lingered longer, if he had known he was propitiating his future
biographer.

New York at the time of our author's birth was a rural city of about
twenty-three thousand inhabitants, clustered about the Battery. It did
not extend northward to the site of the present City Hall Park; and
beyond, then and for several years afterwards, were only country
residences, orchards, and corn-fields. The city was half burned down
during the war, and had emerged from it in a dilapidated condition.
There was still a marked separation between the Dutch and the English
residents, though the Irvings seem to have been on terms of intimacy with
the best of both nationalities. The habits of living were primitive; the
manners were agreeably free; conviviality at the table was the fashion,
and strong expletives had not gone out of use in conversation. Society
was the reverse of intellectual: the aristocracy were the merchants and
traders; what literary culture found expression was formed on English
models, dignified and plentifully garnished with Latin and Greek
allusions; the commercial spirit ruled, and the relaxations and
amusements partook of its hurry and excitement. In their gay,
hospitable, and mercurial character, the inhabitants were true
progenitors of the present metropolis. A newspaper had been established
in 1732, and a theater had existed since 1750. Although the town had a
rural aspect, with its quaint dormer-window houses, its straggling lanes
and roads, and the water-pumps in the middle of the streets, it had the
aspirations of a city, and already much of the metropolitan air.

These were the surroundings in which the boy's literary talent was to
develop. His father was a deacon in the Presbyterian church, a sedate,
God-fearing man, with the strict severity of the Scotch Covenanter,
serious in his intercourse with his family, without sympathy in the