adverse times they starve. How the country is to extricate itself
from its present embarrassment, how it is to escape from the poverty
that seems to be overwhelming it, and how the government is to quiet
the multitudes that are already turbulent and clamorous, and are yet
but in the beginning of their real miseries, I cannot conceive."

The embarrassments of the agricultural and laboring classes and of the
government were as serious in 1816 as they have again become in 1881.

During 1817 Irving was mostly in the depths of gloom, a prey to the
monotony of life and torpidity of intellect. Rays of sunlight pierce the
clouds occasionally. The Van Wart household at Birmingham was a frequent
refuge for him, and we have pretty pictures of the domestic life there;
glimpses of Old Parr, whose reputation as a gourmand was only second to
his fame as a Grecian, and of that delightful genius, the Rev. Rann
Kennedy, who might have been famous if he had ever committed to paper the
long poems that he carried about in his head, and the engaging sight of
Irving playing the flute for the little Van Warts to dance. During the
holidays Irving paid another visit to the haunts of Isaac Walton, and his
description of the adventures and mishaps of a pleasure party on the
banks of the Dove suggest that the incorrigible bachelor was still
sensitive to the allurements of life; and liable to wander over the
"dead-line" of matrimonial danger. He confesses that he was all day in
Elysium. "When we had descended from the last precipice," he says, "and
come to where the Dove flowed musically through a verdant meadow--then
--fancy me, oh, thou 'sweetest of poets,' wandering by the course of this
romantic stream--a lovely girl hanging on my arm, pointing out the
beauties of the surrounding scenery, and repeating in the most dulcet
voice tracts of heaven-born poetry. If a strawberry smothered in cream
has any consciousness of its delicious situation, it must feel as I felt