After a stormy passage of sixty-four days, not lacking in serious perils, Irving landed in New York in the wake of a heavy snowstorm in February, 1806, in high spirits and ready for such pleasures as the little town afforded. One of his biographers has described it as a “handy” city; it was large enough to furnish ample variety of character studies and many opportunities for good-fellowship of an intimate, easy-going sort; there was an air of conviviality about the place, but there was little serious dissipation. It was a very pleasant moment in the growth of the metropolis which had become, in a quiet, provincial way, a town in the special sense in which that word connotes a group of people numerous enough to constitute a society, fond of the same pleasures, interested in local incidents and amusements, sufficiently intimate to have formed a code of social standards and manners. In a word, in the New York of Irving’s early maturity, as in the London of the time of Steele and Addison, there was an organized society, open to clever portraiture and brisk satire; supplying at the same time the material and the audience for local wit and humor. It was easy to know everybody in the society of the town, and easy to get about the place. The tone was not intellectual, though the city never lacked men and women of distinguished ability and social cultivation. It was a well-bred and hospitable society, with a keen relish for pleasure. There were numberless dinners and suppers, much less costly and elaborate than those of to-day, and more informal and merry. The country was convivial in all sections outside New England, and the social use of wine was over-generous. In America, as in England, getting under the table was an indiscretion, not a fault. One of Irving’s friends reported that, after a festive occasion, he had fallen through an open grating on his homeward way and was disposed to feel very much depressed by the darkness and solitude; but, one after another, several fellow-guests joined him in the same manner, and the hilarity was prolonged until dawn.
Like many other young men whose ultimate good or evil fortune it was to write books, Irving was admitted to the bar at about the same time that the sign, “William Cullen Bryant, attorney and counsellor at Law,” appeared in the little village of Cummington in western Massachusetts. In after years his estimate of his legal acquirements was indicated by his quoting the comments of two well-known lawyers who were examining students for admission to practise law. “Martin,” said one of these examiners, referring to an aspirant who had acquitted himself very lamely—“Martin, I think he knows a little law.” “Make it stronger,” was the reply; “damned little.” Irving had loitered and dreamed on the water-front as a boy when he ought to have been at his books; and now, at the gateway of his career, the literary temperament turned him toward congenial fellowship rather than arduous study. There was plenty of material for comradeship in the town, and young men of spirit instinctively gathered about him. It was a very kindly and wholesome Bohemia in which they disported themselves in the halcyon days of a fleeting youth. They regarded themselves as “men about town” of the deepest dye, but it was a very innocent town in which they amused themselves, and they all bore honorable names in later and more serious years.
Henry Ogden, Henry Brevoort, James K. Paulding, John and Gouverneur Kemble, Peter and Washington Irving, the leaders of this vivacious company, were members of families who had long been foremost in the social life of the city, and they were far from being the “roistering blades” they fondly thought themselves to be. They were young men of spirit, generous tastes, and no little cultivation. They combined with great success devotion to literature and social activity. Irving speaks of himself as “a champion at the tea-parties,” and the “nine worthies,” or “lads of Kilkenny,” as he called them, shone in the society of what was then known as “the gentler sex” no less than on the festive occasions when they celebrated their youth in private revels. The old country house built by Nicholas Gouverneur, from whom it had descended to Gouverneur Kemble, was the favorite out-of-town haunt of these lively youths. It had a pleasant site on the banks of the Passaic not far from Newark, and is celebrated in the “Salmagundi” papers as Cockloft Hall. An old-time air hung about the place, with its antique furniture and generous endowment of family portraits. It was cared for by two old servants of long standing in the family, and a negro boy, and it afforded a well-set stage for the lively comedy which these vivacious youths made of life in the golden hour of coming into the heritage of youth and pleasure and Letters. “Who would have thought,” wrote Irving in his sixty-seventh year to the owner of the old Hall, “that we should ever have lived to be two such respectable old gentlemen?”, and many years after the curtain had fallen on the gaiety and fun of those hilarious days, Peter Irving often recalled the Saturdays at the Hall, when “we sported on the lawn until fatigued, and sometimes fell sociably into a general nap in the drawing-room in the dusk of the evening.” In town the “lads of Kilkenny” often assembled at Dyde’s, a tavern of good standing in Park Row; a convenient place for after-theatre suppers.
