THE SKETCH BOOK GROUP.--The only one of his productions to which Irving gave the name of _The Sketch Book_ was finished in 1820, the year in which Scott's _Ivanhoe_, Keats's _Eve of St. Agnes_, and Shelley's _Prometheus Unbound_ appeared. Of the same general order as _The Sketch Book_ are Irving's _Bracebridge Hall_ (1822) and _Tales of a Traveller_ (1824). These volumes all contain short stories, essays, or sketches, many of which are suggestive of Addison's _Spectator_. _The Sketch Book_ is the most famous of Irving's works of this class. While it contains some excellent essays or descriptions, such as those entitled _Westminster Abbey_ and _Stratford-on-Avon_, the book lives to-day because of two short stories, _Rip Van Winkle_ and _The Legend of Sleepy Hollow_. These were not equaled by Addison, and they have not been surpassed by any English writers of the nineteenth century. Both stories take their rise from the "Knickerbocker Legend," and they are thoroughly American in coloring and flavor, even if they did happen to be written in England. No story in our literature is better known than that of Rip Van Winkle watching Hendrick Hudson and his ghostly crew playing ninepins in the Catskill Mountains and quaffing the magic liquor which caused him to sleep for twenty years. [Illustration: ICHABOD CRANE] For nearly one hundred years Ichabod Crane's courtship of Katrina Van Tassel, in _The Legend of Sleepy Hollow_, has continued to amuse its readers. The Indian summer haze is still resting on Sleepy Hollow, our American Utopia, where we can hear the quail whistling, see the brook bubbling along among alders and dwarf willows, over which amber clouds float forever in the sky; where the fragrant buckwheat fields breathe the odor of the beehive; where the slapjacks are "well buttered and garnished with honey or treacle, by the delicate little dimpled hand of Katrina Van Tassel," where a greeting awaits us from the sucking pigs already roasted and stuffed with pudding; where the very tea tables of the Dutch housewives welcome us with loads of crisp crumbling crullers, honey cakes, and "the whole family of cakes," surrounded by pies, preserves, roast chicken, bowls of cream, all invested with a halo from the spout of the motherly Dutch teapot. _The Alhambra_, a book of tales of the old Moorish palace in Granada, Spain, has been aptly termed "The Spanish Sketch Book." This has preserved the romance of departed Moorish glory almost as effectively as the Knickerbocker sketches and stories have invested the early Dutch settlers of New York with something like Homeric immortality. A traveler in Spain writes of _The Alhambra_: "Not Ford, nor Murray, nor Hare has been able to replace it. The tourist reads it within the walls it commemorates as conscientiously as the devout read Ruskin in Florence." [Footnote: Introduction to Pennell's illustrated edition of _The Alhambra_.]