On Irving’s return to America in February, 1806, with reestablished health, life did not at first take on a more serious purpose.  He was admitted to the bar, but he still halted.[1] Society more than ever attracted him and devoured his time.  He willingly accepted the office of “champion at the tea-parties;” he was one of a knot of young fellows of literary tastes and convivial habits, who delighted to be known as “The Nine Worthies,” or “Lads of Kilkenny.”  In his letters of this period I detect a kind of callowness and affectation which is not discernible in his foreign letters and journal.

[Footnote 1:  Irving once illustrated his legal acquirements at this time by the relation of the following anecdote to his nephew:  Josiah Ogden Hoffman and Martin Wilkins, an effective and witty advocate, had been appointed to examine students for admission.  One student acquitted himself very lamely, and at the supper which it was the custom for the candidates to give to the examiners, when they passed upon their several merits, Hoffman paused in coming to this one, and turning to Wilkins said, as if in hesitation, though all the while intending to admit him, “Martin, I think he knows a little law.”  “Make it stronger, Jo,” was the reply; “d——­d little.”]

These social worthies had jolly suppers at the humble taverns of the city, and wilder revelries in an old country house on the Passaic, which is celebrated in the “Salmagundi” papers as Cockloft Hall.  We are reminded of the change of manners by a letter of Mr. Paulding, one of his comrades, written twenty years after, who recalls to mind the keeper of a porter house, “who whilom wore a long coat, in the pockets whereof he jingled two bushels of sixpenny pieces, and whose daughter played the piano to the accompaniment of broiled oysters.”  There was some affectation of roystering in all this; but it was a time of social good-fellowship, and easy freedom of manners in both sexes.  At the dinners there was much sentimental and bacchanalian singing; it was scarcely good manners not to get a little tipsy; and to be laid under the table by the compulsory bumper was not to the discredit of a guest.  Irving used to like to repeat an anecdote of one of his early friends, Henry Ogden, who had been at one of these festive meetings.  He told Irving the next day that in going home he had fallen through a grating which had been carelessly left open, into a vault beneath.  The solitude, he said, was rather dismal at first, but several other of the guests fell in, in the course of the evening, and they had on the whole a pleasant night of it.