In writing his “Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada from the MSS. of Fray Antonio Agapida,” Irving recurred to a device which he had already employed with success. Fray Antonio is no less mythical than the “small elderly gentleman, dressed in an old black coat and cocked hat, by the name of Knickerbocker,” who was supposed to have left behind him, in his rooms at the Independent Columbian Hotel, that “very curious kind of a written book in his own handwriting” which, being presently printed “to pay off the bill for his board and lodging,” brought to its real author his first popularity. Nor can the “Granada” lay much stronger claim to be considered authentic history than Irving’s burlesque account of New York “from the beginning of the world to the end of the Dutch dynasty.” It is not, of course, predominantly humorous; but it is, in reality, merely a historical romance, adorned with bits from old chroniclers. In it Irving gave his imagination loose rein; and for that reason it is the most readable of his Spanish books.
His writings upon American history are less sympathetic. The matter of “Captain Bonneville” was fine in its facts, but it contained too little of the last to stimulate Irving’s romantic imagination, and it remained cold and almost crude under his shaping hand. In the founding of the settlement by which a butcher’s boy from Waldorf hoped to seize the mighty river of the West, there was also the stuff “of Romance,” and Irving’s “Astoria, or Anecdotes of Enterprise beyond the Rocky Mountains,” should transport the reader to
the continuous woods Where rolls the Oregon, and hears no sound Save his own dashings.
In fact it continually brings his mind back to the ledgers of a too prosperous counting-house. Into the “Life of Washington” Irving was never able to put his heart. The book was the task-work of his declining years. It was undertaken at the suggestion of enterprising publishers, to whom he listened the more readily because the number of those dependent upon him had increased as the income from his earlier works declined. Its composition dragged from the outset. When at length the volumes appeared, they achieved a pronounced _succès d’estime_; but the work shows neither the firm grip of its subject nor the sustained vigour of treatment which might rank it among great biographies. It is rather a history of the United States during the latter half of the eighteenth century. There are entertaining anecdotes in it, vivid descriptions of battles, and sturdy American feeling. But of Washington himself there is only a pale shadow.