wise and dignified is the tone of his short chapter called "English Writers on America"; and this sentence from it might long have served in our days of fairer fame as a popular motto: "We have but to live on, and every day we live a whole volume of refutation." His friendship with Scott, also, was a delightful addition to the amenities of literature, and shall remain a goodly and refreshing memory to us always. Yet what he accomplished in this way for American literature at large, Irving compensated for with some loss of his own dignity. It cannot be denied that the success of "The Sketch-Book" led to an overdoing of his part in "Bracebridge Hall." "Salmagundi" was the first step in the path of palpable imitation of Addison's "Spectator"; in "The Sketch-Book," though taking some charming departures, the writer made a more refined attempt to produce the same order of effects so perfectly attained by the suave Queen Anne master; and in "Bracebridge Hall" the recollection of the Sir Roger de Coverley papers becomes positively annoying. It is not that the style of Addison is precisely reproduced, of course, but the general resemblance in manner is as close as it could well have been without direct and conscious copying, the memory of Addisonian methods is too apparent. Irving's real genius, which occasionally in his other writings emits delicious flashes, does not often assert itself in this work; and though he has the knack of using the dry point of Addison's humor, he doesn't achieve what etchers call "the burr" that ought to result from its use. Addison, too, stings his lines in with true aquafortis precision, and Irving's sketches are to his as pen-and-ink drawing to the real etching. But it was not only this lack of literary independence that belittled Irving's dignity. He had become so well satisfied with his post of mediator between the writers of the two nations, that it became paramount with him to preserve the good-will he had won in England, and this appears in the cautious and _almost_ obsequious mien of "Bracebridge." One may trace it also, with amused pain, in his correspondence with Paulding,--honest, pathetic Paulding, a rabid miso-Briton who burned to write something truly American, and couldn't; whom Drake laughingly hails as "The bard of the backwoods, The poet of cabbages, log-huts, and gin."