“Your familiar pictures of home made me extremely desirous again to be there . . . .  I shall once more return to sober life, satisfied with having secured three months of sunshine in this valley of shadows and darkness.  In this space of time I have seen considerable of the world, but I am sadly afraid I have not grown wiser thereby, inasmuch as it has generally been asserted by the sages of every age that wisdom consists in a knowledge of the wickedness of mankind, and the wiser a man grows the more discontented he becomes with those around him.  Whereas, woe is me, I return in infinitely better humor with the world than I ever was before, and with a most melancholy good opinion and good will for the great mass of my fellow-creatures!”

Free intercourse with men of all parties, he thought, tends to divest a man’s mind of party bigotry.

“One day [he writes] I am dining with a knot of honest, furious Federalists, who are damning all their opponents as a set of consummate scoundrels, panders of Bonaparte, etc.  The next day I dine, perhaps, with some of the very men I have heard thus anathematized, and find them equally honest, warm, and indignant; and if I take their word for it, I had been dining the day before with some of the greatest knaves in the nation, men absolutely paid and suborned by the British government.”

His friends at this time attempted to get him appointed secretary of legation to the French mission, under Joel Barlow, then minister, but he made no effort to secure the place.  Perhaps he was deterred by the knowledge that the author of “The Columbiad” suspected him, though unjustly, of some strictures on his great epic.  He had in mind a book of travel in his own country, in which he should sketch manners and characters; but nothing came of it.  The peril to trade involved in the War of 1812 gave him some forebodings, and aroused him to exertion.  He accepted the editorship of a periodical called “Select Reviews,” afterwards changed to the “Analectic Magazine,” for which he wrote sketches, some of which were afterwards put into the “Sketch-Book,” and several reviews and naval biographies.  A brief biography of Thomas Campbell was also written about this time, as introductory to an edition of “Gertrude of Wyoming.”  But the slight editorial care required by the magazine was irksome to a man who had an unconquerable repugnance to all periodical labor.

In 1813 Francis Jeffrey made a visit to the United States.  Henry Brevoort, who was then in London, wrote an anxious letter to Irving to impress him with the necessity of making much of Mr. Jeffrey.  “It is essential,” he says,—­“that Jeffrey may imbibe a just estimate of the United States and its inhabitants; he goes out strongly biased in our favor, and the influence of his good opinion upon his return to this country will go far to efface the