we had moved in the beginning of the summer,—­the letters (though carefully guarded by the delicacy of her who intrusted them to the editor, and alone retained among many more calculated to lay bare his true feelings), even fragmentary as they are, point out the truth.

“Here is the key to the journey to Silesia, the return to Dresden, and, finally, to the journey from Dresden to Rotterdam in our company, first planned so as to part at Cassel, where Mr. Irving had intended to leave us and go down the Rhine, but subsequently could not find in his heart to part.  Hence, after a night of pale and speechless melancholy, the gay, animated, happy countenance with which he sprang to our coachbox to take his old seat on it, and accompany us to Rotterdam.  There even could he not part, but joined us in the steamboat; and, after bearing us company as far as a boat could follow us, at last tore himself away, to bury himself in Paris, and try to work....

“It was fortunate, perhaps, that this affection was returned by the warmest friendship only, since it was destined that the accomplishment of his wishes was impossible, for many obstacles which lay in his way; and it is with pleasure I can truly say that in time he schooled himself to view, also with friendship only, one who for some time past has been the wife of another.”

Upon the delicacy of this revelation the biographer does not comment, but he says that the idea that Irving thought of marriage at that time is utterly disproved by the following passage from the very manuscript which he submitted to Mrs. Foster:—­

“You wonder why I am not married.  I have shown you why I was not long since.  When I had sufficiently recovered from that loss, I became involved in ruin.  It was not for a man broken down in the world, to drag down any woman to his paltry circumstances.  I was too proud to tolerate the idea of ever mending my circumstances by matrimony.  My time has now gone by; and I have growing claims upon my thoughts and upon my means, slender and precarious as they are.  I feel as if I already had a family to think and provide for.”

Upon the question of attachment and depression, Mr. Pierre Irving says:—­

“While the editor does not question Mr. Irving’s great enjoyment of his intercourse with the Fosters, or his deep regret at parting from them, he is too familiar with his occasional fits of depression to have drawn from their recurrence on his return to Paris any such inference as that to which the lady alludes.  Indeed, his ‘memorandum book’ and letters show him to have had, at this time, sources of anxiety of quite a different nature.  The allusion to his having ‘to put once more to sea’ evidently refers to his anxiety on returning to his literary pursuits, after a season of entire idleness.”

It is not for us to question the judgment of the biographer, with his full knowledge of the circumstances and his