him, and in 1834 his medical advisers recommended him to spend the winter in Madeira for the recovery of his health. But some of the oracular voices which found utterance in his church, had proclaimed it to be the will of God that he should go to Scotland and do a great work there; and accordingly he proceeded thither in defiance of the prohibition of his medical attendant, though scarcely able to walk through the room. He reached Glasgow completely exhausted, and there he died on the 8th of December, in the forty-third year of his age. He left a widow and three young children. In addition to the works already mentioned, he published a missionary "Oration" in 1824; an Introductory Essay to Bishop Horne's Commentary on the Psalms in 1826; "The Coming of the Messiah in Glory and Majesty, by Juan Josafah Ben Ezra, a converted Jew, translated from the Spanish," 1827; and "Sermons, Lectures, and Occasional Discourses," in 3 vols. in 1828. Edward Irving, with all his frailties, was a man of devout and earnest spirit, honest, simple-hearted, and bold as a lion. He had a vivid imagination and great powers of eloquence, and was both a profound and original, though not a sound thinker. "He strove," says his friend Carlyle, "with all the force that was in him to be a christian minister. He might have been so many things; not a speaker only, but a doer—the leader of hosts of men. For his head, when the fog Babylon had not obscured it, was of strong, far-searching insight. His very enthusiasm was sanguine, not atrabiliar; he was so loving, full of hope, so simple-hearted, and made all that approached him his. A giant force of activity was in the man: speculation was accident, not nature. But above all, be what he might, to be a reality was indispensable for him. . . . But for Irving I had never known what the communion of man with man means; his was the freest, brotherliest, bravest human soul mine ever came in contact with. I call him, on the whole, the best man I have ever, after trial enough, found in this world or hope to find."—J. T.
IRVING, Washington, one of the most pleasing and popular of American writers, was born at New York on the 3rd of April, 1783. He was of Scottish origin, his father belonging to a family of Irvings long settled in the Orkney Islands. The elder Irving became a prosperous merchant in New York, married an Englishwoman, and died when Washington was very young. Educated by his elder brothers, more than one of whom combined literary tastes with successful commercial or professional activity, he is described as a meditative and melancholy boy, debarred by ill-health from close application to study or business. The earliest of his recorded contributions to literature were made when he was nineteen, and consisted of papers of dramatic criticism, light sketches of men and manners in New York, &c., published in the form of letters, and under the pseudonym of "Jonathan Oldstyle, Gent.," in the New York Morning Chronicle, a democratic journal edited by his brother Peter. This was in 1802, and in 1803 he was induced to proceed to the south of Europe, symptoms of pulmonary disease having shown themselves. After a tour in Italy, &c., he paid a visit to England, returning home in 1806, when he resumed his legal studies, and was admitted to the bar. He does not seem to have ever practised as a lawyer. In 1807 appeared at New York a fortnightly magazine, "Salmagundi, or the whim-whams of Launcelot Langstaff," in which Irving was the principal writer of prose, his brother William contributing much of the poetry. Informed by Irving's humour and vivacity, "Salmagundi" was very popular, but its existence was closed with the twentieth number, owing, it is said, to a dispute between the conductors and the publisher. In 1809 Irving published his first book, the "History of New York, by Diedrich Knickerbocker," the imaginary surname which, made famous by him, he lived to see eagerly bestowed on commodities the most multifarious. It was originally planned in conjunction with his brother Peter, and was to have parodied the matter and manner of a local hand-book, a Picture of New York, long since forgotten. With Peter Irving's departure for Europe, however, this limited scheme was abandoned, and in Washington's hands the work assumed its present form. Its publication was heralded by mystifying paragraphs in the newspapers; and so delicate was the all-pervading irony of the book, that it was accepted by some as an authentic chronicle of New York under the Dutch régime, one the memory of which had faded away in the empire city. With the reading public of the States, the skill of the delineation and the exquisite humour displayed made "Knickerbocker" an immediate favourite. Its fame spread to Britain, where Sir Walter Scott was among its earliest and warmest admirers—a circumstance which afterwards proved of considerable importance to its author. Soon after the publication of "Knickerbocker," Irving was admitted a partner in the thriving commercial house which his brothers had inherited from their father. This connection with commerce was not at first of an engrossing kind, for during the war between the United States and England, he not only acted, with the title of colonel, as aid-de-camp to the governor of New York, but edited a magazine, the Annalectic. With the peace Irving merged the soldier and the editor in the merchant, and proceeded to Liverpool to conduct the branch which "Irving Brothers" carried on there. It was as an opulent merchant who had written for amusement a delightful book, that during this residence in Britain Irving was first welcomed in 1817 by Sir Walter Scott to his own house—a visit which has been gracefully and genially chronicled in "Abbotsford," a sketch afterwards published by Irving in the "Crayon Miscellany." In the same year disaster overtook the firm to which Irving belonged, and he turned to literature not as a pastime, but as a resource. It was under this pressure that he wrote the first half of the "Sketch-book," which he transmitted to New York where it was published in instalments with the greatest success. Passages from it found their way into English literary journals, exciting attention and interest. Lockhart noticed the "Sketch-book" with generous appreciation in Blackwood's Magazine, and Irving resolved on an English edition. Its London publisher failed a month after its appearance. But meanwhile Irving had been in communication with Scott, who, as soon as he learned the new circumstances in which the author of "Knickerbocker" was placed, hastened to the rescue, and offered Irving the editorship of a periodical projected for publication in Edinburgh. Irving declined the offer on the plea of constitutional unfitness for the post, but Scott did not relax in his exertions to befriend the American author. At his request the late John Murray, by whom the "Sketch-book" had been originally refused, undertook the publication of a new English edition of it, which was issued in July, 1820, in two volumes, a new one being added to the volume which had appeared in London in the preceding February. The success of the "Sketchbook" was now immediate and immense. A new Addison, another Goldsmith, it was said, had appeared, blending the finest humour with delicate sentiment, and wielding a style of marvellous grace and sweetness. An American, Irving at once took rank with the foremost English writers in his own department; and for his next work, "Bracebridge Hall," the publisher of the "Sketch Book" offered a thousand guineas without seeing the MS. For the following twelve years Irving resided chiefly on the continent, visiting England only when about to publish a new work. In "Bracebridge Hall," composed principally at Paris and published in 1822, he effected on a more extended scale, and with more elaborateness and finish of execution, for the life of the old-fashioned English country house, what Addison had exquisitely but lightly and hurriedly essayed in the papers which describe the visit of Mr. Spectator to Sir Roger de Coverley. Perhaps in "Bracebridge Hall" what is finest and most peculiar in Irving's genius finds its most complete expression. "Tales of a Traveller"—a medley of sketches and fiction which succeeded "Bracebridge Hall," and was published in 1824—was much inferior to its predecessors; and the languor with which it was received warned Irving that he must seek out another field. It was in the winter of the following year, and while resident in the south of France, that he received the suggestion of Mr. Alexander Everett, then American minister in Spain, to proceed to Madrid, and translate into English the well-known work of Navarrete, secretary of the Royal Spanish Academy of History—the Coleccion de los Viages, &c.—then on the point of publication, and known to contain a mass of novel and interesting information respecting Columbus and the discovery of America. Irving at once proceeded to Madrid, and there, with Navarrete's work before him, and other new and ample material opening out around him, he resolved to write an original biography of Columbus. His "Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus" was published in 1828, and remains the standard work upon the subject. He supplemented it in 1831 by another devoted to the voyages and discoveries of the companions of Columbus. Nor were these the only literary fruits of his residence in Spain, to which were also due the
