Speeches: Literary and Social | Page 9

improving the bad, and for encouraging the good; and to
advance these great objects shall be, to the end of my life, my earnest
endeavour, to the extent of my humble ability. Having said thus much
with reference to myself, I shall have the pleasure of saying a few
words with reference to somebody else.
There is in this city a gentleman who, at the reception of one of my
books--I well remember it was the Old Curiosity Shop--wrote to me in
England a letter so generous, so affectionate, and so manly, that if I had
written the book under every circumstance of disappointment, of
discouragement, and difficulty, instead of the reverse, I should have
found in the receipt of that letter my best and most happy reward. I
answered him, {5} and he answered me, and so we kept shaking hands
autographically, as if no ocean rolled between us. I came here to this
city eager to see him, and [laying his hand it upon Irving's shoulder]
here he sits! I need not tell you how happy and delighted I am to see
him here to-night in this capacity.
Washington Irving! Why, gentlemen, I don't go upstairs to bed two
nights out of the seven--as a very creditable witness near at hand can
testify--I say I do not go to bed two nights out of the seven without
taking Washington Irving under my arm; and, when I don't take him, I
take his own brother, Oliver Goldsmith. Washington Irving! Why, of
whom but him was I thinking the other day when I came up by the
Hog's Back, the Frying Pan, Hell Gate, and all these places? Why,
when, not long ago, I visited Shakespeare's birthplace, and went
beneath the roof where he first saw light, whose name but HIS was
pointed out to me upon the wall? Washington Irving--Diedrich
Knickerbocker--Geoffrey Crayon--why, where can you go that they

have not been there before? Is there an English farm- -is there an
English stream, an English city, or an English country-seat, where they
have not been? Is there no Bracebridge Hall in existence? Has it no
ancient shades or quiet streets?
In bygone times, when Irving left that Hall, he left sitting in an old oak
chair, in a small parlour of the Boar's Head, a little man with a red nose,
and an oilskin hat. When I came away he was sitting there still!--not a
man LIKE him, but the same man--with the nose of immortal redness
and the hat of an undying glaze! Crayon, while there, was on terms of
intimacy with a certain radical fellow, who used to go about, with a
hatful of newspapers, wofully out at elbows, and with a coat of great
antiquity. Why, gentlemen, I know that man--Tibbles the elder, and he
has not changed a hair; and, when I came away, he charged me to give
his best respects to Washington Irving!
Leaving the town and the rustic life of England--forgetting this man, if
we can--putting out of mind the country church-yard and the broken
heart--let us cross the water again, and ask who has associated himself
most closely with the Italian peasantry and the bandits of the Pyrenees?
When the traveller enters his little chamber beyond the Alps--listening
to the dim echoes of the long passages and spacious corridors--damp,
and gloomy, and cold--as he hears the tempest beating with fury against
his window, and gazes at the curtains, dark, and heavy, and covered
with mould--and when all the ghost-stories that ever were told come up
before him--amid all his thick-coming fancies, whom does he think of?
Washington Irving.
Go farther still: go to the Moorish Mountains, sparkling full in the
moonlight--go among the water-carriers and the village gossips, living
still as in days of old--and who has travelled among them before you,
and peopled the Alhambra and made eloquent its shadows? Who
awakes there a voice from every hill and in every cavern, and bids
legends, which for centuries have slept a dreamless sleep, or watched
unwinkingly, start up and pass before you in all their life and glory?
But leaving this again, who embarked with Columbus upon his gallant
ship, traversed with him the dark and mighty ocean, leaped upon the
land and planted there the flag of Spain, but this same man, now sitting
by my side? And being here at home again, who is a more fit
companion for money-diggers? and what pen but his has made Rip Van

Winkle, playing at nine-pins on that thundering afternoon, as much part
and parcel of the Catskill Mountains as any tree or crag that they can
boast?
But these are topics familiar from my boyhood, and which I am apt to
pursue; and lest I should be tempted now to talk too