NEXT to Addison himself, Washington Irving is the most thorough master of Addison’s prose style. Indeed, it is not a paradox to say that at times he writes the Addisonian essay better than Addison himself, for he has a delicacy of touch in portrait drawing and character sketching which he does not lose even when he is most serious; while Addison’s tender humor is far from being a characteristic of all his Spectator essays. This in Addison is not an indication of inferiority, but an incident of that solidity of judgment and loftiness of thought which are as characteristic of him at his very best as parody and burlesque are of Irving when he throws off the restraints of his classical training. Addison could not have written the Knickerbocker “History of New York,” nor could Irving have written Addison’s essay “On the Message of the Stars” in the Spectator of August 22d, 1712. We can see, too, that Irving’s best characters in “Bracebridge Hall” are the near relations of Sir Roger de Coverley’s family and friends. But if Irving takes pleasure in openly imitating the manner of the Spectator, he succeeds to an eminent degree in doing what no one else has been able to do at all,—in giving new vitality and a distinct individuality to everything he borrows from the masters of Queen Anne’s reign.

  Irving differs from the Spectator school much more in character than in style. To them the essay was to be the means of reforming a depraved generation. They had a deep consciousness of a serious mission, and as a result they often cease to amuse in their anxiety to instruct. Irving has little of the reformer in him. He saw the inconsistencies and incongruities of human character and of the history which grows out of them; but instead of preaching, he laughed. He is, by nature a story-teller rather than a “Vates,” as Addison was, and all his essays tend to become stories. In the “Alhambra,” the essay and the tale are so blended that it is impossible to separate them. So in his masterpieces, “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” Irving, though he is still a pupil of Addison, is no longer an essayist at all, but a story-teller, illustrating a highly developed faculty of inventing plots of which Addison shows only a rudimentary trace. Charming as he is in essay writing, Irving’s great strength lies in easy narrative. This he understood so thoroughly that when his extensive writings are analyzed they are found to be nearly all narrative. Even his lightest sketches have a tendency to develop a plot. His portraits will not stay upon his easel. They “come to life,” step down and begin to act in the most animated manner before they are more than half drawn. In this he resembles Hawthorne, and it is this chiefly which differentiates him from the “wits” of Queen Anne’s reign. We believe in Sir Roger de Coverley—as the most admirable literary portrait ever painted. But we accept Rip Van Winkle, with all his improbabilities, as one of the high realities of a supernatural world,—not a portrait, but an absolute illogical necessity, who, when once created by Irving, is as much alive as we are. What this means we can the better realize by remembering that the difficulty of presenting Sir Roger on the stage would be as insuperable as that of keeping Rip Van Winkle off.

  Irving was born at New York, April 3d, 1783. His father, William Irving, was an Englishman, and Irving at early maturity had none of the prejudice against English manners and institutions which often characterized young Americans of that time. In 1804, when he went abroad for two years for his health, he received the first impulse towards a mode of writing in which he excels,—that of describing the customs of other countries in such sketches and essays as those of “Bracebridge Hall” and the “Alhambra.” In 1815 he went abroad again, and “Bracebridge Hall,” which appeared seven years later, made him a great favorite with the aristocratic party in England. His Knickerbocker “History of New York,” which appeared in 1809, had made him famous in America. “The Sketch Book” appeared in parts in 1819, and was published in book form in 1820. Until his death, November 28th, 1859, he continued to write one volume after another of sketches, biographies, and histories with hardly a dull line in them. It is not necessary and it would be ungrateful to complain that he lacks depth, while no doubt it is true that no other author of his generation has written so voluminously and so entertainingly on such a wide range of subjects.