LIFE OF WASHINGTON IRVING.
THE life of Washington Irving was one of the concern, however, is not with the ancestors of brightest ever led by an author. He discovered | Irving, but with his father, William Irving, who his genius at an early age; was graciously wel- was from Shapinsha, one of the Orkney Islands, comed by his countrymen; answered the literary and who, on the death of his mother, determined condition of the period when he appeared; won to follow the sea. He was born in 1731, a year easily, and as easily kept, a distinguished place before Washington, and when his biographers in the republic of letters; was generously re- find him, was a petty officer on board of an warded for his work; charmed his contempora- armed packet-ship in the service of his British ries by his amiability and modesty; lived long, Majesty, plying between Falmouth and New wisely, happily, and died at a ripe old age, in the York. At the former port he met and became fullness of his powers and his fame. He never enamored of Sarah Sanders, a beautiful girl learned the mournful truth which the lives of so about two years younger than himself, the only many authors force upon us: daughter of John and Anna Sanders, and granddaughter of an English curate named Kent. They were married at Falmouth, on the 18th of May,
Slow rises worth, by poverty depressed;"
he never felt the ills which so often assail the 1761, and two years and two months later emsouls of scholars :
"Toil, envy, want, the patron and the jail;" he never wrote for his bread like Johnson and Goldsmith, and never hungered like Otway and Chatterton; but lived in learned ease, surrounded by friends, master of himself and his time-a prosperous gentleman. Born under a lucky star, all good things sought him out, and were turned by him to delightful uses. He made the world happier by his gifts, and the world honors his memory.
The ancestry of Washington Irving reaches back to the days of Robert Bruce, who, when a fugitive from the court of Edward I., concealed himself in the house of William De Irwin, his secretary and sword-bearer. William De Irwin followed the changing fortunes of his royal master; was with him when he was routed at Methven; shared his subsequent dangers; and was one of the seven who were hidden with him in a copse of holly when his pursuers passed by. When Bruce came to his own again he made him Master of the Rolls, and ten years after the battle of Bannockburn, gave him in free barony the forest of Drum, near Aberdeen. He also permitted him to use his private badge of three holly leaves, with the motto, Sub sole sub umbra virens, which are still the arms of the Irving family. Our
barked for New York, leaving the body of their first child in an English grave-yard. William Irving now abandoned the sea, and entering into trade, was prospering in a small way when the Revolution broke out. His house was under the guns of the English ships of war in the harbor, so he concluded to remove to the country, and took refuge with his family in Rahway, New Jersey. He was safer, perhaps, than he would have been in New York; but business was at an end. He was pointed out as a rebel, and British troops were billeted in his best rooms, while the family was banished to the garret, so he made up his mind to return to New York. He was still a rebel, as well as his wife, who supplied prisoners with food from her own table, visited them in prison when they were ill, and furnished them with clothes, blankets, and the like. "I'd rather you'd send them a rope, Mrs. Irving," said the brutal Cunningham, who, nevertheless, allowed her charities to pass through his hands.
Washington Irving, the youngest of eleven children, and the eighth son of William and Sarah Irving, was born toward the close of these troublous times in New York, on April 3d, 1783. The house in which he was born, a plain, twostory dwelling in William Street (131), between Fulton and John, has long since disappeared, as well as the house on the opposite side of the (xv)