for the innocent enjoyment which is intensified by such a multitude of pleasant associations. Let us think, at last, as we reverse the exhausted bowl, and replace it in its nook, of the fine monitory symbolism that resides in the familiar implement, as expressed in an ancient distich:—
"Mens ignis, tubulus corpus mihi, vitaque fumus,
Herba penus, clavus fata, suprema cinis:"
which has been thus quaintly Englished:—
"Of lordly man how humbling is the type,
A fleeting shadow, a tobacco-pipe,
His mind, the fire; his frame, the tube of clay;
His breath, the smoke thus idly puff'd away;
His food, the herb that fills the hollow bowl;
Death is the stopper; ashes end the whole."
Washington Irving never married. He was engaged early in life to a young lady of rare beauty and worth. She died; and the bereaved man thenceforth contented himself with the memory of his vanished love, sought no other bride, and lived for literature, friendship and nature. His latter years,—after long sojourn in the storied countries of the elder world,—were passed at his delightful residence, "Sunnyside," on the banks of the Hudson river, about twenty-five miles from the city of New York. Here he was visited by Frederika Bremer, who has left us a charming description of the man and his home; and here he died suddenly of heart-disease, November 28th, 1860, in the seventy-seventh year of his age.
Thackeray, whom the death of Irving inspired with one of the best of his Roundabout Papers, styles him the "Goldsmith of our time," associating him with Macaulay as our "Gibbon." There is an obituary notice of him in the Gentleman's Magazine, vol. liii. p. 82; there is his Life and Letters, by his nephew, the Rev. Pierre E. Irving (H. G. Bohn, 1862-3, 4 vols. 8vo); there is a Transatlantic volume, Irvingiana, a Memorial of Washington Irving, New York, 1860, 4to; and there is an article in the new edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, "Washington Irving," from the pen of Mr. Richard Garnett, written with characteristic taste, fulness of knowledge, and delicacy of judgment.
I ought not, even in this imperfect memoir, to omit to state that it was Washington Irving, who, in 1830, was selected with Henry Hallam, to receive one of the two fifty-guinea gold medals of the Royal Society of Literature, instituted by George IV., for eminence in historical composition. He also received the honorary degree of D.C.L., from the University of Oxford.
XIX.—THE LORD BROUGHAM AND VAUX.
The ordinary intellect that seeks repose in inactivity stands amazed at the productiveness of those rarer minds which find their needful rest in change of action. It is the fallowness of land compared with the rotation of crops; where it is to a difference of procedure, no less than to the
