But the skill was very noticeable also. Irving's prose is not
that of the Defoe-Swift-Franklin-Paine type of plain talk to the
crowd. It is rather an inheritance from that other eighteenth
century tradition, the conversation of the select circle. Its
accents were heard in Steele and Addison and were continued in
Goldsmith, Sterne, Cowper, and Charles Lamb. Among Irving's
successors, George William Curtis and Charles Dudley Warner and
William Dean Howells have been masters of it likewise. It is
mellow human talk, delicate, regardful, capable of exquisite
modulation. With instinctive artistic taste, Irving used this old
and sound style upon fresh American material. In "Rip van Winkle"
and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" he portrayed his native valley
of the Hudson, and for a hundred years connoisseurs of style have
perceived the exquisite fitness of the language to the images and
ideas which Irving desired to convey. To render the Far West of
that epoch this style is perhaps not "big" and broad enough, but
when used as Irving uses it in describing Stratford and
Westminster Abbey and an Old English Christmas, it becomes again
a perfect medium. Hawthorne adopted it for "Our Old Home," and
Englishmen recognized it at once as a part of their own
inheritance, enriched, like certain wines, by the voyage across
the Atlantic and home again. Irving wrote of England, Mr. Warner
once said, as Englishmen would have liked to write about it. When
he described the Alhambra and Granada and the Moors, it was the
style, rich both in physical sensation and in dreamlike reverie,
which revealed to the world the quick American appreciation of
foreign scenes and characters. Its key is sympathy.

Irving's popularity has endured in England. It suffered during
the middle of the century in his own country, for the strongest