patriot army occupied the city.  “Washington’s work is ended,” said the mother, “and the child shall be named after him.”  When the first President was again in New York, the first seat of the new government, a Scotch maid-servant of the family, catching the popular enthusiasm, one day followed the hero into a shop and presented the lad to him.  “Please, your honor,” said Lizzie, all aglow, “here’s a bairn was named after you.”  And the grave Virginian placed his hand on the boy’s head and gave him his blessing.  The touch could not have been more efficacious, though it might have lingered longer, if he had known he was propitiating his future biographer.

New York at the time of our author’s birth was a rural city of about twenty-three thousand inhabitants, clustered about the Battery.  It did not extend northward to the site of the present City Hall Park; and beyond, then and for several years afterwards, were only country residences, orchards, and corn-fields.  The city was half burned down during the war, and had emerged from it in a dilapidated condition.  There was still a marked separation between the Dutch and the English residents, though the Irvings seem to have been on terms of intimacy with the best of both nationalities.  The habits of living were primitive; the manners were agreeably free; conviviality at the table was the fashion, and strong expletives had not gone out of use in conversation.  Society was the reverse of intellectual:  the aristocracy were the merchants and traders; what literary culture found expression was formed on English models, dignified and plentifully garnished with Latin and Greek allusions; the commercial spirit ruled, and the relaxations and amusements partook of its hurry and excitement.  In their gay, hospitable, and mercurial character, the inhabitants were true progenitors of the present metropolis.  A newspaper had been established in 1732, and a theater had existed since 1750.  Although the town had a rural aspect, with its quaint dormer-window houses, its straggling lanes and roads, and the water-pumps in the middle of the streets, it had the aspirations of a city, and already much of the metropolitan air.

These were the surroundings in which the boy’s literary talent was to develop.  His father was a deacon in the Presbyterian church, a sedate, God-fearing man, with the strict severity of the Scotch Covenanter, serious in his intercourse with his family, without sympathy in the amusements of his children; he was not without tenderness in his nature, but the exhibition of it was repressed on principle,—­a man of high character and probity, greatly esteemed by his associates.  He endeavored to bring up his children in sound religious principles, and to leave no room in their lives for triviality.  One of the two weekly half-holidays was required for the catechism, and the only relaxation from the three church services on Sunday was the reading of “Pilgrim’s Progress.”  This cold and severe discipline