This text is part of:
[91] hotels are there named after him, “Washington Irving” or more frequently “Washington,” evidently meaning the same thing; and Spanish gratitude has furnished him with what all America could never give him, a wife. In the reading room of the chief hotel, opposite the Alhambra, there is a portrait of Irving hanging on one side and one of “Mrs. Irving” on the other. No opinion of Irving's was more remarkable and perhaps less to be expected than that which he expressed toward the end of his life as the sum of his judgment in regard to the prospects of American letters. After spending the greater part of his mature life in Europe, he wrote to Motley as his conclusion: “You are properly sensible of the high calling of the American press, that rising tribunal before which the history of all nations is to be revised and rewritten and the judgment of past ages to be corrected or confirmed.” 1 This was written on July 17, 1857, before the Civil War, and this was the opinion of a man the greater part of whose working life, like Motley's, had been passed in Europe; and who had thus a right
Boston, New York and Chicago. Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1903.
Tufts University provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.