184 Public Lectures
friend he is nothing.” Irving is a companion, a loving com-
panion, a sociable friend. The time to read him is in the
evening, in an easy chair, before an open fire, the curtains
drawn, the boom of street traffic hushed, in the quietness of
home. For he has one quality in common with Dickens, cozi-
ness. Probably modern publishers would reject his manu-
scripts as insufficiently peptic. But for decades the pub-
lishers, including illustrious John Murray, paid handsomely
for his writings and seldom lost anything by their transac-
tion, for the public bought and loved the books.
Irvingwas born April 3, 1783, in New York, youngest of a
large family, the father, William, a Scotch Presbyterian
deacon; the mother, Sarah, grand-daughter of an English
curate, a distinction for Sarah, when all English curates were
supposed to be aristocrats. That was before Anthony
Trollope had written about them. William was a merchant
in New York, plausible occupation for the parent of a child
destined to write of the foremost merchant of them all,
John Jacob Astor. By 1783 finis had been written to the
Revolutionary War. The sign in front of Nicholas Vedder’s
inn up in the Catskills bore a new effigy, that of George
Washington instead of King George, even as the child, grown
man, was to relate it in a familiar quaint classic, Rip Van
Winkle. Following a tradition old and not obsolete, the
parents gave the child the name of the man most famous
in the new nation, Washington.
Few episodes in American literary history are better
known than that of the Scotch nurse Lizzie following Gen-
eral Washington into a shop and saying, “Please your
Honor, here’s a bairn was named after you,” whereupon the
hero placed a hand upon the child’s head and murmured
something (he was shy with strange children). Triumphant
Lizzie reported it as a “blessing.” There are slight varia-