Yet the book reflected the political passions which marked the period of the Embargo. Besides the burlesque, the “History” contained satire; and perhaps its most marked trait was the good-nature which, at a time when bitterness was universal in politics, saved Irving’s political satire from malignity. Irving meant that no one should mistake the character of the universal genius, Governor Wilhelmus Kieft, surnamed the Testy, who as a youth had made many curious investigations into the nature and operations of windmills, and who came well-nigh being smothered in a slough of unintelligible learning,--“a fearful peril, from the effects of which he never perfectly recovered.” “No sooner had this bustling little man been blown by a whiff of fortune into the seat of government, than he called together his council and delivered a very animated speech on the affairs of the government; ... and here he soon worked himself into a fearful rage against the Yankees, whom he compared to the Gauls who desolated Rome, and to the Goths and Vandals who overran the fairest plains of Europe.... Having thus artfully wrought up his tale of terror to a climax, he assumed a self-satisfied look, and declared with a nod of knowing import that he had taken measures to put a final stop to these encroachments,--that he had been obliged to have recourse to a dreadful engine of warfare, lately invented, awful in its effects but authorized by direful necessity; in a word, he was resolved to conquer the Yankees--by Proclamation.” Washington Irving’s political relations were those commonly known as Burrite, through his brother Peter, who edited in Burr’s interest the “Morning Chronicle.” Antipathy to Jefferson was a natural result, and Irving’s satire on the President was the more interesting because the subject offered temptations for ill-tempered sarcasm such as spoiled Federalist humor. The Knickerbocker sketch of Jefferson was worth comparing with Federalist modes of expressing the same ideas:-- “The great defect of Wilhelmus Kieft’s policy was that though no man could be more ready to stand forth in an hour of emergency, yet he was so intent upon guarding the national pocket that he suffered the enemy to break its head.... All this was a remote consequence of his education at the Hague; where, having acquired a smattering of knowledge, he was ever a great conner of indexes, continually dipping into books without ever studying to the bottom of any subject, so that he had the scum of all kinds of authors fermenting in his pericranium. In some of these titlepage researches he unluckily stumbled over a grand political _cabalistic word_, which with his customary facility he immediately incorporated into his great scheme of government, to the irretrievable injury and delusion of the honest province of Nieuw Nederlands, and the eternal misleading of all experimental rulers.”