Eve a grand ball was likewise given, where there was a vast display of great and little people.  The Livingstons were there in all their glory.  Little Rule Britannia made a gallant appearance at the head of a train of beauties, among whom were the divine H——­, who looked very inviting, and the little Taylor, who looked still more so.  Britannia was gorgeously dressed in a queer kind of hat of stiff purple and silver stuff, that had marvelously the appearance of copper, and made us suppose that she had procured the real Mambrino helmet.  Her dress was trimmed with what we simply mistook for scalps, and supposed it was in honor of the nation; but we blushed at our ignorance on discovering that it was a gorgeous trimming of marten tips.  Would that some eminent furrier had been there to wonder and admire!”

With a little business and a good deal of loitering, waiting upon the whim of his pen, Irving passed the weary months of the war.  As late as August, 1814, he is still giving Brevoort, who has returned, and is at Rockaway Beach, the light gossip of the town.  It was reported that Brevoort and Dennis had kept a journal of their foreign travel, “which is so exquisitely humorous that Mrs. Cooper, on only looking at the first word, fell into a fit of laughing that lasted half an hour.”  Irving is glad that he cannot find Brevoort’s flute, which the latter requested should be sent to him:  “I do not think it would be an innocent amusement for you, as no one has a right to entertain himself at the expense of others.”  In such dallying and badinage the months went on, affairs every day becoming more serious.  Appended to a letter of September 9, 1814, is a list of twenty well-known mercantile houses that had failed within the preceding three weeks.  Irving himself, shortly after this, enlisted in the war, and his letters thereafter breathe patriotic indignation at the insulting proposals of the British and their rumored attack on New York, and all his similes, even those having love for their subject, are martial and bellicose.  Item:  “The gallant Sam has fairly changed front, and, instead of laying siege to Douglas castle, has charged sword in hand, and carried little Cooper’s entrenchments.”

As a Federalist and an admirer of England, Irving had deplored the war, but his sympathies were not doubtful after it began, and the burning of the national Capitol by General Ross aroused him to an active participation in the struggle.  He was descending the Hudson in a steamboat when the tidings first reached him.  It was night, and the passengers had gone into the cabin, when a man came on board with the news, and in the darkness related the particulars:  the burning of the President’s house and government offices, and the destruction of the Capitol, with the library and public archives.  In the momentary silence that followed, somebody raised his voice, and in a tone of complacent derision “wondered what Jimmy Madison would say now.”  “Sir,”