Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Walcott Boynton, Reader's History of American Literature

---

---

[87] Prescott called it, appealed readily to an audience which had listened rather coldly to the less spontaneous Tales of a Traveller, and had given a formal approbation to the Life of Christopher Columbus without finding very much Irving in it.

---

Historical work.

Thereafter, except for the Crayon Miscellanies (1835) and Wolfert's Roost (1855), Irving's work was to be almost entirely in biography and history. Of his historical work it is enough to say that he was not eminently fitted for it by nature. Of course he could not write dully; his historical narratives are just as readable as Goldsmith's, and rather more veracious. But he plainly lacked the scholar's training and methods which we now require in the historian; nor had he a large view of men and events in their perspective. He had, at least, a faculty of giving life and force to dim historic figures, which gained the praise of such men as Prescott and Bancroft and Motley. Washington, for example, had begun to loom vaguely and impersonally in the national memory, a mere great man, when Irving turned him from cold bronze to flesh and blood again.

Irving's services to America in diplomacy