Page 12 - Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, James Russell Lowell, Bayard Taylor

furniture, and the walls were adorned with old family portraits. The place
was in charge of an old man and his wife and a negro boy, who were the

sole occupants, except when the nine would sally forth from New York and
enliven its solitudes with their madcap pranks and orgies.

"’Who would have thought," said Irving at the age of sixty-three to another
of those nine lads, "that we should ever have lived to be two such

respectable old gentlemen!"

About this time Irving and a friend named James K. Paulding proposed to
start a paper, to be called "Salmagundi." It was an imitation of Addison’s
Spectator, and consisted of light, humorous essays, most of them making

fun of the fads and fancies of New York life in those days. The numbers
were published from a week to a month apart, and were continued for about

a year.

The young men had no idea of making money by the venture, for they were

then well-to-do; but to their surprise it proved a great success, and the
publisher is said to have made ten or fifteen thousand dollars out of it. He

afterwards paid the editors four hundred dollars each.

Irving now visited Philadelphia, Boston, and other places. He thought of

trying for a government office, and was tempted into politics. His
description of his experience is amusing enough.

"Before the third day was expired, I was as deep in mud and politics as ever
a moderate gentleman would wish to be; and I drank beer with the

multitude; and I talked handbill-fashion with the demagogues, and I shook
hands with the mob--whom my heart abhorreth. ’Tis true, for the two first

days I maintained my coolness and indifference.... But the third day--ah!
then came the tug of war. My patriotism all at once blazed forth, and I
determined to save my country! O, my friend, I have been in such holes and

corners; such filthy nooks, sweep offices, and oyster cellars!"

He closes by saying that this saving one’s country is such a sickening
business that he wants no more of it.