Irving was the last and greatest of the Addisonians. His boyish letters, signed "Jonathan Oldstyle," contributed in 1802 to his brother's newspaper, the _Morning Chronicle_, were, like Franklin's _Busybody_, close imitations of the _Spectator_. To the same family belonged his _Salmagundi_ papers, 1807, a series of town-satires on New York society, written in conjunction with his brother William and with James K. Paulding. The little tales, essays, and sketches which compose the _Sketch Book_ were written in England, and published in America, in periodical numbers, in 1819-20. In this, which is in some respects his best book, he still maintained that attitude of observation and spectatorship taught him by Addison. The volume had a motto taken from Burton: "I have no wife nor children, good or bad, to provide for--a mere spectator of other men's fortunes," etc.; and "The Author's Account of Himself," began in true Addisonian fashion: "I was always fond of visiting new scenes and observing strange characters and manners." But though never violently "American," like some later writers who have consciously sought to throw off the trammels of English tradition, Irving was in a real way original. His most distinct addition to our national literature was in his creation of what has been called "the Knickerbocker legend." He was the first to make use, for literary purposes, of the old Dutch traditions which clustered about the romantic scenery of the Hudson. Colonel T. W. Higginson, in his _History of the United States_, tells how "Mrs. Josiah Quincy, sailing up that river in 1786, when Irving was a child three years old, records that the captain of the sloop had a legend, either supernatural or traditional, for every scene, 'and not a mountain reared its head unconnected with some marvelous story.'" The material thus at hand Irving shaped into his _Knickerbocker's History of New York_, into the immortal story of _Rip Van Winkle_ and the _Legend of Sleepy Hollow_ (both published in the _Sketch Book_), and into later additions to the same realm of fiction, such as _Dolph Heyliger_ in _Bracebridge Hall_, the _Money Diggers_, _Wolfert Webber_, and _Kidd the Pirate_, in the _Tales of a Traveler_, and some of the miscellanies from the _Knickerbocker Magazine_, collected into a volume, in 1855, under the title of _Wolfert's Roost_.