my regret that I could not play both Jesse James and Bob Ford, his slayer!" Mr. Tarkington was a precocious child, of an over-inquiring mind and retentive memory, who, although repeatedly taken from school for two or three months by the advice of the family's physician, read and studied at home, and at the end of a term would be at the head of his class, or in its foremost ranks, in examinations. At college he was seldom known to take notes, yet when men came to him to be posted, he was always able to impart the information they desired. He attended Exeter, went to Purdue University, and entered the Junior Class at Princeton. Mr. Tarkington is a representative to the State Legislature of Indiana, and tells, in connection with his campaigning, many amusing incidents; the following is one which the local papers delighted in printing: "A friend," said Mr. Tarkington, "stumping for me, thought he would feel the sentiment of a crowd he was about to address at a cross-roads. "Are you going to vote for Tarkington?' he inquired. gained general credence concerning a doughnut factory. Mr. Tarkington owns a little corner piece of property in Indianapolis which he rents to a baker. The baker's next-door neighbor objected to the smell of doughnuts baking, and asked him to discontinue their making. The baker refusing, he brought suit, and Mr. Tarkington as owner of the property became co-defendant. Then some one, as a joke, circulated the report that he had started a doughnut factory. It was published abroad, and his newspaper clippings increased threefold. His friends greeted him on the street with, "Well, Tarkington, how are doughnuts?" The Indianapolis papers cartooned him rapidly eating doughnuts. He had occasion to go to New York, and thought no one would know of the story there, but on walking into a club where three of his friends were playing pool, he was hailed in chorus with, "Well, Tarkington, how are doughnuts?" "I do not expect," he said, "to live that story down in my lifetime. "I wrote The Two Vanrevels' many years ago, as a short story of two thousand "You mean that actor-fellow?' asked words, and put it away in hopes it would I RVING and Longfellow were primarily translators and interpreters of the Old World to the New; to them, more than to any other of our early writers, was due the liberation of the young nation from provincialism, not by the use of fresh motives or of novel literary forms, but by bringing the American imagination in touch with the imagination of Europe, and reknitting the deeper ties which had been, in a way, severed by forcible separation from Old World rule. There was, in the first three decades of the nineteenth century, general dependence on European literature and general deference to European taste; a dependence from which Emerson and Poe, by definite and urgent teaching as well as by practice of art with that freshness and force which always form a new beginning, finally effected our liberation. But this deferential attitude, this imitative spirit, had nothing in common with that assimilation of the experience, sentiment, poetic association, and historic charm of the older civilization which Irving and Longfellow effected. They assisted in the emancipation from servile imitation by greatly forwarding the equalization of the conditions of culture between the Old World and the New, and by bring ing the New into spiritual sympathy with the Old. This work was different from that of Emerson and Poe, but they share the distinction of breaking the formal while reuniting the vital ties, and thus preparing the way for the free interchange of influence on a basis of equality which to-day constitutes the rich spiritual commerce between the Old World and the New. To this great end Cooper was also a strenuous and effective worker; failing dismally when he tried the rôle of interpreter in "Precaution," succeeding on original lines when he portrayed the fresh experiences and characteristic types of the new society in "The Spy" and "The Leatherstocking Tales." But while Irving and Longfellow were translators in a high sense and with fresh feeling of the Old World to the New, they were also original forces in the literature of the new country. Their urbanity, geniality, hospitality of mind, and sweetness of nature gave them rare sensitiveness of feeling for things old and ripe and beautiful, and a winning quality of style; traits which, among a people whose literature, during its first important period, was to carry suggestions of the pulpit with it, have tended somewhat to obscure their originality and significance. Longfellow was so gentle a preacher that, aside from a few poems so frankly didactic that we forgive their exhortations for the sake of the pure impulse they convey, the bands and gown are concealed under the singers' robes; while Irving's preaching was wholly the silent influence of one of the finest, kindliest, and truest of men. In the preponderance of ethical over artistic interests in this country Longfellow and Irving have carried less weight and made less impression than writers of more urgent ethical impulse but of far less poetic and literary power. When a great deal of current writing has been forgotten, and much that Irving and Longfellow wrote has passed into the same oblivion, it is safe to predict that "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and "Rip Van Winkle," and "Evangeline" and "Hiawatha," will hold their own be cause of their quality as literature and because they are part of the very limited legendary lore of America. Irving gave permanent form to the Knickerbocker tradition when he created Diedrich Knickerbocker and Rip Van Winkle; and in "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" he was not only the forerunner of the American novelist but the first and perhaps the only American myth-maker. Like Longfellow and Cooper, he was often in Europe; and it may be suspected that when these writers were young, and for a long time after, the new country was a lonely place for men who craved richness and beauty of life, the charm of old association, the ripeness of a society which had gotten through with foundationlaying, had built its roads, and had passed on to love things which are beautiful as well as to do things which are useful. Born in 1783, in the cosmopolitan city of New York, where even at that early period eighteen or twenty languages were spoken, Irving went to Europe in search of health in his twenty-second year; saw something of France, Italy, Holland, and England; enjoying with the freshness of a young imagination nature, art, society, and life. "I am a young man and in Paris," he wrote to a friend at home. Returning to New York in 1806, he took his place at once in the little group of wits and men-about-town, in the good sense of the phrase, of which Paulding, Brevoort, Henry Ogden, and the Kembles were members—a spirited, vivacious company, with great capacity for enjoyment and with gifts of humor and satire which, under the influence of Goldsmith, Addison, and the eighteenth-century essayists, were soon at work in the little city "to instruct the young, inform the old, correct the town, and castigate the age," to quote from "Salmagundi," which ran its meteoric course in twenty numbers and then vanished in the mystery from which it had come. When "The History of New York by Diedrich Knickerbocker" appeared, it reminded Walter Scott of Dean Swift and of Sterne. In 1815 Irving went to Europe for the second time, and seventeen years passed before he set foot in his native city again. During t he wrote " The SketchBook of essays in his most characteristic vein, urbane, genial, full not only of Old World atmosphere but of Old World grace, ease, mellowness of reflection, and sentiment, but full also of New World feeling. "Bracebridge Hall" brought the fragrance of old gardens and the dignity of old homes once more to the children of the men and women who had left them behind two centuries before; "The Tales of a Traveler," which appeared two years later and was read with eager interest, dealt with old things, but was full of novelty to the untraveled America of the third decade of the last century. "The Life of Columbus" was begun, and "The Tales of the Alhambra " and "The Conquest of Granada" were finished, during this long residence abroad, and when he returned, in 1832, Irving's most characteristic work was done. He was still to write "The Life of Washington," "Mahomet and His Successors," the charming account of Goldsmith, and other books; but he struck no new notes and disclosed no new qualities as a writer. At first glance it would seem as if Irving's work had been done against many backgrounds, English and Spanish as well as American, and as if his note had been cosmopolitan rather than American. The real Irving, however, was a true son of the country of which New York is the capital, and his characteristic and abiding work had behind it a city, a river, and a mountain range which were not simply the stage setting of his life, but which gave color, atmosphere, tone, to his writing. As a translator Irving rendered a great service to his country, and enriched its literature with meditations on Westminster Abbey, the description of Stratford-on-Avon, and the group of studies of English life and landscape in "Brace bridge Hall;" but the Irving who will be known to the future will be the Geoffrey Crayon of the Knickerbocker city, and the books which will live longest, because they are in material and manner most completely his own, will be the legends of the Hudson. His kindly and pervasive humor has as little in common with the keen, pungent New England humor as his genial and urbane spirit had with the strenuous, ethical temper of New England. The rigidity of the Puritan, the concentration |