at that moment." Indeed, the letters of this doleful year are enlivened
by so many references to the graces and attractions of lovely women, seen
and remembered, that insensibility cannot be attributed to the author of
the "Sketch-Book."

The death of Irving's mother in the spring of 1817 determined him to
remain another year abroad. Business did not improve. His
brother-in-law Van Wart called a meeting of his creditors, the Irving
brothers floundered on into greater depths of embarrassment, and
Washington, who could not think of returning home to face poverty in New
York, began to revolve a plan that would give him a scanty but sufficient
support. The idea of the "Sketch-Book" was in his mind. He had as yet
made few literary acquaintances in England. It is an illustration of the
warping effect of friendship upon the critical faculty that his opinion
of Moore at this time was totally changed by subsequent intimacy. At a
later date the two authors became warm friends and mutual admirers of
each other's productions. In June, 1817, "Lalla Rookh" was just from the
press, and Irving writes to Brevoort: "Moore's new poem is just out. I
have not sent it to you, for it is dear and worthless. It is written in
the most effeminate taste, and fit only to delight boarding-school girls
and lads of nineteen just in their first loves. Moore should have kept
to songs and epigrammatic conceits. His stream of intellect is too small
to bear expansion--it spreads into mere surface." Too much cream for the
strawberry!

Notwithstanding business harassments in the summer and fall of 1817 he
found time for some wandering about the island; he was occasionally in
London, dining at Murray's, where he made the acquaintance of the elder
D'Israeli and other men of letters (one of his notes of a dinner at
Murray's is this: "Lord Byron told Murray that he was much happier after