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Indiana University Studies 



mildness of the sentiments, — sicklied over, perhaps, a little now and 

 then, with that cloying heaviness into which unvarying sweetness is 

 too apt to subside. The rhythm and melody are certainly excessive. 

 It gives an air of mannerism. Mr. C. F. Richardson expresses him- 

 self in like manner in his American Literature (I, 271), where he says: 

 '^His refinement of style was somewhat excessive, and his readers 

 never completely lose sight of the rhetorician manipulating the 

 printed words." Edgar Allan Poe goes still farther: 'Tew of our 

 writers are guilty," he asserts, ''of more frequent inadvertences of 

 language. In what may be termed his mere English he is surpassed 

 by fifty writers whom we could name."^^ 



Originality, as a quality of Irving's fiction has been more widely 

 recognized in America than in France or even in England. The works 

 which are thought to reveal this quality most clearly are the History 

 of New York and the Sketch-book. In the North American Review 

 (XXVIII, 103), Alexander Everett argues that the hitherto unaccom- 

 plished feat of establishing a purely American literary reputation of 

 the first order implies "not merely taste and talent but originality, 

 the quality which forms the real distinction, if there be one, between 

 what we call genius and every other degree of intellectual power". 

 The character of Diedrich Knickerbocker, in his opinion, affords con- 

 clusive proof that its creator possessed originality. Discussing the 

 humor of the Sketch-book, Bryant asserted in his discourse on Irving, 

 delivered in 1860, that it "shows the same peculiar and original cast" 

 of that of the History of New York, "wholly unhke that of any former 

 author ".'^^ John Neal, unlike most English critics, who are prone to 

 see in Irving a reflection of their own writers, Addison, Goldsmith, 

 and others, was deeply impressed by Irving's originality. Apropos of 

 the History of New York, he says: "We look upon this volume ... as 

 a work so altogether original, without being extravagant, as to stand 

 alone among the labors of men."'^^ And in the Sketch-book he discovers 

 a "world of humor, so happy, so natural, so altogether unlike that of 

 any other man, dead or alive," that he would rather have been the 

 writer of it, fifty times over, than of every other thing that he wrote. '^^ 



The extent of Addison's influence upon Irving is thought by Ed- 

 ward Everett to have been exaggerated. "Mr. Irving's manner is 

 often compared with Addison's," he states, "though, closely examined, 

 there is no great resemblance between them except that they both 



72 Edinburgh Review, IV (1822), 213. 



73 Poe, Works (Ed. Stedman and Woodberry), IX, 229. 



74 Bryant, Prose Works, I, 347. 

 Blackwood's Magazine, XVII (1825), 61. 



76 It'id., 64. 



