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[84] succeed in producing anything which could be called deeply imaginative. This, however, is equally true of the great English writers to whom (without being in any proper sense their imitator) he was most nearly akin. John Trumbull had produced, just before the Revolution, a series of Addisonian essays of real elegance and acuteness. In the Salmagundi papers, written mainly by Irving and his friend James K. Paulding in 1807, the method of the eighteenth-century essayists is employed with a much freer hand. It pretends to be nothing but a humorous commentary upon town follies, though in the opening number the authors whimsically profess their intention to be “to instruct the young, reform the old, correct the town, and castigate the age.” Whatever we may now think of the limitations of this work — its exuberance not seldom degenerating into facetiousness, its inequality, its occasional lapses into banality, we must own that it did for the New York of that day precisely what Addison and Steele did for the London of a century before, and what nobody appears to be likely to do for the New York or London of a century later.
Boston, New York and Chicago. Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1903.
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