RECOLLECTIONS OF WASHINGTON IRVING.

BY ONE OF HIS FRIENDS.

The appearance of the first volume of the long-expected Life of Washington Irving has excited an interest which will not be satisfied until the whole work shall have been completed.  Its author, Pierre M. Irving, sets forth with the announcement that his plan is to make the patriarch of American literature his own biographer.  It is nothing new that this branch of letters is beset with peculiar difficulties.  Some men suffer sadly at the hand of their chronicler.  Scott misrepresents Napoleon, and Southey fails equally in his Memoirs of Cowper and of the Wesleys.  Friendship’s colors are too bright for correct portraiture, and prejudice equally forbids acuracy.  Mr. Pierre M. Irving, though an admirer of his distinguished kinsman, (and who that knew him could fail of admiration?) avoids the character of a mere eulogist, while at the same time he exhibits none of the obsequiousness of a Boswell, fluttering like a moth about a huge candle.  Being a man of independent mind and of high culture, he brings out the character he portrays in aspects true to life, and not exaggerated by excess of tone, while he fully exhibits its exquisite finish.

Among the many incidents of deep interest which are contained in this volume, the episode of Matilda Hoffman stands forth in most striking relief.  While lifting the veil which for a half-century covered the most pathetic event in Irving’s life, his biographer touches with a scrupulous delicacy a theme so sacredly enshrined in a life-long memory.  In referring to this affair, which gave a tender aspect to Irving’s subsequent career, and in fact changed its whole tenor, we may remark that the loves of literary men form a most interesting and, in some cases, moving history.  Some, like Petrarch, Earl Surrey, Burns, and Byron, have embalmed the objects of their affection in the effusions of their muse, while others have bequeathed that duty to others.  Shakspeare says but little about his sweetheart, while Milton, who was decidedly unsuccessful in matters of the heart, seems to have acted on the motto, ‘The least said, the soonest mended.’  Poor Pope, miserable invalid though he was, nervous, irritable, and full of hate and spleen, was not beyond the power of the tender passion, and confessed the charms of the lonely Martha Blount, who held the wretched genius among her conquests.  Swift, although an ogre at heart, had his chapter of love matters, which never fail to give us the horrors when we bring them to mind, and the episodes of Stella and Vanessa are among the minor tragedies in life’s great drama.  Johnson had a great heart, and was born to love, though, like the lion, he needed to have his claws pared, to fit him for female society.  What a tender attachment was that which he bore ‘Tetty,’ and with what solemn remembrance he preserved her as his own, even after death had robbed him of her presence!