Beschreibung:

IRVING, WASHINGTON. Autograph letter signed (in full) to "My dear Helen" (wife of his nephew Pierre M. Irving), Sunnyside, 6 April 1854. 7 pages, 8vo, a few slight marginal tears. A fine and lengthy family letter, written three days after his 71st birthday. "...Your uncle [Washington Irving's brother John Treat Irving] is slowly following his thumb down the columns of the Journal of Commerce and I am left to my own thoughts for company: which not being very bright I will try to gossip a little with you...Last Monday...I entered my seventy first year bewailing the common lot of age, the falling off of friends. However I had your uncle, Sarah and little Kate left, and we ate and drank and made merry..." Irving describes his recent visit to New York: "...My last visit to town was quite a gay one. Irving and Sarah [a nephew and niece] and myself took a sudden thought one evening to go to Wallack's theatre and a very pleasant evening we passed there...Another of my dissipations was an evening at the dancing school, where I was very much pleased and amused...The scene brought my old dancing-school days back again, and I felt very much like cutting a pigeon wing, and showing the young folds how we all footed it in days of yore, about the time that David danced before the ark. The next morning where should I breakfast but at Judge [John] Duer's: it was to meet Mr. [Sir Thomas] Lawrence, the English portrait painter, who has come out with letters from [William Makespeace] Thackeray, and I don't know who all, and is painting all the head people (some of whom have no heads) in town..." "...It's pretty late and time to go to bed. Your uncle has thumbed through the whole of the Journal of Commerce , not an advertisement has escaped him. I fear he is sitting up out of civility to me so I will conclude [not, however, before adding a charming full-page post-script]..." Partially quoted in The Life and Letters of Washington Irving. Edited by ... Pierre M. Irving (New York, 1864), vol 4, pp. 172-173.