The cholera frightened Willis away from Paris in April, but before he left, the United States minister, Mr. Rives, appointed him honorary attache to his own embassy, a great social advantage to the young man, who was thereby enabled to obtain the entree into court circles in every country that he visited. At the same time the appointment somewhat misled his numerous new acquaintances on the subject of his social position, while the 'spurious' attacheship afterwards became a weapon in the hands of his enemies. However, for the time being, the young correspondent thoroughly enjoyed his novel experiences, and contrived to communicate his enjoyment to his readers. His letters were eagerly read by his countrymen, and are said to have been copied into no less than five hundred newspapers. He eschewed useful information, gave impressions rather than statistics, and was fairly successful in avoiding the style of the guide-book. The summer and autumn of 1832 were spent in northern Italy, Florence being the traveller's headquarters. He had letters of introduction to half the Italian nobility, and was made welcome in the court circles of Tuscany. In the autumn he was flirting at the Baths of Lucca, and at this time he had formed a project of travelling to London by way of Switzerland. 'In London,' he writes to his sister, 'I mean to make arrangements with the magazines, and then live abroad altogether. It costs so little here, and one lives so luxuriously too, and there is so much to fill one's mind and eye, that I think of returning to naked America with ever-increasing repugnance. I love my country, but the ornamental is my vocation, and of this she has none.' This programme was changed, and Willis spent the winter between Rome, Florence, and Venice. Wherever he went he made friends, but his progress was in itself a feat of diplomacy, and few people dreamt that the dashing young attache depended for his living upon his contributions to a newspaper, payment for which did not always arrive with desirable punctuality. 'I have dined,' he writes to his mother, 'with a prince one day, and alone in a cook-shop the next.' He explains that he can live on about sixty pounds a year at Florence, paying four or five shillings a week for his rooms, breakfasting for fourpence, and dining quite magnificently for a shilling.

In June 1833, Willis was invited by the officers of an American frigate to accompany them on a six months' cruise in the Mediterranean. This was far too good an offer to be refused, since it would have been impossible to get a peep at the East under more ideal conditions of travel. Willis's letters from Greece and Turkey are among the best and happiest that he wrote, for the weather was perfect, the company was pleasant (there were ladies on board), and the reception they met with wherever they weighed anchor was most hospitable; while the Oriental mode of life appealed to our hero's highly-coloured, romantic taste. In the island of AEgina he was introduced to Byron's Maid of Athens, once the beautiful Teresa Makri, now plain Mrs. Black, with an ugly little boy, and a Scotch terrier that snapped at the traveller's heels. He describes the ci-devant Maid of Athens as a handsome woman, with a clear dark skin, and a nose and forehead that formed the straight line of the Greek model.

'Her eyes are large,' he continues, 'and of a soft, liquid hazel, and this is her chief beauty. There is that looking out of the soul through them which Byron always described as constituting the loveliness that most moved him.... We met her as simple Mrs. Black, whose husband's terrier had worried us at the door, and we left her feeling that the poetry she called forth from the heart of Byron was her due by every law of loveliness.'

By this time the fame of the Pencillings had reached London; and at Smyrna Willis found a letter awaiting him from the Morning Herald, which contained an offer of the post of foreign correspondent at a salary of L200 a year. But as his letters would have to be mainly political, and as he might be expected to act as war-correspondent, which was scarcely in his line, he decided to refuse the offer. On leaving the frigate he loitered through Italy, Switzerland, and France to England, arriving at Dover on June 1, 1834. While at Florence he had made the acquaintance of Walter Savage Landor, who had given him some valuable letters of introduction to people in England, among them one to Lady Blessington. Landor also put into Willis's hands a package of books, whose temporary disappearance through some mismanagement roused the formidable wrath of the old poet. In his Letter to an Author, printed at the end of Pericles and Aspasia, Landor describes the transaction (which related to an American edition of the Imaginary Conversations), and continues:—

'I regret the appearance of his book (the Pencillings by the Way) more than the disappearance of mine.... My letter of presentation to Lady Blessington threw open (I am afraid) too many folding-doors, some of which have been left rather uncomfortably ajar. No doubt his celebrity as a poet, and his dignity as a diplomatist, would have procured him all those distinctions in society which he allowed so humble a person as myself the instrumentality of conferring. Greatly as I have been flattered by the visits of American gentlemen, I hope that for the future no penciller of similar composition will deviate in my favour to the right hand of the road from Florence to Fiesole.'

The end of this storm in a teacup was that the books, which had safely arrived in New York, returned as safely to London, where they were handed over to their rightful owner, but not in time, as Willis complained, to keep him from going down to posterity astride the finis to Pericles and Aspasia. Long afterwards he expressed his hope that Landor's biographers would either let him slip off at Lethe's wharf, or else do him justice in a note. Before this unfortunate incident, Landor and Willis had corresponded on cordial terms. The old poet wrote to say how much he envied his correspondent the evenings he passed in the society of 'the most accomplished and graceful of all our fashionable world, my excellent friend, Lady Blessington,' while the American could not sufficiently express his gratitude for the introduction to that lady, 'my lodestar and most valued friend,' as he called her, 'for whose acquaintance I am so much indebted to you, that you will find it difficult in your lifetime to diminish my obligations.'

