He had time also to revise his works.  It is perhaps worthy of note that for several years, while he was at the height of his popularity, his books had very little sale.  From 1842 to 1848 they were out of print; with the exception of some stray copies of a cheap Philadelphia edition, and a Paris collection (a volume of this, at my hand, is one of a series entitled a “Collection of Ancient and Modern British Authors"), they were not to be found.  The Philadelphia publishers did not think there was sufficient demand to warrant a new edition.  Mr. Irving and his friends judged the market more wisely, and a young New York publisher offered to assume the responsibility.  This was Mr. George P. Putnam.  The event justified his sagacity and his liberal enterprise.  From July, 1848, to November, 1859, the author received on his copyright over eighty-eight thousand dollars.  And it should be added that the relations between author and publisher, both in prosperity and in times of business disaster, reflect the highest credit upon both.  If the like relations always obtained, we should not have to say, “May the Lord pity the authors in this world, and the publishers in the next.”

I have outlined the life of Washington Irving in vain, if we have not already come to a tolerably clear conception of the character of the man and of his books.  If I were to follow his literary method exactly, I should do nothing more.  The idiosyncrasies of the man are the strength and weakness of his works.  I do not know any other author whose writings so perfectly reproduce his character, or whose character may be more certainly measured by his writings.  His character is perfectly transparent:  his predominant traits were humor and sentiment; his temperament was gay with a dash of melancholy; his inner life and his mental operations were the reverse of complex, and his literary method is simple.  He felt his subject, and he expressed his conception not so much by direct statement or description as by almost imperceptible touches and shadings here and there, by a diffused tone and color, with very little show of analysis.  Perhaps it is a sufficient definition to say that his method was the sympathetic.  In the end the reader is put in possession of the luminous and complete idea upon which the author has been brooding, though he may not be able to say exactly how the impression has been conveyed to him; and I doubt if the author could have explained his sympathetic process.  He certainly would have lacked precision in any philosophical or metaphysical theme, and when, in his letters, he touches upon politics, there is a little vagueness of definition that indicates want of mental grip in that direction.  But in the region of feeling his genius is sufficient to his purpose; either when that purpose is a highly creative one, as in the character and achievements of his Dutch heroes, or merely that of portraiture, as in the “Columbus” and the “Washington.”  The analysis of a nature so simple and a character so transparent as Irving’s, who lived in the sunlight and had no envelope of mystery, has not the fascination that attaches to Hawthorne.