long intimacy with his uncle; yet it is evident that Irving was seriously impressed at Dresden, and that he was very much unsettled until he drove away the impression by hard work with his pen; and it would be nothing new in human nature and experience if he had for a time yielded to the attractions of loveliness and a most congenial companionship, and had returned again to an exclusive devotion to the image of the early loved and lost.

That Irving intended never to marry is an inference I cannot draw either from his fondness for the society of women, from his interest in the matrimonial projects of his friends and the gossip which has feminine attractions for its food, or from his letters to those who had his confidence.  In a letter written from Birmingham, England, March 15, 1816, to his dear friend Henry Brevoort, who was permitted more than perhaps any other person to see his secret heart, he alludes, with gratification, to the report of the engagement of James Paulding, and then says:—­

“It is what we must all come to at last.  I see you are hankering after it, and I confess I have done so for a long time past.  We are, however, past that period [Irving was thirty-two] when a man marries suddenly and inconsiderately.  We may be longer making a choice, and consulting the convenience and concurrence of easy circumstances, but we shall both come to it sooner or later.  I therefore recommend you to marry without delay.  You have sufficient means, connected with your knowledge and habits of business, to support a genteel establishment, and I am certain that as soon as you are married you will experience a change in your ideas.  All those vagabond, roving propensities will cease.  They are the offspring of idleness of mind and a want of something to fix the feelings.  You are like a bark without an anchor, that drifts about at the mercy of every vagrant breeze or trifling eddy.  Get a wife, and she’ll anchor you.  But don’t marry a fool because she has a pretty face, and don’t seek after a great belle.  Get such a girl as Mary ——­, or get her if you can; though I am afraid she has still an unlucky kindness for poor ——­, which will stand in the way of her fortunes.  I wish to God they were rich, and married, and happy!”

The business reverses which befell the Irving brothers, and which drove Washington to the toil of the pen, and cast upon him heavy family responsibilities, defeated his plans of domestic happiness in marriage.  It was in this same year, 1816, when the fortunes of the firm were daily becoming more dismal, that he wrote to Brevoort, upon the report that the latter was likely to remain a bachelor:  “We are all selfish beings.  Fortune by her tardy favors and capricious freaks seems to discourage all my matrimonial resolves, and if I am doomed to live an old bachelor, I am anxious to have good company.  I cannot bear that all my old companions should launch away into the married state, and leave me alone to tread this