The fame of Irving becomes the more resplendent when we remember that he was the first great pioneer in American letters. Franklin was the only man of any note who had preceded him, and his writings were confined to a much smaller scope. It was while Bryon and Scott were leaders of English letters that Irving, without the advantage of a college education, went to England and met and associated with the greatest of English authors, issued several of his books and made good his own title to an honorable position in literature among them, not only leaving his impress upon English society but he created an illustrious following among her authors that any man should be proud of; for it is from Irving’s “Sketch Book” that the revival of Christmas feasts was inaugurated, which Dickens afterwards took up and pursued to further lengths, making Irving his model in more ways than is generally supposed. Sir Walter Scott and Thackeray were his friends and admirers. The latter calls Irving the “first ambassador whom the new world of letters sent to the old.” At home Irving’s influence was even greater. His tales like “Rip Van Winkle” and its fellows became the first fruits of an abundant harvest, rich in local flavor, which later American story-tellers like Hawthorne, Poe, Bret Harte and Cable, all in their own way, following in his footsteps, have gathered after him. The genius of Irving was not of that stalwart, rugged character which conquered by admiration. It rather won its way softly and by the aid of genial sentiment, human sympathy and pungent humor. His heart was quick to catch the sentiment, and his imagination as quick to follow the thread of an incident to its most charming conclusion. He it was who peopled the green nooks of “Sleepy Hollow” and the rocky crags of the Catskills, describing landscape and character with a charm which no later American writer has surpassed; and it was his delicate subtlety and keen insight which called into being in his “Knickerbocker’s History” a civilization, giving to the legend the substance of truth, and presenting a fiction so that it passed for a fact. This is a feat which very few authors have accomplished. That Irving might have been a successful historian is evinced by his “Life of Columbus” and “Life of Washington,” in which his exhaustive inquiry into details and his treatment of the same leave nothing new in the lives of these great men to be told; but it is on his descriptive essays, such as we find in his “Sketch Book,” “The Alhambra” and “Knickerbocker’s History,” that his title to enduring fame most securely rests. The poet, Lowell, in his “Fable for Critics,” thus happily characterizes Washington Irving: