Irving passed five years in England. Once recognized by the literary
world, whatever was best in the society of letters and of fashion was
open to him. He was a welcome guest in the best London houses, where he
met the foremost literary personages of the time, and established most
cordial relations with many of them; not to speak of statesmen, soldiers,
and men and women of fashion, there were the elder D'Israeli, Southey,
Campbell, Hallam, Gifford, Milman, Foscolo, Rogers, Scott, and Belzoni
fresh from his Egyptian explorations. In Irving's letters this old
society passes in review: Murray's drawing-rooms; the amusing
blue-stocking coteries of fashion of which Lady Caroline Lamb was a
promoter; the Countess of Besborough's, at whose house the Duke could be
seen; the Wimbledon country seat of Lord and Lady Spence; Belzoni, a
giant of six feet five, the center of a group of eager auditors of the
Egyptian marvels; Hallam, affable and unpretending, and a copious talker;
Gifford, a small, shriveled, deformed man of sixty, with something of a
humped back, eyes that diverge, and a large mouth, reclining on a sofa,
propped up by cushions, with none of the petulance that you would expect
from his Review, but a mild, simple, unassuming man,--he it is who prunes
the contributions and takes the sting out of them (one would like to have
seen them before the sting was taken out); and Scott, the right
honest-hearted, entering into the passing scene with the hearty enjoyment
of a child, to whom literature seems a sport rather than a labor or
ambition, an author void of all the petulance, egotism, and peculiarities
of the craft. We have Moore's authority for saying that the literary
dinner described in the "Tales of a Traveller," whimsical as it seems and
pervaded by the conventional notion of the relations of publishers and
authors, had a personal foundation. Irving's satire of both has always
the old-time Grub Street flavor, or at least the reminiscent tone, which
is, by the way, quite characteristic of nearly everything that he wrote