". . . Last Monday was my birth day. Eliza and Oscar were to have come up on Saturday and staid over Sunday [to] eat a birth day dinner with me. The weather was threatening on Saturday, so they became faint hearted and staid at home. Kate being baulked of their company deserted me on Saturday morning and went to town where she still remains; so 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 together.
"I am glad you and Pierre managed to pass several days in Washington . . . . I foresaw . . . that you would stay for the Brazilian minister's ball, and you did right in doing so. It gave you an opportunity of seeing diplomacy . . . and in some measure prepared you for that elevated 'spear' in which you and Pierre will move when the state quarry has made him a millionaire and he is enabled to take the Grand Tower and go t'italy.
"I was the greater part of last week in town. Helen Treat was there with part of her family . . . . Treat is in high spirits about the state quarry . . . . My last visit to town was quite a gay one. Irving and Sarah and myself took a sudden thought one evening to go to Wallack's theatre and a very pleasant evening was passed there. It was the first representation of a little comedy in three acts from the French called 'The prison and the palace' and I recommend you to see it, when you return to New York and the quarry has made a dividend. . . .
"The next morning where should I breakfast but at Judge Duer's! I was to meet Mr. Lawrence the English portrait painter, who has come out with letters from Thackeray and I don't know who all, and is painting all the head people (some of whom have no heads) in town. It was a very agreeable breakfast party, three or four gentlemen beside Mr. Lawrence and myself; but what made it especially agreeable . . . was the presence of two of the Miss Duers! Jane I believe, and Harriet. My dear Helen I was delighted with them; so bright, so easy, so lady like, so intelligent. Harriet has one of the finest most spiritual faces I have seen for a long time. Why in heaven's name have I not seen more of these women? We have very few like them in New York. . . ."
Excerpted in Pierre Munro Irving's Life and Letters of Washington Irving (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1883), 172.
With--(Washington Irving.) Group of over 30 letters between some of the principal figures involved in printing, distributing and selling his The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819-20), including publishers Moses Thomas and Henry Brevoort, booksellers Wells & Lilley, distributor E.J. Coale, printer C.S. Van Winkle, and Irving's brother Ebenezer, many concerning issues relating to the acquisition of appropriate paper, most to Brevoort. Together over 50 pages, 4to, most with integral address leaf; few with missing panels but mostly without loss to text. Vp, September 1818-November 1819.