Willis seems to have arrived in England prepared to like everything English, and he began by falling in love with the Ship Hotel at Dover, 'with its bells that would ring, doors that would shut, blazing coal fires [on June 1], and its landlady who spoke English, and was civil—a greater contrast to the Continent could hardly he imagined.' The next morning he was in raptures over the coach that took him to London, with its light harness, four beautiful bays, and dashing coachman, who discussed the Opera, and hummed airs from the Puritani. He saw a hundred charming spots on the road that he coveted with quite a heartache, and even the little houses and gardens in the suburbs pleased his taste—there was such an affectionateness in the outside of every one of them. Regent Street he declares to be the finest street he has ever seen, and he exclaims, 'The Toledo of Naples, the Corso of Rome, the Rue de la Paix, and the Boulevards of Paris are really nothing to Regent Street.'

Willis called on Lady Blessington in the afternoon of the day after his arrival, but was informed that her ladyship was not yet down to breakfast. An hour later, however, he received a note from her inviting him to call the same evening at ten o'clock. She was then living at Seamore House, while D'Orsay had lodgings in Curzon Street. Willis tells us that he found a very beautiful woman exquisitely dressed, who looked on the sunny side of thirty, though she frankly owned to forty, and was, in fact, forty-five. Lady Blessington received the young American very cordially, introduced him to the magnificent D'Orsay, and plunged at once into literary talk. She was curious to know the degree of popularity enjoyed by English authors in America, more especially by Bulwer and D'Israeli, both of whom she promised that he should meet at her house.

'D'Israeli the elder,' she said, 'came here with his son the other night. It would have delighted you to see the old man's pride in him. As he was going away, he patted him on the head, and said, "Take care of him, Lady Blessington, for my sake. He is a clever lad, but wants ballast. I am glad he has the honour to know you, for you will check him sometimes when I am away...." D'Israeli the younger is quite his own character of Vivian Grey, crowded with talent, but very soigne of his curls, and a bit of a coxcomb. There is no reverse about him, however, and he is the only joyous dandy I ever saw.' Then the conversation turned upon Byron, and Willis asked if Lady Blessington had known La Guiccioli. 'No; we were at Pisa when they were together,' she replied. 'But though Lord Blessington had the greatest curiosity to see her, Lord Byron would never permit it. "She has a red head of her own," said he, "and don't like to show it." Byron treated the poor creature dreadfully ill. She feared more than she loved him.'

On concluding this account of his visit, Willis observes that there can be no objection to his publishing such personal descriptions and anecdotes in an American periodical, since 'the English just know of our existence, and if they get an idea twice a year of our progress in politics, they are comparatively well informed. Our periodical literature is never even heard of. I mention this fact lest, at first thought, I might seem to have abused the hospitality or the frankness of those on whom letters of introduction have given me claims for civility.' Alas, poor Willis! He little thought that one of the most distinguished and most venomous of British critics would make a long arm across the Atlantic, and hold up his prattlings to ridicule and condemnation.

The following evening our Penciller met a distinguished company at Seamore House, the two Bulwers, Edward and Henry; James Smith of 'Rejected Addresses' fame; Fonblanque, the editor of the Examiner; and the young Duc de Richelieu. Of Fonblanque, Willis observes: 'I never saw a worse face, sallow, seamed, and hollow, his teeth irregular, his skin livid, his straight black hair uncombed. A hollow, croaking voice, and a small, fiery black eye, with a smile like a skeleton's, certainly did not improve his physiognomy.' Fonblanque, as might have been anticipated, did not at all appreciate this description of his personal defects, when it afterwards appeared in print. Edward Bulwer was quite unlike what Willis had expected. 'He is short,' he writes, 'very much bent, slightly knock-kneed, and as ill-dressed a man for a gentleman as you will find in London.... He has a retreating forehead, large aquiline nose, immense red whiskers, and a mouth contradictory of all talent. A more good-natured, habitually smiling, nerveless expression could hardly be imagined.' Bulwer seems to have made up for his appearance by his high spirits, lover-like voice, and delightful conversation, some of which our Boswell has reported.

