faded humor and fancy of the past generation.  But I found not only a sprightly humor and vivacity which are modern, but a truth to Italian local color that is very rare in any writer foreign to the soil.  As to America, I do not know what can be more characteristically American than the Knickerbocker, the Hudson River tales, the sketches of life and adventure in the far West.  But underneath all this diversity there is one constant quality,—­the flavor of the author.  Open by chance and read almost anywhere in his score of books,—­it may be the “Tour on the Prairies,” the familiar dream of the Alhambra, or the narratives of the brilliant exploits of New World explorers; surrender yourself to the flowing current of his transparent style, and you are conscious of a beguilement which is the crowning excellence of all lighter literature, for which we have no word but “charm.”

The consensus of opinion about Irving in England and America for thirty years was very remarkable.  He had a universal popularity rarely enjoyed by any writer.  England returned him to America medaled by the king, honored by the university which is chary of its favors, followed by the applause of the whole English people.  In English households, in drawing-rooms of the metropolis, in political circles no less than among the literary coteries, in the best reviews, and in the popular newspapers the opinion of him was pretty much the same.  And even in the lapse of time and the change of literary fashion authors so unlike as Byron and Dickens were equally warm in admiration of him.  To the English indorsement America added her own enthusiasm, which was as universal.  His readers were the million, and all his readers were admirers.  Even American statesmen, who feed their minds on food we know not of, read Irving.  It is true that the uncritical opinion of New York was never exactly reechoed in the cool recesses of Boston culture; but the magnates of the “North American Review” gave him their meed of cordial praise.  The country at large put him on a pinnacle.  If you attempt to account for the position he occupied by his character, which won the love of all men, it must be remembered that the quality which won this, whatever its value, pervades his books also.

And yet it must be said that the total impression left upon the mind by the man and his works is not that of the greatest intellectual force.  I have no doubt that this was the impression he made upon his ablest contemporaries.  And this fact, when I consider the effect the man produced, makes the study of him all the more interesting.  As an intellectual personality he makes no such impression, for instance, as Carlyle, or a dozen other writers now living who could be named.  The incisive critical faculty was almost entirely wanting in him.  He had neither the power nor the disposition to cut his way transversely across popular opinion and prejudice that Ruskin has, nor to draw around him disciples equally well pleased to see him fiercely demolish to-day what they had delighted to see him set up yesterday as eternal.  He evoked neither violent partisanship nor violent opposition.  He was an extremely sensitive man, and if he had been capable of creating a conflict, he would only have been miserable in it.  The play of his mind depended upon the sunshine of approval.  And all this shows a certain want of intellectual virility.