all the martyrs of Grub Street [he exclaims], I ’d sooner live in a garret, and starve into the bargain, than follow so sordid, dusty, and soul-killing a way of life, though certain it would make me as rich as old Croesus, or John Jacob Astor himself!” The sparkle of society was no more agreeable to him than the rattle of cutlery.  “I have scarcely [he writes] seen anything of the ——­s since your departure; business and an amazing want of inclination have kept me from their threshold.  Jim, that sly poacher, however, prowls about there, and vitrifies his heart by the furnace of their charms.  I accompanied him there on Sunday evening last, and found the Lads and Miss Knox with them.  S——­was in great spirits, and played the sparkler with such great success as to silence the whole of us excepting Jim, who was the agreeable rattle of the evening.  God defend me from such vivacity as hers, in future,—­such smart speeches without meaning, such bubble and squeak nonsense!  I ’d as lieve stand by a frying-pan for an hour and listen to the cooking of apple fritters.  After two hours’ dead silence and suffering on my part I made out to drag him off, and did not stop running until I was a mile from the house.”  Irving gives his correspondent graphic pictures of the social warfare in which he was engaged, the “host of rascally little tea-parties” in which he was entangled; and some of his portraits of the “divinities,” the “blossoms,” and the beauties of that day would make the subjects of them flutter with surprise in the churchyards where they lie.  The writer was sated with the “tedious commonplace of fashionable society,” and languishing to return to his books and his pen.

In March, 18122, in the shadow of the war and the depression of business, Irving was getting out a new edition of the “Knickerbocker,” which Inskeep was to publish, agreeing to pay $1200 at six months for an edition of fifteen hundred.  The modern publisher had not then arisen and acquired a proprietary right in the brains of the country, and the author made his bargains like an independent being who owned himself.

Irving’s letters of this period are full of the gossip of the town and the matrimonial fate of his acquaintances.  The fascinating Mary Fairlie is at length married to Cooper, the tragedian, with the opposition of her parents, after a dismal courtship and a cloudy prospect of happiness.  Goodhue is engaged to Miss Clarkson, the sister to the pretty one.  The engagement suddenly took place as they walked from church on Christmas Day, and report says “the action was shorter than any of our naval victories, for the lady struck on the first broadside.”  The war colored all social life and conversation.  “This war [the letter is to Brevoort, who is in Europe] has completely changed the face of things here.  You would scarcely recognize our old peaceful city.  Nothing is talked of but armies, navies, battles, etc.”  The same phenomenon was witnessed then that was observed in the war for