the monk as a heretic, and notified the Elector of the fact. The delay in electing the Emperor gave Luther a longer respite. Even when Charles V. was chosen to succeed his grandfather, there was an interval of two years before he had leisure to take up the question. The Pope meantime issued a second Bull, which Luther burned in the town square. April, 1521, the Imperial Diet assembled at Worms, and Luther was summoned to attend. The Elector insisted on his getting a safe-conduct from the Emperor. Luther when urged to keep away, answered, though he trembled, "I will go if there are as many devils in Worms as tiles on the roofs." The bold monk entered the hall where sat the sovereign of half the world, surrounded by civil and ecclesiastical dignitaries. He was required to retract his false doctrine. He replied he could not retract until his doctrine was proved to be false. "Here stand I. I cannot otherwise. God help me. Amen." Luther went forth free, and left Augsburg. But a party of friendly knights, disguised as robbers, waylaid him, and carried him to the Castle of Wartburg. There safely guarded from those who sought his life, he spent his time in translating the Bible into German.

Later Luther returned to Wittenberg and resumed his labors as pastor and preacher. He married Catharine Bora, a nun from a convent which had been broken up. Outlawed by Church and Empire, yet through good and evil regardless of the praise or abuse of men, he never shrank from his duty for fear of danger, but steadfastly pursued his way toward the goal. After all the dangers which surrounded his entire career, he closed his labors peacefully on February 18, 1546. This moral hero became the leader of the German race in asserting its spiritual independence, and his influence reached out to the ends of the earth.

WHEN the American people desire the sort of writing that affords the most pleasing, recreating and healthy reading, the sort of book that wears best, that one can. pick up lovingly year after

year and lose in it one's worry from contact with the harsh world and its noise, they will discover that in Washington Irving they have possessed a mine of literary. wealth as yet very superficially explored. Except for

the fad of the thing, they have no need to import the volumes of Addison, Goldsmith and Lamb, which go to furnish the libraries of the genteel.

Irving has been well styled the Washington of American literature. As historian, essayist, traveler, satirist, humorist, and a charming teller of stories that have given a lasting romantic interest to American scenes, he has no compeer. Besides this purely literary work, Irving did his country inestimable service in redeeming it from the foreigner's sneer that it could produce everything but books. He won cordial

respect for his land and people by his example of refined taste and broad culture, at a time when this service was most needed; and his country honored itself as highly as it honored him when it appointed Irving as Minister to the Court of Spain-the classic land of poetry and romance.

He was born in New York city in 1783, of Scotch parentage, and trained for business. To this he added the study of law, but drifted into literature through journalism, his earliest productions being mild satires on New York life. He was sent to England in 1804 to look after his brothers' business there, and in his travels on the Continent he saw Lord Nelson's fleet chasing the French, and within a year saw the hero lying in state, wrapped in the flag of his "Victory."

He was back in New York in 1806, and was one of Aaron Burr's counsel in 1807, at his trial for treason at Richmond. The death of the young lady to whom Irving was engaged so deeply affected him that he remained unmarried. The Salmagundi was followed by the inimitably humorous Knickerbocker's History of New York, a palpable hit, for which Irving has not yet been forgiven by the High and Low Dutch aristocracy of the Empire State. Sir Walter Scott told Irving, that it was as if written by Swift and Sterne.

Irving in 1814 was made the military secretary of Governor Tompkins, with the rank of Colonel, and was going into active service; but the war stopped in four months. In 1815 he went on what was to have been a short trip to Europe, but which lasted seventeen years. The family business went bankrupt, and Irving was offered official positions in New York and editorships by Sir Walter Scott and John Murray; the latter also offered $500 for an article in the Quarterly Review. All these Irving refused-the last because the Quarterly was bitterly anti-American.

His Sketch Book floated him into greater popularity and comparative fortune. Mrs. Siddons told him he had made her weep, and Kemble shared the admiration felt for the young American author. Bracebridge Hall is chiefly a pleasant transcript of his visits to old English manor-houses, with recall of customs even then falling into desuetude. Then followed his Tales of a Traveler, which, with other books, grew out of his sojourns in Spain. For his Life of Columbus, issued in 1828, Murray paid £3,150 for the English copyright; £2,000 for the Conquest of Granada, and £1,000 for the Alhambra. In 1829 Irving became secretary of the American legation in London, and in the next year

the two gold medals of the Royal Society of Literature were given to Irving and Hallam.

Wishing to settle down for quiet work in his native land, Irving bought his exquisite home, Sunnyside, in Sleepy Hollow, on the Hudson, in 1832, where he was frequently visited by the famous authors of America, and, among other visitors, he received Louis Napoleon, who afterward married Eugénie, whom Irving had danced on his knee in Madrid as a girl of six. He declined the office of Naval Secretary in Van Buren's Cabinet, but accepted that of Minister to Spain for four years, 1842-46, on the nomination of Daniel Webster.

At the age of sixty-six Irving produced his Life of Washington, which, though not without fault in regard to historic fact, will hold its place in the literature of patriotism by its charm of style. This cultivated style gives high distinction to his other biographies of Goldsmith, Columbus and Mahomet. In all his writings there glows a warm heart, full of sympathy, tender-voiced and cheery. If there is always a merry twinkle in his eye, it is from innocent love of fun for its own sake, never from a desire to make artificial humor. Whatever Irving touched he beautified; he was equally at home in each class of work, a master of all, and always a gentleman. When Irving died, in 1859, as did Prescott, his friend, Lord Macaulay, and Leigh Hunt, he left a void in the ranks of American writers which has never been filled.

WHAT was Emerson? He was known at one time as a transcendental philosopher; but his admirers now rarely use the term. To some he is the Poet, untrammeled by the rules of the versifier, to others the Prophet, and again he is by turns a visionary, and the shrewdest of guides in the ways of the world. His judg

ment of other men was so discriminating as to be called "fatal" to himself. He anticipates this imperfect epitaph on

his work by the confession, "I am the victim of miscellany." Yet again he said, "I am not a great poet, but whatever there is of me at all is poet."

Emerson can no more be measured for any regulation uniform worn by the army of writers than the rolling clouds that veil and reveal the summer sky can be condensed into a valise. In an age of unlovely materialism, in a land where progress is too much measured by profits, he dared to play the part of the youth with the banner "Excelsior," even if the nobility of the unpractical climb won only smiles in the market-place. His pure and expansive soul mirrored the aspirations of all great souls in all ages and countries, and if the rays reflected