I have quoted this passage, not more on account of its intrinsic interest, than as a specimen of the author’s consummate art of conveying an impression by what I may call the tone of his style; and this appears in all his correspondence relating to this picturesque and eventful period.  During the four years of his residence the country was in a constant state of excitement and often of panic.  Armies were marching over the kingdom.  Madrid was in a state of siege, expecting an assault at one time; confusion reigned amid the changing adherents about the person of the child-queen.  The duties of a minister were perplexing enough, when the Spanish government was changing its character and its personnel with the rapidity of shifting scenes in a pantomime.  “This consumption of ministers,” wrote Irving to Mr. Webster, “is appalling.  To carry on a negotiation with such transient functionaries is like bargaining at the window of a railroad-car:  before you can get a reply to a proposition the other party is out of sight.”

Apart from politics, Irving’s residence was full of half-melancholy recollections and associations.  In a letter to his old comrade, Prince Polgorouki, then Russian Minister at Naples, he recalls the days of their delightful intercourse at the D’Oubrils’: 

“Time dispels charms and illusions.  You remember how much I was struck with a beautiful young woman (I will not mention names) who appeared in a tableau as Murillo’s Virgin of the Assumption?  She was young, recently married, fresh and unhackneyed in society, and my imagination decked her out with everything that was pure, lovely, innocent, and angelic in womanhood.  She was pointed out to me in the theatre shortly after my arrival in Madrid.  I turned with eagerness to the original of the picture that had ever remained hung up in sanctity in my mind.  I found her still handsome, though somewhat matronly in appearance, seated, with her daughters, in the box of a fashionable nobleman, younger than herself, rich in purse but poor in intellect, and who was openly and notoriously her cavalier servante.  The charm was broken, the picture fell from the wall.  She may have the customs of a depraved country and licentious state of society to excuse her; but I can never think of her again in the halo of feminine purity and loveliness that surrounded the Virgin of Murillo.”

During Irving’s ministry he was twice absent, briefly in Paris and London, and was called to the latter place for consultation in regard to the Oregon boundary dispute, in the settlement of which he rendered valuable service.  Space is not given me for further quotations from Irving’s brilliant descriptions of court, characters, and society in that revolutionary time, nor of his half-melancholy pilgrimage to the southern scenes of his former reveries.  But I will take a page from a letter to his sister, Mrs. Paris, describing his voyage from Barcelona to Marseilles, which exhibits the lively susceptibility of the author and diplomat who was then in his sixty-first year: