368 



To an author avowedly seeking bread as well as fame, it was par- 

 ticularly successful. For the copyright of his next work, ^' Brace- 

 bridge Hall," he was offered one thousand guineas before Murray 

 saw the manuscript. 



I must pass over the " Tales of a Traveller," published in 1824, 

 and severely criticised by the "London Quarterly," "Blackwood's," 

 and the "Westminster Review," to come to his greatest work, the 

 ''Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus." I have said his 

 greatest work ; I make no exception. It was an admirable choice 

 of a subject. Columbus was the discoverer of America; it was 

 scarcely a fond hyperbole which announced — 



"A Castilla y Leon, 

 Nuevo mundo dio Colon." 



He was, besides, a man whose history was full of romance ; whose 

 life was more stirring than that of fabled heroes in epic poem, or 

 prose fiction. Irving was conceded to be the originator and f^ither 

 of the literature which was to flourish upon the soil discovered by 

 Columbus, and was therefore the fitting chronicler of such a life. 



In 1825, there had been published in Madrid, — a spasmodic flash of 

 the dying flame of Spanish letters, — a compilation of voyages and 

 discoveries, called "Coleccion de los Viages y Descubrimientos," &c. 



At the suggestion of the American Minister to Spain, Mr. Alex- 

 ander H. Everett, the equally gifted brother of Edward Everett, and 

 Mr. 0. Bicb, American Consul at Madrid, Mr. Irving, then in the 

 first vigor of a new and increasing reputation, examined these with 

 the intention of translating some of them ; but, afterwards, becoming 

 much interested in them and other records which were freely thrown 

 open to him, he determined to accost his great subject in an original 

 work. 



The "Columbus," commenced thus under most favorable auspices, 

 was rapidly, but carefully, written ; it appeared in 1828. Imbued 

 with the spirit of the old chroniclers, gifted with an imagination 

 equal to all the demands of his almost pictorial undertaking, he ex- 

 hibits a regulated and calm historic judgment, which resists the 

 temptation and checks the tendency to romance. It is a beautiful 

 modern restoration of old chronicle. He did not design it to be a 

 philosophic history. He guards himself, by calling it not a historj/, 

 but a life. 



With the magic power of an iirtist, he has more than compensated 



