Washington Irving and the Knickerbocker Group



186           Public Lectures

concluded with an account of Peter Stuyvesant, the whole a
burlesque of a prosaic erudite history of the city.

Sir Walter Scott, who seems to have read everything,
compared the Knickerbocker history favorably with Swift’s
satires. One Swiftian trait it has not, corrosiveness, for
Irving could not hate. The Knickerbocker history was Irv-
ing’s second book, his first, an Addisonian periodical, the
Salamagundi papers, in which his brother William and his
friend, Paulding, collaborated, mild satire on society at
Ballston Spa, New Yorkers’ fashionable resort. Irving had
not finished Knickerbocker when Matilda Hoffman died in
her eighteenth year.

Gingerly one touches on this romance of Irving’s life.
Gingerly because most writers follow Charles Dudley War-
ner, who in turn followed Irving’s first biographer, his
nephew Pierre Irving, in sentimentalizing this romance, rep-
resenting it as Irving’s only romance with references to a
locked box, a miniature, a tress of hair, a Bible and a prayer
book, Matilda’s, which Irving carried with him on his ex-
tensive journeyings. But it seems established that in middle
life he contemplated, without results, marriage with an Eng-
lish girl, Emily Foster. The primary romance of Washing-
ton Irving needs no embellishment, is sufficiently sacred in
its reality. Like Robert Browning, Irving had friends among
women as well as among men, but, like Browning, one
woman dominated his thoughts while she lived, his memory
when she was dead. He said, speaking of Matilda :

I was naturally susceptible and tried to form other attach-
ments, but my heart would not hold on; it would continue to
recur to what it had lost,

to which he added that he dreamed of Matilda “incessantly”
(his own word).

After the Knickerbocker history was issued in 1809 he



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