'Smith asked Bulwer if he kept an amanuensis. "No," he said, "I scribble it all out myself, and send it to the press in a most ungentlemanlike hand, half print, half hieroglyphics, with all its imperfections on its head, and correct in the proof—very much to the dissatisfaction of the publisher, who sends me in a bill of L16, 6s. 4d. for extra corrections. Then I am free to confess I don't know grammar. Lady Blessington, do you know grammar? There never was such a thing heard of before Lindley Murray. I wonder what they did for grammar before his day! Oh, the delicious blunders one sees when they are irretrievable! And the best of it is the critics never get hold of them. Thank Heaven for second editions, that one may scratch out one's blots, and go down clean and gentlemanlike to posterity." Smith asked him if he had ever reviewed one of his own books. "No, but I could! And then how I should like to recriminate, and defend myself indignantly! I think I could be preciously severe. Depend upon it, nobody knows a book's faults so well as its author. I have a great idea of criticising my books for my posthumous memoirs. Shall I, Smith? Shall I, Lady Blessington?"'

Willis fell into conversation with the good-natured, though gouty James Smith, who talked to him of America, and declared that there never was so delightful a fellow as Washington Irving. 'I was once,' he said, 'taken down with him into the country by a merchant to dinner. Our friend stopped his carriage at the gate of his park, and asked if we would walk through the grounds to the house. Irving refused, and held me down by the coat-tails, so that we drove on to the house together, leaving our host to follow on foot. "I make it a principle," said Irving, "never to walk with a man through his own grounds. I have no idea of praising a thing whether I like it or not. You and I will do them to-morrow by ourselves."' 'The Rejected Addresses,' continues Willis, 'got on his crutches about three o'clock in the morning, and I made my exit with the rest, thanking Heaven that, though in a strange country, my mother-tongue was the language of its men of genius.'

One of the most interesting passages in the Pencillings is that in which Willis describes a breakfast at Crabb Robinson's chambers in the Temple, where he met Charles and Mary Lamb, a privilege which he seems thoroughly to have appreciated. 'I never in my life,' he declares, 'had an invitation more to my taste. The Essays of Elia are certainly the most charming things in the world, and it has been, for the last ten years, my highest compliment to the literary taste of a friend to present him with a copy.... I arrived half an hour before Lamb, and had time to learn something of his peculiarities. Some family circumstances have tended to depress him of late years, and unless excited by convivial intercourse, he never shows a trace of what he once was. He is excessively given to mystifying his friends, and is never so delighted as when he has persuaded some one into a belief in one of his grave inventions.... There was a rap at the door at last, and enter a gentleman in black small clothes and gaiters, short and very slight in his person, his hair just sprinkled with grey, a beautiful, deep-set, grey eye, aquiline nose, and a very indescribable mouth. His sister, whose literary reputation is very closely associated with her brother's, came in after him. She is a small, bent figure, evidently a victim to ill-health, and hears with difficulty. Her face has been, I should think, a fine, handsome one, and her bright grey eye is still full of intelligence and fire....

'I had set a large arm-chair for Miss Lamb. "Don't take it, Mary," said Lamb, pulling it away from her very gravely. "It looks as if you were going to have a tooth drawn." The conversation was very local, but perhaps in this way I saw more of the author, for his manner of speaking of their mutual friends, and the quaint humour with which he complained of one, and spoke well of another, was so completely in the vein of his inimitable writings, that I could have fancied myself listening to an audible composition of new Elia. Nothing could be more delightful than the kindness and affection between the brother and sister, though Lamb was continually taking advantage of her deafness to mystify her on every topic that was started. "Poor Mary," he said, "she hears all of an epigram but the point." "What are you saying of me, Charles?" she asked. "Mr. Willis," said he, raising his voice, "admires your Confessions of a Drunkard very much, and I was saying that it was no merit of yours that you understood the subject."

'The conversation presently turned upon literary topics, and Lamb observed: "I don't know much of your American authors. Mary, there, devours Cooper's novels with a ravenous appetite with which I have no sympathy. The only American book I ever read twice was the Journal of Edward Woolman, a Quaker preacher and tinker, whose character is one of the finest I ever met. He tells a story or two about negro slaves that brought the tears into my eyes. I can read no prose now, though Hazlitt sometimes, to be sure—but then Hazlitt is worth all the modern prose-writers put together." I mentioned having bought a copy of Elia the last day I was in America, to send as a parting gift to one of the most lovely and talented women in the country. "What did you give for it?" asked Lamb. "About seven-and-six." "Permit me to pay you that," said he, and with the utmost earnestness he counted the money out on the table. "I never yet wrote anything that would sell," he continued. "I am the publisher's ruin. My last poem won't sell a copy. Have you seen it, Mr. Willis?" I had not. "It is only eighteenpence, and I'll give you sixpence towards it," and he described to me where I should find it sticking up in a shop-window in the Strand.

'Lamb ate nothing, and complained in a querulous tone of the veal pie. There was a kind of potted fish, which he had expected that our friend would procure for him. He inquired whether there was not a morsel left in the bottom of the last pot. Mr. Robinson was not sure. "Send and see," said Lamb, "and if the pot has been cleaned, bring me the lid. I think the sight of it would do me good." The cover was brought, upon which there was a picture of the fish. Lamb kissed it with a reproachful look at his friend, and then left the table and began to wander round the room with a broken, uncertain step, as if he almost forgot to put one leg before the other. His sister rose after a while, and commenced walking up and down in the same manner on the opposite side of the table, and in the course of half an hour they took their leave.' Landor, in commenting on this passage, says it is evident that Willis 'fidgeted the Lambs,' and seems rather unaccountably annoyed at his having alluded to Crabb Robinson simply as 'a barrister.'

