A History of New-York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, by Dietrich | Page 2

way of eating the detested food. But the
more he tried to like it the nastier it grew, and he gave up as
impracticable his hope of going to sea. He fastened upon adventures of
real travelers; he yearned for travel, and was entranced in his youth by
first sight of the beauties of the Hudson River. He scribbled jests for his
school friends, and, of course, he wrote a school-boy play. At sixteen
his schooling was at an end, and he was placed in a lawyer's office,
from which he was transferred to another, and then, in January, 1802,
to another, where he continued his clerkship with a Mr. Hoffman, who
had a young wife, and two young daughters by a former marriage. With
this family Washington Irving, a careless student, lively, clever, kind,
established the happiest relations, of which afterwards there came the
deep grief of his life and a sacred memory.
Washington Irving's eldest brothers were beginning to thrive in
business. A brother Peter shared his frolics with the pen. His artist
pleasure in the theater was indulged without his father's knowledge. He
would go to the play, come home for nine o'clock prayers, go up to bed,
and climb out of his bed-room window, and run back and see the
after-piece. So come evasions of undue restraint. But with all this
impulsive liveliness, young Washington Irving's life appeared, as he
grew up, to be in grave danger. When he was nineteen, and taken by a
brother-in-law to Ballston springs, it was determined by those who
heard his incessant night cough that he was "not long for this world."
When he had come of age, in April, 1804, his brothers, chiefly his
eldest brother, who was prospering, provided money to send him to
Europe that he might recover health by restful travel in France, Italy
and England. When he was helped up the side of the vessel that was to
take him from New York to Bordeaux, the captain looked at him with
pity and said, "There's a chap who will go overboard before we get

across." But Washington Irving returned to New York at the beginning
of the year 1806 with health restored.
What followed will be told in the Introduction to the of her volume of
this History of New York, by Diedrich Knickerbocker.
H.M.

THE AUTHOR'S APOLOGY.
The following work, in which, at the outset, nothing more was
contemplated than a temporary jeu-d'esprit, was commenced in
company with my brother, the late Peter Irving, Esq. Our idea was to
parody a small hand-book which had recently appeared, entitled, "A
Picture of New York." Like that, our work was to begin an historical
sketch; to be followed by notices of the customs, manners and
institutions of the city; written in a serio-comic vein, and treating local
errors, follies and abuses with good-humored satire.
To burlesque the pedantic lore displayed in certain American works,
our historical sketch was to commence with the creation of the world;
and we laid all kinds of works under contribution for trite citations,
relevant or irrelevant, to give it the proper air of learned research.
Before this crude mass of mock erudition could be digested into form,
my brother departed for Europe, and I was left to prosecute the
enterprise alone.
I now altered the plan of the work. Discarding all idea of a parody on
the "Picture of New York," I determined that what had been originally
intended as an introductory sketch should comprise the whole work,
and form a comic history of the city. I accordingly moulded the mass of
citations and disquisitions into introductory chapters, forming the first
book; but it soon became evident to me that, like Robinson Crusoe with
his boat, I had begun on too large a scale, and that, to launch my history
successfully, I must reduce its proportions. I accordingly resolved to
confine it to the period of the Dutch domination, which, in its rise,

progress and decline, presented that unity of subject required by classic
rule. It was a period, also, at that time almost a terra incognita in
history. In fact, I was surprised to find how few of my fellow-citizens
were aware that New York had ever been called New Amsterdam, or
had heard of the names of its early Dutch governors, or cared a straw
about their ancient Dutch progenitors.
This, then, broke upon me as the poetic age of our city; poetic from its
very obscurity, and open, like the early and obscure days of ancient
Rome, to all the embellishments of heroic fiction. I hailed my native
city as fortunate above all other American cities in having an antiquity
thus extending back into the regions of doubt and fable; neither did I
conceive I was committing any grievous