Category: Biographies
WASHINGTON IRVING, the first biography published in the American Men of Letters Series, came out in December, 1881. It was an expansion of a biographical and critical sketch prefixed to the first volume of a new edition of Irving's works which began to appear in 1880. It was e...
WASHINGTON IRVING, the first biography published in the American Men of Letters Series, came out in December, 1881. It was an expansion of a biographical and critical sketch pre...
2. Chapter 2It was during the French War, and while he was serving as a petty officer in an armed packet plying between Falmouth and New York, that he met Sarah Sanders, a beautiful girl, t...
3. Chapter 3These social worthies had jolly suppers at the humble taverns of the city, and wilder revelries in an old country house on the Passaic, which is celebrated in the “Salmagundi” p...
4. Chapter 4This memorandum, it subsequently appeared, was a letter, or a transcript of it, addressed to a married lady, Mrs. Foster, in which the story of his early love was related, in re...
5. Chapter 5After three months of indolent enjoyment in the winter and spring of 1811, Irving is complaining to Brevoort in June of the enervation of his social life: “I do want most deplor...
6. Chapter 6“At the hotel where we put up [he writes] we had a most singular and whimsical assemblage of beings. I don't know whether you were ever at an English watering-place, but if you...
7. Chapter 7Irving passed five years in England. Once recognized by the literary world, whatever was best in the society of letters and of fashion was open to him. He was a welcome guest in...
8. Chapter 8“As I live in the neighborhood of the library of the Jesuits' College of St. Isidoro, I pass most of my mornings there. You cannot think what a delight I feel in passing through...
9. Chapter 9Our author was far from idle. Indeed, he could not afford to be. Although he had received considerable sums from his books, and perhaps enough for his own simple wants, the resp...
10. Chapter 10“After passing through various chambers of the palace, now silent and sombre, but which I had traversed in former days, on grand court occasions in the time of Ferdinand VII, wh...
11. Chapter 11“The renowned Wouter (or Walter Van Twiller) was descended from a long line of Dutch burgomasters, who had successively dozed away their lives, and grown fat upon the bench of m...
12. Chapter 12“And now commenced the horrid din, the desperate struggle, the maddening ferocity, the frantic desperation, the confusion and self-abandonment of war. Dutchman and Swede comming...
13. Chapter 13“'Their commander, the Lord Scales, was an accomplished cavalier, of gracious and noble presence and fair speech; it was a marvel to see so much courtesy in a knight brought up...
14. Chapter 14The charm of the “Alhambra” is largely in the leisurely, loitering, dreamy spirit in which the temporary American resident of the ancient palace-fortress entered into its molder...
15. Chapter 15“By degrees his attention was attracted to a neighbor equally solitary with himself. This was a tall soldier, of a stern aspect and grizzled beard, who seemed posted as a sentry...
16. Chapter 16Irving was always the literary man; he had the habits, the idiosyncrasies, of his small genus. I mean that he regarded life not from the philanthropic, the economic, the politic...