The first number of the “Sketch-Book” was published in America in May, 1819.  Irving was then thirty-six years old.  The series was not completed till September, 1820.  The first installment was carried mainly by two papers, “The Wife” and “Rip Van Winkle;” the one full of tender pathos that touched all hearts, because it was recognized as a genuine expression of the author’s nature; and the other a happy effort of imaginative humor,—­one of those strokes of genius that recreate the world and clothe it with the unfading hues of romance; the theme was an old-world echo, transformed by genius into a primal story that will endure as long as the Hudson flows through its mountains to the sea.  A great artist can paint a great picture on a small canvas.

The “Sketch-Book” created a sensation in America, and the echo of it was not long in reaching England.  The general chorus of approval and the rapid sale surprised Irving, and sent his spirits up, but success had the effect on him that it always has on a fine nature.  He writes to Leslie:  “Now you suppose I am all on the alert, and full of spirit and excitement.  No such thing.  I am just as good for nothing as ever I was; and, indeed, have been flurried and put out of my way by these puffings.  I feel something as I suppose you did when your picture met with success,—­anxious to do something better, and at a loss what to do.”

It was with much misgiving that Irving made this venture.  “I feel great diffidence,” he writes Brevoort, March 3, 1819, “about this reappearance in literature.  I am conscious of my imperfections, and my mind has been for a long time past so pressed upon and agitated by various cares and anxieties, that I fear it has lost much of its cheerfulness and some of its activity.  I have attempted no lofty theme, nor sought to look wise and learned, which appears to be very much the fashion among our American writers at present.  I have preferred addressing myself to the feelings and fancy of the reader more than to his judgment.  My writings may appear, therefore, light and trifling in our country of philosophers and politicians.  But if they possess merit in the class of literature to which they belong, it is all to which I aspire in the work.  I seek only to blow a flute accompaniment in the national concert, and leave others to play the fiddle and French-horn.”  This diffidence was not assumed.  All through his career, a breath of criticism ever so slight acted temporarily like a hoar-frost upon his productive power.  He always saw reasons to take sides with his critic.  Speaking of “vanity” in a letter of March, 1820, when Scott and Lockhart and all the Reviews were in a full chorus of acclaim, he says:  “I wish I did possess more of it, but it seems my curse at present to have anything but confidence in myself or pleasure in anything I have written.”

In a similar strain he had written, in September, 1819, on the news of the cordial reception of the “Sketch-Book” in America:—­