In London Willis appears to have fallen upon his feet from the very first. To the end of his life he looked back upon his first two years in England as the happiest and most successful period in his whole career. It was small wonder that he became a little dazzled and intoxicated by the brilliancy of his surroundings, which spoilt him for the homelier conditions of American life. 'What a star is mine,' he wrote to his sister Julia, three days after landing at Dover. 'All the best society of London exclusives is now open to me—me! without a sou in my pocket beyond what my pen brings me, and with not only no influence from friends at home, but with a world of envy and slander at my back.... In a literary way I have already had offers from the Court Magazine, the Metropolitan, and the New Monthly, of the first price for my articles. I sent a short tale, written in one day, to the Court Magazine, and they gave me eight guineas for it at once. I lodge in Cavendish Square, the most fashionable part of the town, paying a guinea a week for my lodgings, and am as well off as if I had been the son of the President.'

Willis was constantly at Lady Blessington's house, where he met some of the best masculine society of the day. At one dinner-party among his fellow-guests were D'Israeli, Bulwer, Procter (Barry Cornwall), Lord Durham, and Sir Martin Shee. It was his first sight of Dizzy, whom he found looking out of the window with the last rays of sunlight reflected on the gorgeous gold flowers of an embroidered waistcoat. A white stick with a black cord and tassel, and a quantity of chains about his neck and pocket, rendered him rather a conspicuous object. 'D'Israeli,' says our chronicler, 'has one of the most remarkable faces I ever saw. He is vividly pale, and but for the energy of his action and the strength of his lungs, would seem a victim to consumption. His eye is as black as Erebus, and has the most mocking, lying-in-wait expression conceivable. His mouth is alive with a kind of impatient nervousness, and when he has burst forth with a particularly successful cataract of expression, it assumes a curl of triumphant scorn that would be worthy of Mephistopheles. A thick, heavy mass of jet-black ringlets falls over his left cheek almost to his collarless stock, while on the right temple it is parted and put away with the smooth carefulness of a girl's, and shines most unctuously with "thy incomparable oil, Macassar."' Willis was always interested in dress, being himself a born dandy, and he was inclined to judge a man by the cut of his coat and the set of his hat. On this occasion he remarks that Bulwer was very badly dressed as usual, while Count D'Orsay was very splendid, but quite indefinable. 'He seemed showily dressed till you looked to particulars, and then it seemed only a simple thing well fitted to a very magnificent person.'

The conversation ran at first on Sir Henry Taylor's new play, Philip van Artevelde, which the company thought overrated, and then passed to Beckford, of Vathek fame, who had already retired from the world, and was living at Bath in his usual eccentric fashion. Dizzy was the only person present who had met him, and, declares Willis, 'I might as well attempt to gather up the foam of the sea as to convey an idea of the extraordinary language in which he clothed his description. There were at least five words in every sentence which must have been very much astonished at the use to which they were put, and yet no others apparently could so well have conveyed his idea. He talked like a racehorse approaching the winning-post, every muscle in action, and the utmost energy of expression flowing out in every burst. It is a great pity he is not in Parliament.'

At midnight Lady Blessington left the table, when the conversation took a political turn, but D'Israeli soon dashed off again with a story of an Irish dragoon who was killed in the Peninsular. 'His arm was shot off, and he was bleeding to death. When told he could not live, he called for a large silver goblet, out of which he usually drank his claret. He held it to the gushing artery, and filled it to the brim, then poured it slowly out upon the ground, saying, "If that had been shed for old Ireland." You can have no idea how thrillingly this little story was told. Fonblanque, however, who is a cold political satirist, could see nothing in a man's "decanting his claret" that was in the least sublime, so "Vivian Grey" got into a passion, and for a while was silent.'

Willis was now fairly launched in London society, literary and fashionable. He went to the Opera to hear Grisi, then young and pretty, and Lady Blessington pointed out the beautiful Mrs. Norton, looking like a queen, and Lord Brougham flirting desperately with a lovely woman, 'his mouth going with the convulsive twitch that so disfigures him, and his most unsightly of pug-noses in the strongest relief against the red lining of the box.' He breakfasted with 'Barry Cornwall,' whose poetry he greatly admired, and was introduced to the charming Mrs. Procter and the 'yellow-tressed Adelaide,' then only eight or nine years old. Procter gave his visitor a volume of his own poems, and told him anecdotes of the various authors he had known, Hazlitt, Lamb, Keats, and Shelley. Another interesting entertainment was an evening party at Edward Bulwer's house. Willis arrived at eleven, and found his hostess alone, playing with a King Charles' spaniel, while she awaited her guests.

