it would show itself at the sick couch of a parent, a relative, or a friend.  In this manner the writer of this brief memorial witnessed those soothing acts of kindness which, under peculiar circumstances, will ever be dear to his memory.  Alas! little did she then dream that in one short year she herself would fall a sacrifice to the same disease under which the friend to whom she so kindly ministered, sunk to the grave.’

This testimony to departed worth bears the impress of deep sincerity, and its freedom from the fulsome praise, which so often varnishes the dead, seems to add to its force.  Peter Irving, also, pays a tribute to her character in the following utterance, in a letter to his bereaved brother:  ’May her gentle spirit have found that heaven to which it ever seemed to appertain.  She was too spotless for this contaminated world.’

The biographer states that ’Mr. Irving never alluded to this event, nor did any of his relatives ever venture in his presence to introduce the name of Matilda,’ ‘I have heard,’ he adds, ’of but one instance in which it was ever obtruded upon him, and that was by her father, nearly thirty years after her death, and at his own house.  A granddaughter had been requested to play for him some favorite piece on the piano, and in extricating her music from the drawer, she accidentally brought forth a piece of embroidery with it.  ‘Washington,’ said Mr. Hoffman, picking up the faded relic, ‘this is a piece of poor Matilda’s workmanship.’  The effect was electric.  He had been conversing in the sprightliest mood before, but he sunk at once into utter silence, and in a few moments got up and left the house.  It is evidence with what romantic tenderness Irving cherished the memory of this early love, that he kept by him through life the Bible and Prayer-Book of Matilda.  He lay with them under his pillow in the first days of keen and vivid anguish that followed her loss, and they were ever afterward, in all changes of climate and country, his inseparable companions.’

The scene at the house of Mr. Hoffman, to which the biographer alludes, took place after Irving’s second return from Europe, and after an absence of nearly twenty years from his native land.  During this time he had become famous as an author, and had been conceded the position of the first American gentleman in Europe.  He had been received at Courts as in his official position (Secretary of Legation) and had received the admiration of the social and intellectual aristocracy of England.  Returning full of honors, he became at once the lion of New-York, and was greeted by a public dinner at the City Hotel.  How little could it have been imagined, that amid all this harvest of honors, while he stood the cynosure of a general admiration, he should still be under the power of a youthful attachment, and that outliving all the glories of his splendid success, a maiden, dead thirty years, held him with undying power.  While others thought him the happy object of a nation’s popularity, his heart was stealing away from noise and notice to the hallowed ground where Matilda lay.