer, and not to be called on for a more active participation in affairs than he chooses to take.  He is doing the world the highest service of which he is capable, and the most enduring it can receive from any man.  It is not a question whether the work of the literary man is higher than that of the reformer or the statesman; it is a distinct work, and is justified by the result, even when the work is that of the humorist only.  We recognize this in the ease of the poet.  Although Goethe has been reproached for his lack of sympathy