'The author of Pelham,' he writes, 'is a younger son, and depends on his writings for a livelihood; and truly, measuring works of fancy by what they will bring, a glance round his luxurious rooms is worth reams of puffs in the Quarterlies. He lives in the heart of fashionable London, entertains a great deal, and is expensive in all his habits, and for this pay Messrs. Clifford, Pelham, and Aram—most excellent bankers. As I looked at the beautiful woman before me, waiting to receive the rank and fashion of London, I thought that close-fisted old literature never had better reason for his partial largess.'

Willis was astonished at the neglect with which the female portion of the assemblage was treated, no young man ever speaking to a young lady except to ask her to dance. 'There they sit with their mammas,' he observes, 'their hands before them in the received attitude; and if there happens to be no dancing, looking at a print, or eating an ice, is for them the most entertaining circumstance of the evening. Late in the evening a charming girl, who is the reigning belle of Naples, came in with her mother from the Opera, and I made this same remark to her. "I detest England for that very reason," she said frankly. "It is the fashion in London for young men to prefer everything to the society of women. They have their clubs, their horses, their rowing matches, their hunting, and everything else is a bore! How different are the same men at Naples! They can never get enough of one there."... She mentioned several of the beaux of last winter who had returned to England. "Here have I been in London a month, and these very men who were at my side all day on the Strada Nuova, and all but fighting to dance three times with me of an evening, have only left their cards. Not because they care less about me, but because it is not the fashion—it would be talked about at the clubs; it is knowing to let us alone."'

There were only three men at the party, according to Willis, who could come under the head of beaux, but there were many distinguished persons. There was Byron's sister, Mrs. Leigh, a thin, plain, middle-aged woman, of a serious countenance, but with very cordial, pleasing manners. Sheil, the famous Irish orator, small, dark, deceitful, and talented-looking, with a squeaky voice, was to be seen in earnest conversation with the courtly old Lord Clarendon. Fonblanque, with his pale, dislocated-looking face, was making the amiable, with a ghastly smile, to Lady Stepney, author of The Road to Ruin and other fashionable novels. The bilious Lord Durham, with his Brutus head and severe countenance, high-bred in appearance in spite of the worst possible coat and trousers, was talking politics with Bowring. Prince Moscowa, son of Marshal Ney, a plain, determined-looking young man, was unconscious of everything but the presence of the lovely Mrs. Leicester Stanhope. Her husband, afterwards Sir Leicester, who had been Byron's companion in Greece, was introduced to Willis, and the two soon became on intimate terms.

In the course of the season Willis made the acquaintance of Miss Mitford, who invited him to spend a week with her at her cottage near Reading. In a letter to her friend, Miss Jephson, Miss Mitford says: 'I also like very much Mr. Willis, an American author, who is now understood to be here to publish his account of England. He is a very elegant young man, more like one of the best of our peers' sons than a rough republican.' The admiration was apparently mutual, for Willis, in a letter to the author of Our Village, says: 'You are distinguished in the world as the "gentlewoman" among authoresses, as you are for your rank merely in literature. I have often thought you very enviable for the universality of that opinion about you. You share it with Sir Philip Sidney, who was in his day the gentleman among authors. I look with great interest for your new tragedy. I think your mind is essentially dramatic; and in that, in our time, you are alone. I know no one else who could have written Rienzi, and I felt Charles I. to my fingers' ends, as one feels no other modern play.'

Willis was less happy in his relations with Harriet Martineau, to whom he was introduced just before her departure for America. 'While I was preparing for my travels,' she writes, in her own account of the interview, 'an acquaintance brought a buxom gentleman, whom he introduced under the name of Willis. There was something rather engaging in the round face, brisk air, and enjouement of the young man; but his conscious dandyism and unparalleled self-complacency spoiled the satisfaction, though they increased the inclination to laugh.... He whipped his bright little boot with his bright little cane, while he ran over the names of all his distinguished fellow-countrymen, and declared that he would send me letters to them all.' Miss Martineau further relates that the few letters she presented met with a very indifferent reception. Her indignation increased when she found that in his private correspondence Willis had given the impression that she was one of his most intimate friends. In his own account of the interview he merely says: 'I was taken by the clever translator of Faust to see the celebrated Miss Martineau. She has perhaps at this moment the most general and enviable reputation in England, and is the only one of the literary clique whose name is mentioned without some envious qualification.'

