though certain it would make me as rich as old Croesus, or John Jacob
Astor himself!" The sparkle of society was no more agreeable to him than
the rattle of cutlery. "I have scarcely [he writes] seen anything of the
----s since your departure; business and an amazing want of inclination
have kept me from their threshold. Jim, that sly poacher, however,
prowls about there, and vitrifies his heart by the furnace of their
charms. I accompanied him there on Sunday evening last, and found the
Lads and Miss Knox with them. S----was in great spirits, and played the
sparkler with such great success as to silence the whole of us excepting
Jim, who was the agreeable rattle of the evening. God defend me from
such vivacity as hers, in future,--such smart speeches without meaning,
such bubble and squeak nonsense! I 'd as lieve stand by a frying-pan for
an hour and listen to the cooking of apple fritters. After two hours'
dead silence and suffering on my part I made out to drag him off, and did
not stop running until I was a mile from the house." Irving gives his
correspondent graphic pictures of the social warfare in which he was
engaged, the "host of rascally little tea-parties" in which he was
entangled; and some of his portraits of the "divinities," the "blossoms,"
and the beauties of that day would make the subjects of them flutter with
surprise in the churchyards where they lie. The writer was sated with
the "tedious commonplace of fashionable society," and languishing to
return to his books and his pen.

In March, 18122, in the shadow of the war and the depression of business,
Irving was getting out a new edition of the "Knickerbocker," which
Inskeep was to publish, agreeing to pay $1200 at six months for an
edition of fifteen hundred. The modern publisher had not then arisen and
acquired a proprietary right in the brains of the country, and the author
made his bargains like an independent being who owned himself.