Produced by Sankar Viswanathan and The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) The Riverside Biographical Series NUMBER 11 [Illustration: Washington Irving] WASHINGTON IRVING BY HENRY W. BOYNTON BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY The Riverside Press, Cambridge 1901 COPYRIGHT, 1901, BY HENRY W. BOYNTON * * * * * CONTENTS CHAP. PAGE I. EARLY YEARS AND SURROUNDINGS 1 II. MAN ABOUT TOWN 16 III. MAN OF LETTERS--FIRST PERIOD 35 IV. MAN OF LETTERS--SECOND PERIOD 59 V. A PUBLIC CHARACTER 81 VI. THE MAN HIMSELF 105 * * * * * WASHINGTON IRVING I EARLY YEARS AND SURROUNDINGS Irving's name stands as the first landmark in American letters. No other American writer has won the same sort of recognition abroad or esteem at home as became his early in life. And he has lost very little ground, so far as we can judge by the appeal to figures. The copyright on his works ran out long since, and a great many editions of Irving, cheap and costly, complete and incomplete, have been issued from many sources. Yet his original publishers are now selling, year by year, more of his books than ever before. There is little doubt that his work is still widely read, and read not because it is prescribed, but because it gives pleasure; not as the product of a "standard author," but as the expression of a rich and engaging personality, which has written itself like an indorsement across the face of a young nation's literature. It is that of a man so sensitive that the scornful finger of a child might have left him sleepless; so kindly that nobody ever applied to him in vain for sympathy; so modest that the smallest praise embarrassed him. His manner and tastes were simple and unassuming. He had no great passions; the brother was stronger in him than the lover. To these qualities, which might by themselves belong to ineffectiveness, he added courage, firmness, magnanimity. It was because he was such a man, and because what he was shines on every page he wrote, that the world still warms to him.