A budget of literary news sent to the Mirror includes such items as that 'D'Israeli is driving about in an open carriage with Lady S., looking more melancholy than usual. The absent baronet, whose place he fills, is about to bring an action against him, which will finish his career, unless he can coin the damages in his brain. Mrs. Hemans is dying of consumption in Ireland. I have been passing a week at a country-house, where Miss Jane Porter [author of Scottish Chiefs] and Miss Pardoe [author of Beauties of the Bosphorus] were staying. Miss Porter is one of her own heroines grown old, a still noble wreck of beauty.... Dined last week with Joanna Baillie at Hampstead—the most charming old lady I ever saw. To-day I dine with Longman, to meet Tom Moore, who is living incog. near this Nestor of publishers, and pegging hard at his History of Ireland.... Lady Blessington's new book makes a great noise. Living as she does twelve hours out of the twenty-four in the midst of the most brilliant and intellectually exhausting circle in London, I only wonder how she found time to write it. Yet it was written in six weeks! Her novels sell for a hundred pounds more than any other author's, except Bulwer's. Bulwer gets L1400; Lady Blessington, L400; Mrs. Norton, L250; Lady Charlotte Bury, L200; Grattan, L300; and most other authors below this. Captain Marryat's gross trash sells immensely about Wapping and Portsmouth, and brings him in L500 or L600 the book—but that can scarce be called literature. D'Israeli cannot sell a book at all, I hear. Is not that odd? I would give more for one of his books than for forty of the common saleable things about town.'

One more description of a literary dinner at Lady Blessington's may be quoted before Willis's account of this, his first and most memorable London season, is brought to an end. Among the company on this occasion were Moore, D'Israeli, and Dr. Beattie, the King's physician, who was himself a poet. Moore had been ruralising for a year at Slopperton Cottage, and, before his arrival, D'Israeli expressed his regret that he should have been met on his return to town with a savage article in Fraser on his supposed plagiarisms. Lady Blessington declared that he would never see it, since he guarded himself against the sight and knowledge of criticism as other people guarded against the plague. Some one remarked on Moore's passion for rank. 'He was sure to have five or six invitations to dine on the same day,' it was said, 'and he tormented himself with the idea that he had perhaps not accepted the most exclusive. He would get off from an engagement with a countess to dine with a marchioness, and from a marchioness to accept the invitation of a duchess. As he cared little for the society of men, and would sing and be delightful only for the applause of women, it mattered little whether one circle was more talented than another.' At length Mr. Moore was announced, and the poet, 'sliding his little feet up to Lady Blessington, made his compliments with an ease and gaiety, combined with a kind of worshipping deference, that were worthy of a prime minister at the Court of Love.... His eyes still sparkle like a champagne bubble, though the invader has drawn his pencillings about the corners; and there is a kind of wintry red that seems enamelled on his cheek, the eloquent record of the claret his wit has brightened. His mouth is the most characteristic feature of all. The lips are delicately cut, and as changeable as an aspen; but there is a set-up look about the lower lip—a determination of the muscle to a particular expression, and you fancy that you can see wit astride upon it. It is arch, confident, and half diffident, as if he were disguising his pleasure at applause, while another bright gleam of fancy was breaking upon him. The slightly tossed nose confirms the fun of his expression, and altogether it is a face that sparkles, beams, and radiates.'

The conversation at dinner that night was the most brilliant that the American had yet heard in London. Sir Walter Scott was the first subject of discussion, Lady Blessington having just received from Sir William Gell the manuscript of a volume on the last days of Sir Walter Scott, a melancholy chronicle of ruined health and weakened intellect, which was afterwards suppressed. Moore then described a visit he had paid to Abbotsford, when his host was in his prime. 'Scott,' he said, 'was the most manly and natural character in the world. His hospitality was free and open as the day; he lived freely himself, and expected his guests to do the same.... He never ate or drank to excess, but he had no system; his constitution was Herculean, and he denied himself nothing. I went once from a dinner-party at Sir Thomas Lawrence's to meet Scott at another house. We had hardly entered the room when we were set down to a hot supper of roast chicken, salmon, punch, etc., and Sir Walter ate immensely of everything. What a contrast between this and the last time I saw him in London! He had come to embark for Italy, quite broken down both in mind and body. He gave Mrs. Moore a book, and I asked him if he would make it more valuable by writing in it. He thought I meant that he should write some verses, and said, "I never write poetry now." I asked him to write only his name and hers, and he attempted it, but it was quite illegible.'

O'Connell next became the topic of conversation, and Moore declared that he would be irresistible if it were not for two blots on his character, viz. the contributions in Ireland for his support, and his refusal to give satisfaction to the man he was willing to attack. 'They may say what they will of duelling,' he continued, 'but it is the great preserver of the decencies of society. The old school which made a man responsible for his words was the better.' Moore related how O'Connell had accepted Peel's challenge, and then delayed a meeting on the ground of his wife's illness, till the law interfered. Another Irish patriot refused a meeting on account of the illness of his daughter, whereupon a Dublin wit composed the following epigram upon the two:—

'Some men with a horror of slaughter, Improve on the Scripture command. And honour their—wife and their daughter— That their days may be long in the land.'

