Crayon is the most fashionable fellow of the day,” wrote the painter Leslie.  Lord Byron, in a letter to Murray, underscored his admiration of the author, and subsequently said to an American:  “His Crayon,—­I know it by heart; at least, there is not a passage that I cannot refer to immediately.”  And afterwards he wrote to Moore, “His writings are my delight.”  There seemed to be, as some one wrote, “a kind of conspiracy to hoist him over the heads of his contemporaries.”  Perhaps the most satisfactory evidence of his popularity was his publisher’s enthusiasm.  The publisher is an infallible contemporary barometer.

It is worthy of note that an American should have captivated public attention at the moment when Scott and Byron were the idols of the English-reading world.

In the following year Irving was again in England, visiting his sister in Birmingham, and tasting moderately the delights of London.  He was, indeed, something of an invalid.  An eruptive malady,—­the revenge of nature, perhaps, for defeat in her earlier attack on his lungs,—­appearing in his ankles, incapacitated him for walking, tormented him at intervals, so that literary composition was impossible, sent him on pilgrimages to curative springs, and on journeys undertaken for distraction and amusement, in which all work except that of seeing and absorbing material had to be postponed.  He was subject to this recurring invalidism all his life, and we must regard a good part of the work he did as a pure triumph of determination over physical discouragement.  This year the fruits of his interrupted labor appeared in “Bracebridge Hall,” a volume that was well received, but did not add much to his reputation, though it contained “Dolph Heyliger,” one of his most characteristic Dutch stories, and the “Stout Gentleman,” one of his daintiest and most artistic bits of restrained humor.[1]

[Footnote 1:  I was once [says his biographer] reading aloud in his presence a very flattering review of his works, which had been sent him by the critic in 1848, and smiled as I came to this sentence:  “His most comical pieces have always a serious end in view.”  “You laugh,” said he, with that air of whimsical significance so natural to him, “but it is true.  I have kept that to myself hitherto, but that man has found me out.  He has detected the moral of the Stout Gentleman.”]

Irving sought relief from his malady by an extended tour in Germany.  He sojourned some time in Dresden, whither his reputation had preceded him, and where he was cordially and familiarly received, not only by the foreign residents, but at the prim and antiquated little court of King Frederick Augustus and Queen Amalia.  Of Irving at this time Mrs. Emily Fuller (nee Foster), whose relations with him have been referred to, wrote in 1860:—­