HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY.--Of _The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus_
(1828), Irving said "it cost me more toil and trouble than all my other
productions." While the method of scientific historical study has
completely changed since his time, no dry-as-dust historian has yet equaled
Irving in presenting the human side of Columbus, his ideals, his dreams,
and his mastery of wind and wave and human nature in the greatest voyage of
the ages. Others have written of him as a man who once lived but who died
so very long ago that he now has no more life than the portraits of those
old masters who made all their figures look like paralytics. Irving did not
write this work as if he were imagining a romance. He searched for his
facts in all the musty records which he could find in Spain, but he then
remembered that they dealt with a living, enthusiastic human being,
sometimes weak, and sometimes invested with more than the strength of all
the generations that had died without discovering the New World. It was
this work which, more than any other, brought Irving the degree of D.C.L.
from Oxford University. And yet, when he appeared to take his degree, the
undergraduates of Oxford voiced the judgment of posterity by welcoming him
with shouts of "Diedrich Knickerbocker!" "Ichabod Crane!" "Rip Van Winkle!"
_The Conquest of Granada_ (1829) is a thrilling narrative of the
subjugation by Ferdinand and Isabella of the last kingdom of the Moors in
Spain.
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