I liked the Irving of Sleepy Hollow, Rip Van Winkle, and the German student (one of the great horror stories, by the way), and I had read his Tour of the Prairies (1832) with appreciation for his observational skills.  I knew about his four-volume life of George Washington, but I did not know what to expect of his attempt at history and biography.  He lived in a great age of American historians -- George Bancroft, William Hickling Prescott, John Motley, Francis Parkman (all now condescended to as "romantic" historians) -- but Irving was a storyteller, a fabulist, a satirist, not a man of facts and dates.  I was pleasantly surprised.