Note (return) — WASHINGTON IRVING, ESQ.

To these Tales succeeded a work of greater importance in literature than either of Mr. Irving's previous undertakings. We allude to a History of the Life and Voyages of Columbus, in four vols. 8vo., which appeared in the year 1828. Mr. Irving, at the time this work was first suggested to him, in the winter of 1825-6, was at Bordeaux; and, being informed that a biography was about to appear at Madrid, containing many important and some new documents relative to Columbus, he set off for the Spanish capital, to undertake the translation of the work. Mr. Irving, however, meeting with numerous aids at Madrid, resolved on producing an original history, which he has presented to the public with extreme diffidence: "all that I can safely claim," he observes, "is, an earnest desire to state the truth, an absence from prejudices respecting the nations mentioned in my history, a strong interest in my subject, and a zeal to make up by assiduity for many deficiencies of which I am conscious." This work has been abridged by Mr. Irving to one of the volumes of the Family Library. As we have intimated to the reader, it is of higher pretensions than either of the author's previous writings: a clever critic refers to it as "a spirited and interesting work, in which every thing is as judiciously reasoned as it is beautifully and forcibly expressed," and as "much more grave in its character and laborious in its execution than any of his preceding ones."4