two names of Irving and Goldsmith will be united in the recollection of the delightful hours which each has given to such a host of "happy human beings." There could not be a more admirable description of the influence of his own writings than Mr. Irving has given in his opening paragraph on Goldsmith. We will not forego the pleasure of quoting it entire. "There are few writers for whom the reader feels such personal kindness as for Oliver Goldsmith, for few have so eminently possessed the magic gift of identifying themselves with their writings. We read his character in every page, and grow into familiar intimacy with him as we read. The artless benevolence that beams throughout his works; the whimsical, yet amiable views of human life and human nature; the unforced humor, blending so happily with good feeling and good sense, and singularly dashed, at times, with a pleasing melancholy; even the very nature of his mellow, and flowing, and softly-tinted style-all seem to bespeak his moral as well as his intellectual qualities, and make us love the man at the same time that we admire the author. While the productions of writers of loftier pretension and more sounding names are suffered to moulder on our shelves, those of Goldsmith are cherished, and laid in our bosoms. We do not quote them with ostentation, but they mingle with our minds, sweeten our tempers, and harmonize our thoughts; they put us in good humor with ourselves and with the world, and, in so doing, they make us happier and better men.”

In an elaborate critique of some of Mr. Irving's works, contributed to the "Christian Review " in April, 1850, a skillful writer and ripe scholar, Prof. George W. Greene, holds this language about the "Life of Goldsmith:”—

If there is anybody of whom it could be said that it was his duty to write a life of Goldsmith, it is Washington Irving; and, often as we have had occasion to thank him for happy hours, we do not know that we ever felt so grateful to him for anything as for this. We have always loved Goldsmith, his poetry and his prose, and everything about him. There is not a poem in the language that we can go back to with the same zest

with which we open the "Traveller" or the "Deserted Village" for the five hundreth time; and we can never get through a ten minutes' speech without quoting the "Vicar of Wakefield." And yet we must say frankly, that we never understood Goldsmith's character until now. We have been vexed at his weakness, and have blushed at his blunders. We had always wished he could have thrown off his brogue, and had never put on his bloom-colored coat. That he should not have known how to keep his money, was not very wonderful-it is a professional weakness; but he might at any rate have thrown it away in better company. We have been more than once sorely troubled, too, by sundry little slips that savored somewhat of moral obliquity, and never been able to reconcile the elevation of his intellect with acts that far less rigorous judges than we have characterized as mean and degrading. In short, with all our contempt for Boswell, we have been fairly Boswellized, and, much as we loved Goldsmith, loved him somewhat in despite of what we thought our better judgment.

Thanks to Mr. Irving, our doubts have all been solved, and we can love the kind, simple-hearted, genial man with as much confidence as we admire his writings. This overflowing of the heart, this true philosophy, so interwoven with his whole nature, that, whether he acts or speaks, you find it as strongly marked in his actions as in his language; that quick sensibility, which makes him so keenly alive to all the petty annoyances of his dependent position, and that buoyancy of spirit which raises him above them, and bears him up on the wave while many a stouter heart is sinking around him; those ready sympathies, that self-forgetfulness, that innate, unprompted, spontaneous philanthropy, which, in the days of his prosperity as well as in his days of trial, was never belied by word or by deed-all these we understand as we never understood them before, and feel how rare and beautiful they are. He was not wise in his own concerns, and yet what treasures of wisdom has he not bequeathed to the world! Artless as an infant, yet how deeply read in human nature! with all his feelings upon the surface, ruffled by every breeze and glowing in every sunbeam, and yet how skilled in all the secret windings of the heart! None but a man of genial nature should ever attempt to

write the life of Goldsmith: one who knows how much wisdom can be extracted from folly; how much better for the heart it is to trust than to doubt; how much nobler is a generous impulse than a cautious reserve; how much truer a wisdom there is in benevolence than in all the shrewd devices of worldly craft.

Now Mr. Irving is just the man to feel all this, and to make you feel it too. He sees how weak Goldsmith is in many things, how wise in others, and he sees how closely his wisdom and his weakness are allied. There is no condescension in his pity, none of that parade which often makes pity tenfold more bitter than the sufferings which call it forth. He tells you the story of his hero's errors as freely as he does that of his virtues, and in a way to make you feel that a man may have many a human weakness lie at his door, and yet be worthy of our love and admiration still. He has no desire to conceal, makes no attempt to palliate. He understands his hero's character thoroughly, and feels that if he can only make you understand it, you will love him as much as he does. Therefore he draws him just as he is, lights and shadows, virtues and foibles-vices you cannot call them, be you never so unkind. At his blunders he laughs, just as Goldsmith himself used to laugh in recounting them; and he feels the secret of his virtues too justly to attempt to gild them over with useless embellishment.

Speaking to Mr. Irving of this biography of Goldsmith, soon after its appearance, I asked him if he had introduced any anecdotes not in Prior's or Forster's Life of him. "No," playfully; "I could not invent any new ones; but I have altered the setting, and have introduced-not in their biography-Madame Darblay's anecdote about Boswell and Johnson, which is capital. I have also made more of the Jessamy Bride, by adverting to the dates in the tailor's bill, and fixing thereby the dates of certain visits to her."

Mr. Irving, it will be remembered, before either Prior or Forster entered the field, had sketched a life of Goldsmith, to accompany a Paris edition of that author's works. This sketch was subsequently amplified from the materials brought to light by Prior, and prefixed to some American selections of Goldsmith for Harpers' Family Library. It was now expanded into its present form from the additions of Forster. Of this biography, while giving full credit to the previous labors of Prior and Forster, the "Literary World" remarks: "You may have read the story a hundred times, but you will read it again as a new thing in this biography of Irving."

On the 19th of September, I stopped in at Putnam's, who told me he had already disposed of the first edition of "Goldsmith" of 2,500, and was now busy on a second of 2,000. I wrote to Mr. Irving to that effect, and added that it had increased his publisher's impatience for the appearance of "Mahomet." In his reply of the 21st, he says:

I am getting on very well, but am not yet in a mood to take up my pen; so Mr. Putnam must stay his stomach with "Goldsmith a little longer. I suppose, because I knocked off that work in such an off-hand manner, he thinks it a very easy matter with me "to blow up a dog."

If the reader should not see the point of this quotation, he is referred to the preface of the second part of "Don Quixote."

It was some months after this that I mentioned to him

an article I had been reading in a weekly periodical, in which the writer, evidently alluding to his preface in his biography of Goldsmith, styles him, in an invidious spirit,

a self-acknowledged imitator of that author." At the close of that preface, the reader may remember he addresses Goldsmith in the language of Dante's apostrophe to Virgil:

Translated,

"Tu se' lo mio maestro, e'l mio autore;

Tu se' solo colui da cui io tolsi
Lo bello stile che m'a fatto onore."

"Thou art my master, and my teacher thou;
It was from thee and thee alone, I took
That noble style for which men honor me.

He smiled; said he meant only to express his affectionate admiration of Goldsmith, but it would never do for an author to acknowledge anything. Was never conscious of an attempt to write after any model. No man of genius ever did. From his earliest attempts, everything fell naturally from him. His style, he believed, was as much his own as though Goldsmith had never written as much his own as his voice.

This was not the language of self-eulogy, but of quiet self-vindication. He had never meant to warrant such perversion of his quotation, any more than Dante meant to confess himself an imitator of Virgil. There were un