KNICKERBOCKER'S HISTORY OF NEW YORK.—The New York Evening Post for December 28, 1809, said: "This work was found in the chamber of Mr. Diedrich Knickerbocker, the old gentleman whose sudden and mysterious disappearance has been noticed. It is published in order to discharge certain debts he has left behind." This disguise, however, was too thin to deceive the public, and the work was soon popularly called Irving's Knickerbocker's History of New York.
Two hundred years before its publication, Hendrick Hudson, an explorer in the service of Holland, had sailed into New York Bay and discovered Manhattan Island and the Hudson River for the Dutch. They founded the city of New Amsterdam and held it until the English captured it in 1664. Irving wrote the history of this settlement during the Dutch occupation. He was led to choose this subject, because, as he tells us, few of his fellow citizens were aware that New York had ever been called New Amsterdam, and because the subject, "poetic from its very obscurity," was especially available for an American author, since it gave him a chance to adorn it with legend and fable. He states that his object was "to embody the traditions of our city in an amusing form" and to invest it "with those imaginative and whimsical associations so seldom met with in our country, but which live like charms and spells about the cities of the old world."
[Illustration: THE OFFICIAL WEIGHT]
[Illustration: A ONE-PIPE JOURNEY]
Irving achieved his object and produced an entertaining compound of historical fact, romantic sentiment, exaggeration, and humor. He shows us the contemplative Dutchmen on their first voyage in the Half Moon, sailing into New York Bay, prohibited by Hudson "from wearing more than five jackets and six pair of breeches." We see the scrupulously "honest" Dutch traders buying furs from the Indians, using an invariable scale of avoirdupois weights, a Dutchman's hand in the scale opposite the furs weighing one pound, his foot two pounds. We watch the puzzled Indians trying to account for the fact that the largest bundle of furs never weighed more than two pounds. We attend a council of burghers at Communipaw, called to devise means to protect their town from an English expedition. While they are thoughtfully smoking, the English sail by without seeing the smoke-enveloped town. Irving shows us the Dutchmen estimating their distances and time by the period consumed in smoking a pipe,—Hartford, Connecticut, being two hundred pipes distant. He allows us to watch a housewife emptying her pocket in her search for a wooden ladle and filling two corn baskets with the contents. He takes us to a tea party attended by "the higher classes or noblesse, that is to say such as kept their own cows and drove their own wagons," where we can see the damsels knitting their own woolen stockings and the vrouws serving big apple pies, bushels of doughnuts, and pouring tea out of a fat Delft teapot. He draws this picture of Wouter Van Twiller, Governor of New Amsterdam:—
"The person of this illustrious old gentleman was formed and proportioned as though it had been moulded by the hands of some cunning Dutch statuary, as a model of majesty and lordly grandeur. He was exactly five feet six inches in height, and six feet five inches in circumference. His head was a perfect sphere….
"His habits were as regular as his person. He daily took his four stated meals, appropriating exactly an hour to each; he smoked and doubted eight hours, and he slept the remaining twelve of the four-and-twenty."
[Illustration: WOUTER VAN TWILLER]
THE SKETCH BOOK GROUP.—The only one of his productions to which Irving gave the name of The Sketch Book was finished in 1820, the year in which Scott's Ivanhoe, Keats's Eve of St. Agnes, and Shelley's Prometheus Unbound appeared. Of the same general order as The Sketch Book are Irving's Bracebridge Hall (1822) and Tales of a Traveller (1824). These volumes all contain short stories, essays, or sketches, many of which are suggestive of Addison's Spectator. The Sketch Book is the most famous of Irving's works of this class. While it contains some excellent essays or descriptions, such as those entitled Westminster Abbey and Stratford-on-Avon, the book lives to-day because of two short stories, Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. These were not equaled by Addison, and they have not been surpassed by any English writers of the nineteenth century. Both stories take their rise from the "Knickerbocker Legend," and they are thoroughly American in coloring and flavor, even if they did happen to be written in England. No story in our literature is better known than that of Rip Van Winkle watching Hendrick Hudson and his ghostly crew playing ninepins in the Catskill Mountains and quaffing the magic liquor which caused him to sleep for twenty years.
[Illustration: ICHABOD CRANE]