For Washington himself, Irving has only admiration, which, however, he is able to express without fulsome panegyric. He dwells on the great leader’s magnanimity, on his evenness of temper, his infinite patience, his freedom from trace of vanity, self-interest, or sectional prejudice, his confidence in the justness of the cause, and his trust in Providence, a trust which faltered least when circumstances were most adverse. Irving admired unstintedly the warrior who could hold in check trained and seasoned European soldiers with ‘an apparently undisciplined rabble,’ the ‘American Fabius’ who, when the time was ripe, was found to possess ‘enterprise as well as circumspection, energy as well as endurance.’ The personal side of the biography is not neglected, but no emphasis is laid on particulars of costume, manners, speech, what Washington ate and drank, and said about his neighbors. Irving could have had little sympathy with the modern rage for knowing the size of a great man’s collar and the number of his footgear. The passion for such details is legitimate, but it is a passion which needs to be firmly controlled. In brief, throughout the work emphasis is laid where emphasis belongs, on the character of Washington, who was the soul of the Revolutionary War, and then on the moral grandeur of that great struggle for human rights. * * * * * A historian of American literature says: ‘Irving had no message.’ He was not indeed enslaved by a theory literary or political; neither was he passionate for some reform and convinced that his particular reform was paramount. But he who gave to the world a series of writings which, in addition to being exquisite examples of literary art, are instinct with humor, brotherly kindness, and patriotism, can hardly be said not to have had a message. Irving rendered an immense service to the biographical study of history. Columbus, Mahomet, the princes and warriors of the Holy War, are made real to us. Nor is this all. His books help to counteract that tendency of the times to make history a recondite science. History cannot be confined to the historians and erudite readers alone. Said Freeman to his Oxford audience one day: ‘Has anybody read the essay on Race and Language in the third series of my Historical Essays? It is very stiff reading, so perhaps nobody has.’ And one suspects that Freeman rejoiced a little to think it was ‘stiff reading.’ Nevertheless the public insists on its right to know the main facts. And as Leslie Stephen says, ‘the main facts are pretty well ascertained. Darnley was blown up, whoever supplied the powder, and the Spanish Armada certainly came somehow to grief.’ That man of letters is a benefactor who, like Irving, can give his audience the main facts, expressed in terms which make history more readable even than romance.