a great source of curiosity and amusement on the promenade of a watering-place to observe the little sturdy English women, trudging about in their stout leather shoes, and to study the various ‘understandings’ betrayed to view by this mischievous fashion.”

The years passed rather wearily in England.  Peter continued to be an invalid, and Washington himself, never robust, felt the pressure more and more of the irksome and unprosperous business affairs.  Of his own want of health, however, he never complains; he maintains a patient spirit in the ill turns of fortune, and his impatience in the business complications is that of a man hindered from his proper career.  The times were depressing.

“In America [he writes to Brevoort] you have financial difficulties, the embarrassments of trade, the distress of merchants, but here you have what is far worse, the distress of the poor—­not merely mental sufferings, but the absolute miseries of nature:  hunger, nakedness, wretchedness of all kinds that the laboring people in this country are liable to.  In the best of times they do but subsist, but in adverse times they starve.  How the country is to extricate itself from its present embarrassment, how it is to escape from the poverty that seems to be overwhelming it, and how the government is to quiet the multitudes that are already turbulent and clamorous, and are yet but in the beginning of their real miseries, I cannot conceive.”

The embarrassments of the agricultural and laboring classes and of the government were as serious in 1816 as they have again become in 1881.

During 1817 Irving was mostly in the depths of gloom, a prey to the monotony of life and torpidity of intellect.  Rays of sunlight pierce the clouds occasionally.  The Van Wart household at Birmingham was a frequent refuge for him, and we have pretty pictures of the domestic life there; glimpses of Old Parr, whose reputation as a gourmand was only second to his fame as a Grecian, and of that delightful genius, the Rev. Rann Kennedy, who might have been famous if he had ever committed to paper the long poems that he carried about in his head, and the engaging sight of Irving playing the flute for the little Van Warts to dance.  During the holidays Irving paid another visit to the haunts of Isaac Walton, and his description of the adventures and mishaps of a pleasure party on the banks of the Dove suggest that the incorrigible bachelor was still sensitive to the allurements of life, and liable to wander over the “dead-line” of matrimonial danger.  He confesses that he was all day in Elysium.  “When we had descended from the last precipice,” he says, “and come to where the Dove flowed musically through a verdant meadow—­then—­fancy me, oh, thou ‘sweetest of poets,’ wandering by the course of this romantic stream—­a lovely girl hanging on my arm, pointing out the beauties of the surrounding scenery, and repeating in the most dulcet voice tracts of heaven-born poetry.  If a strawberry smothered in cream has any consciousness of its delicious situation, it must feel as I felt at that moment.”  Indeed, the letters of this doleful year are enlivened by so many references to the graces and attractions of lovely women, seen and remembered, that insensibility cannot be attributed to the author of the “Sketch-Book.”