into excellent English, but also the results of other studies which were, for him, exceptionally thorough. Modern criticism has been very busy with the life of Columbus since Irving wrote. The narratives of Ferdinand Columbus and of Las Casas, upon which he largely relied, have been somewhat discredited, and the character of the discoverer himself has not altogether escaped. Nor can it be denied that Irving’s lively fancy led him to embellish his account of certain dramatic passages in the life of Columbus with details which, while not improbable in themselves, are unsupported by documentary or other direct evidence. But the attempt of some subsequent writers, and notably of Irving’s countryman Winsor, to discredit him on that account has been carried beyond reason. Irving’s narrative of facts in the “Columbus” is conscientiously based upon primary sources; and his judgments, though occasionally over-indulgent of his hero, are in general sound. Columbus may not have been in all respects such a man as Irving represents him, but it is, at least, ennobling for the reader to believe that he was such a man. In writing his “Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada from the MSS. of Fray Antonio Agapida,” Irving recurred to a device which he had already employed with success. Fray Antonio is no less mythical than the “small elderly gentleman, dressed in an old black coat and cocked hat, by the name of Knickerbocker,” who was supposed to have left behind him, in his rooms at the Independent Columbian Hotel, that “very curious kind of a written book in his own handwriting” which, being presently printed “to pay off the bill for his board and lodging,” brought to its real author his first popularity. Nor can the “Granada” lay much stronger claim to be considered authentic history than Irving’s burlesque account of New York “from the beginning of the world to the end of the Dutch dynasty.” It is not, of course, predominantly humorous; but it is, in reality, merely a historical romance, adorned with bits from old chroniclers. In it Irving gave his imagination loose rein; and for that reason it is the most readable of his Spanish books. His writings upon American history are less sympathetic. The matter of “Captain Bonneville” was fine in its facts, but it contained too little of the last to stimulate Irving’s romantic imagination, and it remained cold and almost crude under his shaping hand. In the founding of the settlement by which a butcher’s boy from Waldorf hoped to seize the mighty river of the West, there was also the stuff “of Romance,” and Irving’s “Astoria, or Anecdotes of Enterprise beyond the Rocky Mountains,” should transport the reader to the continuous woods Where rolls the Oregon, and hears no sound Save his own dashings.