Alluding to Grattan's dying advice to his son, 'Always be ready with the pistol,' Moore asked, 'Is it not wonderful that, with all the agitation in Ireland, we have had no such men since his time? The whole country in convulsion—people's lives, fortune, religion at stake, and not a gleam of talent from one's year's end to another. It is natural for sparks to be struck out in a time of violence like this—but Ireland, for all that is worth living for, is dead! You can scarcely reckon Sheil of the calibre of the spirits of old, and O'Connell, with all his faults, stands alone in his glory.'

In the drawing-room, after dinner, some allusion to the later Platonists caused D'Israeli to flare up. His wild black eyes glistened, and his nervous lips poured out eloquence, while a whole ottomanful of noble exquisites listened in amazement. He gave an account of Thomas Taylor, one of the last of the Platonists, who had worshipped Jupiter in a back-parlour in London a few years before. In his old age he was turned out of his lodgings, for attempting, as he said, to worship his gods according to the dictates of his conscience, his landlady having objected to his sacrificing a bull to Jupiter in her parlour. The company laughed at this story as a good invention, but Dizzy assured them it was literally true, and gave his father as his authority. Meanwhile Moore 'went glittering on' with criticisms upon Grisi and the Opera, and the subject of music being thus introduced, he was led, with great difficulty, to the piano. Willis describes his singing as 'a kind of admirable recitative, in which every shade of thought is syllabled and dwelt upon, and the sentiment of the song goes through your blood, warming you to the very eyelids, and starting your tears if you have a soul or sense in you. I have heard of women fainting at a song of Moore's; and if the burden of it answered by chance to a secret in the bosom of the listener, I should think that the heart would break with it. After two or three songs of Lady Blessington's choice, he rambled over the keys a while, and then sang 'When first I met thee' with a pathos that beggars description. When the last word had faltered out, he rose and took Lady Blessington's hand, said Good-night, and was gone before a word was uttered. For a full minute after he closed the door no one spoke. I could have wished for myself to drop silently asleep where I sat, with the tears in my eyes and the softness upon my heart.'



PART II

Having received invitations to stay with Lord Dalhousie and the Duke of Gordon, Willis went north at the beginning of September, 1834. The nominal attraction of Scotland he found, rather to his dismay, was the shooting. The guest, he observes, on arriving at a country-house, is asked whether he prefers a flint or a percussion lock, and a double-barrelled Manton is put into his hands; while after breakfast the ladies leave the table, wishing him good sport. 'I would rather have gone to the library,' says the Penciller. 'An aversion to walking, except upon smooth flag-stones, a poetical tenderness on the subject of putting birds "out of their misery," and hands much more at home with the goose-quill than the gun, were some of my private objections to the order of the day.' At Dalhousie, the son of the house, Lord Ramsay, and his American visitor were mutually astonished at each other's appearance when they met in the park, prepared for a morning's sport.

'From the elegant Oxonian I had seen at breakfast,' writes Willis, 'he (Lord Ramsay) was transformed into a figure something rougher than his Highland dependant, in a woollen shooting-jacket, pockets of any number and capacity, trousers of the coarsest plaid, hobnailed shoes and leather gaiters, and a habit of handling his gun that would have been respected on the Mississippi. My own appearance in high-heeled French boots and other corresponding gear, for a tramp over stubble and marsh, amused him equally; but my wardrobe was exclusively metropolitan, and there was no alternative.' It was hard and exciting work, the novice discovered, to trudge through peas, beans, turnips, and corn, soaked with showers, and muddied to the knees till his Parisian boots were reduced to the consistency of brown paper. He came home, much to his own relief, without having brought the blood of his host's son and heir on his head, and he made a mental note never to go to Scotland again without hobnailed boots and a shooting-jacket.

On leaving Dalhousie Willis spent a few days in Edinburgh, where he breakfasted with Professor Wilson, alias Christopher North. The Professor, he says, talked away famously, quite oblivious of the fact that the tea was made, and the breakfast-dishes were smoking on the table. He spoke much of Blackwood, who then lay dying, and described him as a man of the most refined literary taste, whose opinion of a book he would trust before that of any one he knew. Wilson inquired if his guest had made the acquaintance of Lockhart. 'I have not,' replied Willis. 'He is almost the only literary man in London I have not met; and I must say, as the editor of the Quarterly Review, and the most unfair and unprincipled critic of the day, I have no wish to know him. I never heard him well spoken of. I have probably met a hundred of his acquaintances, but I have not yet seen one who pretended to be his friend.' Wilson defended the absent one, who, he said, was the mildest and most unassuming of men, and dissected a book for pleasure, without thinking of the feelings of the author.

