The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Wr - Washington Irving [150]
The Author’s Farewell8
And so, without more circumstance at all,
I hold it fit that we shake hands and part.
HAMLETjn
Having taken leave of the Hall and its inmates, and brought the history of my visit to something like a close, there seems to remain nothing further than to make my bow, and exit. It is my foible, however, to get on such companionable terms with my reader in the course of a work, that it really costs me some pain to part with him, and I am apt to keep him by the hand, and have a few farewell words at the end of my last volume.
When I cast an eye back upon the work I am just concluding, I cannot but be sensible how full it must be of errors and imperfections; indeed, how should it be otherwise, writing, as I do, about subjects and scenes with which, as a stranger, I am but partially acquainted? Many will, doubtless, find cause to smile at very obvious blunders which I may have made; and many may, perhaps, be offended at what they may conceive prejudiced representations. Some will think I might have said much more on such subjects as may suit their peculiar tastes; whilst others will think I had done wiser to have left those subjects entirely alone.
It will probably be said, too, by some, that I view England with a partial eye. Perhaps I do; for I can never forget that it is my “father-land.” And yet the circumstances under which I have viewed it have by no means been such as were calculated to produce favorable impressions. For the greater part of the time that I have resided in it, I have lived almost unknowing and unknown; seeking no favors and receiving none;—“a stranger and a sojourner in the land,”jo and subject to all the chills and neglects that are the common lot of the stranger.
When I consider these circumstances, and recollect how often I have taken up my pen, with a mind ill at ease, and spirits much dejected and cast down, I cannot but think I was not likely to err on the favorable side of the picture. The opinions I have given of English character have been the result of much quiet, dispassionate, and varied observation. It is a character not to be hastily studied, for it always puts on a repulsive and ungracious aspect to a stranger. Let those, then, who condemn my representations as too favorable, observe this people as closely and deliberately as I have done, and they will, probably, change their opinion. Of one thing, at any rate, I am certain, that I have spoken honestly and sincerely, from the convictions of my mind and the dictates of my heart. When I first published my former writings, it was with no hope of gaining favor in English eyes, for I little thought they were to become current out of my own country; and had I merely sought popularity among my own countrymen, I should have taken a more direct and obvious way, by gratifying rather than rebuking the angry feelings then prevalent against England.
And here let me acknowledge my warm, my thankful feelings, at the effect produced by one of my trivial lucubrations. I allude to the essay in the “Sketch-Book,” on the subject of the literary feuds between England and America. I cannot express the heartfelt delight I have experienced at the unexpected sympathy and approbation with which those remarks have been received on both sides of the Atlantic. I speak this not from any paltry feelings of gratified vanity, for I attribute the effect to no merit of my pen. The paper in question was brief and casual, and the ideas it conveyed were simple and obvious. “It was the cause; it was the cause”jp alone. There was a predisposition on the part of my readers to be favorably affected. My countrymen responded in heart to the filial feelings I had avowed in their name towards the parent country; and there was a generous sympathy in every English bosom towards