To riot at Dyde’s on imperial champagne,
And then scour our city—the peace to maintain,
was an occupation which these gentlemen pursued with great success. When the financial resources of the revelers ran low they reduced the scale of expenditure by resorting to an unpretentious porter-house at the corner of Nassau and John Streets, not far from the theatre, where they indulged in what they depreciatingly called “Blackguard Suppers.” The modern misogynist habit of living in clubs and associating with one sex only had not come into vogue in those sociable and informal days, and the young men who formed the Knickerbocker group were on good terms with the belles of the day, and appear to have been much in evidence at social functions. Irving asked Henry Ogden, who had sailed for China, to “pick up two or three queer little pretty things that would cost nothing and be acceptable to the girls,” and there are hints of a Chinese supper later.
The first number of “Salmagundi,” the initial work of the so-called Knickerbocker School, was published on January 24, 1807, preceded by some clever and mystifying announcements in the “Evening Post.” It appeared fortnightly through the year, and came to an untimely end in January, 1808, not because its popularity was waning, but because its publisher was disposed to deal in an arbitrary fashion with its high-spirited editors. The idea of a periodical which would deal freely and frankly, in a satiric or humorous spirit, with the fashions and foibles of the town originated with Irving, who secured his brother William and his friend James K. Paulding as associates in what turned out to be a more extended and elaborate frolic than they had hitherto planned. They proposed to amuse themselves with the town, and they succeeded for a year in keeping the little city on tip-toe expectation, not unmixed with apprehension; for “Salmagundi,” while entirely free from personalities and scandal, was keen in its comments on manners and local social standards. It was written in the manner of the “Spectator”; but New York did not furnish the varied and brilliant material which London offered Steele and Addison, and the Irvings and Paulding lacked the sophisticated charm, the intimate and adroit skill of their predecessors. They were, moreover, very young apprentices, and must not be judged by the standards set by the masters of the art, whose comments on passing fashions have become contributions to literature. The banter was somewhat heavy-handed and the humor gave little promise of the lightness of Irving’s later manner, or of the clear-cut and nimble wit of Lowell and Holmes. It bore the stamp of a provincial society and was rollicking and hilarious rather than keen and pungent.
Irving had no illusions about its quality. The “North American Review,” however, described “Salmagundi” as a production of extraordinary merit. Eleven years after the last number appeared, Irving wrote to Brevoort that, while it was pardonable as a youthful production, it was full of errors, puerilities, and imperfections; and in a letter to Irving, Paulding said: “I know you consider old Sal. a sort of saucy, flippant trollope belonging to nobody and not worth fathering.” “Salmagundi” had the crudity of youth, but it also had its high spirits, its gaiety, and its audacious confidence in its own opinions. It was frolicsome and joyous and not devoid of literary grace and skill, and will remain the happiest contemporary record of old New York.
The old Government House, which had been built for the President of the United States, faced Bowling Green when “Salmagundi” published the chapter entitled “A Tour in Broadway.” This building passed through a period of great distinction as the residence of Governor George Clinton and of Chief Justice Jay, and then lost prestige as the local post-office. In its cellar were stored the statues of gods and goddesses belonging to the homeless Academy of Arts. The lead statue of George the Third, which formerly stood on Bowling Green, had been pulled down and run into bullets to be aimed at his Majesty’s troops, and the Green had been put to bucolic uses as a pasturage for cows. Cortlandt Street corner was a famous vantage-ground from which to see the belles go by in pleasant weather, on shopping bent. The City Hall, according to “Salmagundi,” was a resort for young lawyers, not because they had business there, but because they had no business anywhere else.
There was an advanced wing of society which practised the latest arts of pleasure imported from the Old World. The great god Style already had its votaries, and then, as now, many were the sacrifices of good taste and refined manners offered at its painted paste-board shrine. “Salmagundi” found a rich yield of satire in the imitative instinct which shaped many of the customs and social habits of the hour. It informs us that