somewhat far advanced, and Mr. Prescott had not yet collected his materials, Irving renounced the glorious theme in such a manner that Prescott never suspected the pain and loss it cost him, nor the full extent of his own obligation.  Some years afterwards Irving wrote to his nephew that in giving it up he in a manner gave up his bread, as he had no other subject to supply its place:  “I was,” he wrote, “dismounted from my cheval de bataille, and have never been completely mounted since.”  But he added that he was not sorry for the warm impulse that induced him to abandon the subject, and that Mr. Prescott’s treatment of it had justified his opinion of him.  Notwithstanding Prescott’s very brilliant work, we cannot but feel some regret that Irving did not write a Conquest of Mexico.  His method, as he outlined it, would have been the natural one.  Instead of partially satisfying the reader’s curiosity in a preliminary essay, in which the Aztec civilization was exposed, Irving would have begun with the entry of the conquerors, and carried his reader step by step onward, letting him share all the excitement and surprise of discovery which the invaders experienced, and learn of the wonders of the country in the manner most likely to impress both the imagination and the memory; and with his artistic sense of the value of the picturesque he would have brought into strong relief the dramatis personae of the story.

In 1842, Irving was tendered the honor of the mission to Madrid.  It was an entire surprise to himself and to his friends.  He came to look upon this as the “crowning honor of his life,” and yet when the news first reached him he paced up and down his room, excited and astonished, revolving in his mind the separation from home and friends, and was heard murmuring, half to himself and half to his nephew, “It is hard,—­very hard; yet I must try to bear it.  God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb.”  His acceptance of the position was doubtless influenced by the intended honor to his profession, by the gratifying manner in which it came to him, by his desire to please his friends, and the belief, which was a delusion, that diplomatic life in Madrid would offer no serious interruption to his “Life of Washington,” in which he had just become engaged.  The nomination, the suggestion of Daniel Webster, Tyler’s Secretary of State, was cordially approved by the President and cabinet, and confirmed almost by acclamation in the Senate.  “Ah,” said Mr. Clay, who was opposing nearly all the President’s appointments, “this is a nomination everybody will concur in!” “If a person of more merit and higher qualification,” wrote Mr. Webster in his official notification, “had presented himself, great as is my personal regard for you, I should have yielded it to higher considerations.”  No other appointment could have been made so complimentary to Spain, and it remains to this day one of the most honorable to his own country.