COMPLETION
OF THE
LIFE AND LETTERS
OF
Washington Irving.
BY PIERRE M. IRVING.
IN FOUR VOLUMES.
The Publisher has the satisfaction of announcing that the 4th volume of
this delightful and attractive work is completed. It includes a COPIOUS
INDEX TO THE FOUR VOLUMES, prepared by S. Austin Allibone,
LL.D., author of the “Dictionary of Authors.”
∵ This work is not a bald biographical account of an individual, but chiefly consists
in a series of sprightly and charming LETTERS, written in various parts of Europe and
the United States, and graphically describing notable events, national characteristics,
and distinguished statesmen and literary men, whose names are “familiar in our mouths
as household words”—the whole extending over a period of more than SIXTY YEARS,
and including the times of the First Napoleon, the times of Jefferson, and Madison,
and Aaron Burr;—associations and correspondence with Scott, Lockhart, Moore, Rogers,
Leslie, James, Dickens, and a host of others in England, France, and Spain: while the
literary and political incidents and characteristics of the whole of the present century, at
home and abroad, are recalled by the vivid biographical touches of these familiar letters.
The genial humor, and the magnetic characteristics of the writer, are especially drawn out
of the domestic and family letters, which form a large part of the volumes. No epistolary
or biographical collection in the English language, or perhaps in any other, is comparable
with this in the variety, scope, and interest of the topics, and the characters introduced.
It may be described as “the Autobiography of Washington Irving, as [unconsciously] related
in several hundred familiar letters to friends; with pen-pictures of the times in
which he lived.”
The materials for this work, if more freely used, would have filled six or eight volumes.
The editor, who received from his distinguished relative these materials, with the request
that he should use them as he thought best, has selected and compressed into four volumes,
the matter most essential to the narrative, and most illustrative of the author's
characteristics. It was at first hoped that this might be done in three volumes, but this
was found to be impracticable, and many intelligent readers have earnestly asked for as
many more.
A new impression of the four volumes is now ready, at
$1.50 per Volume.
The prices in the Publisher's Catalogue are therefore to be corrected as follows:
| Irving's Life, 4 vols., cloth, extra |
$ 6.00 |
| Irving's Life, 4 vols., half calf, extra |
10.00 |
| Irving's Life, 4 vols., half calf, antique |
10.00 |
40,000 sets will be wanted to accompany the revised editions of Irving's Works
already printed and sold.
