In the following year Irving was again in England, visiting his sister in
Birmingham, and tasting moderately the delights of London. He was,
indeed, something of an invalid. An eruptive malady,--the revenge of
nature, perhaps, for defeat in her earlier attack on his lungs,-appearing
in his ankles, incapacitated him for walking, tormented him at intervals
so that literary composition was impossible, sent him on pilgrimages to
curative springs, and on journeys undertaken for distraction and
amusement, in which all work except that of seeing and absorbing material
had to be postponed. He was subject to this recurring invalidism all his
life, and we must regard a good part of the work he did as a pure triumph
of determination over physical discouragement. This year the fruits of
his interrupted labor appeared in "Bracebridge Hall," a volume that was
well received, but did not add much to his reputation, though it
contained "Dolph Heyliger," one of his most characteristic Dutch stories,
and the "Stout Gentleman," one of his daintiest and most artistic bits of
restrained humor.--['I was once' says his biographer reading aloud in his
presence a very flattering review of his works, which, had been sent him
by the critic in 1848, and smiled as I came to this sentence: 'His most
comical pieces have always a serious end in view.
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