The breakfast had been cooling for an hour when the Professor leant back, with his chair still towards the fire, and 'seizing the teapot as if it were a sledge-hammer, he poured from one cup to the other without interrupting the stream, overrunning both cup and saucer, and partly flooding the tea-tray. He then set the cream towards me with a carelessness that nearly overset it, and in trying to reach an egg from the centre of the table, broke two. He took no notice of his own awkwardness, but drank his cup of tea at a single draught, ate his egg in the same expeditious manner, and went on talking of the "Noctes," and Lockhart, and Blackwood, as if eating his breakfast were rather a troublesome parenthesis in his conversation.' Wilson offered to give his guest letters to Wordsworth and Southey, if he intended to return by the Lakes. 'I lived a long time in their neighbourhood,' he said, 'and know Wordsworth perhaps as well as any one. Many a day I have walked over the hills with him, and listened to his repetition of his own poetry, which, of course, filled my mind completely at the time, and perhaps started the poetical vein in me, though I cannot agree with the critics that my poetry is an imitation of Wordsworth's.'

'Did Wordsworth repeat any other poetry than his own?'

'Never in a single instance, to my knowledge. He is remarkable for the manner in which he is wrapped up in his own poetical life. Everything ministers to it. Everything is done with reference to it. He is all and only a poet.'

'What is Southey's manner of life?'

'Walter Scott said of him that he lived too much with women. He is secluded in the country, and surrounded by a circle of admiring friends, who glorify every literary project he undertakes, and persuade him, in spite of his natural modesty, that he can do nothing wrong. He has great genius, and is a most estimable man.'

On the same day that he breakfasted with Wilson, this fortunate tourist dined with Jeffrey, with whom Lord Brougham was staying. Unluckily, Brougham was absent, at a public dinner given to Lord Grey, who also happened to be in Edinburgh at the time. Willis was charmed with Jeffrey, with his frank smile, hearty manner, and graceful style of putting a guest at his ease. But he cared less for the political conversation at table. 'It had been my lot,' he says, 'to be thrown principally among Tories (Conservatives is the new name) since my arrival in England, and it was difficult to rid myself at once of the impressions of a fortnight passed in the castle of a Tory earl. My sympathies on the great and glorious occasion [the Whig dinner to Lord Grey] were slower than those of the rest of the company, and much of their enthusiasm seemed to me overstrained. Altogether, I entered less into the spirit of the hour than I could have wished. Politics are seldom witty or amusing; and though I was charmed with the good sense and occasional eloquence of Lord Jeffrey, I was glad to get upstairs to chasse-cafe and the ladies.'

Willis aggravated a temporary lameness by dancing at the ball that followed the Whig banquet, and was compelled to abandon a charming land-route north that he had mapped out, and allow himself to be taken 'this side up' on a steamer to Aberdeen. Here he took coach for Fochabers, and thence posted to Gordon Castle. At the castle he found himself in the midst of a most distinguished company; the page who showed him to his room running over the names of Lord Aberdeen and Lord Claude Hamilton, the Duchess of Richmond and her daughter, Lady Sophia Lennox, Lord and Lady Stormont, Lord and Lady Mandeville, Lord and Lady Morton, Lord Aboyne, Lady Keith, and twenty other lesser lights. The duke himself came to fetch his guest before dinner, and presented him to the duchess and the rest of the party. In a letter to Lady Blessington Willis says: 'I am delighted with the duke and duchess. He is a delightful, hearty old fellow, full of fun and conversation, and she is an uncommonly fine woman, and, without beauty, has something agreeable in her countenance. Pour moi-meme, I get on better everywhere than in your presence. I only fear I talk too much; but all the world is particularly civil to me, and among a score of people, no one of whom I had ever seen yesterday, I find myself quite at home to-day.'

The ten days at Gordon Castle Willis afterwards set apart in his memory as 'a bright ellipse in the usual procession of joys and sorrows.' He certainly made the most of this unique opportunity of observing the manners and customs of the great. The routine of life at the castle was what each guest chose to make it. 'Between breakfast and lunch,' he writes, 'the ladies were usually invisible, and the gentlemen rode, or shot, or played billiards. At two o'clock a dish or two of hot game and a profusion of cold meats were set on small tables, and everybody came in for a kind of lounging half meal, which occupied perhaps an hour. Thence all adjourned to the drawing-room, under the windows of which were drawn up carriages of all descriptions, with grooms, outriders, footmen, and saddle-horses for gentlemen and ladies. Parties were then made up for driving or riding, and from a pony-chaise to a phaeton and four, there was no class of vehicle that was not at your disposal. In ten minutes the carriages were all filled, and away they flew, some to the banks of the Spey or the seaside, some to the drives in the park, and all with the delightful consciousness that speed where you would, the horizon scarce limited the possessions of your host, and you were everywhere at home. The ornamental gates flying open at your approach; the herds of red deer trooping away from the sound of your wheels; the stately pheasants feeding tamely in the immense preserves; the stalking gamekeepers lifting their hats in the dark recesses of the forest—there was something in this perpetual reminder of your privileges which, as a novelty, was far from disagreeable. I could not, at the time, bring myself to feel, what perhaps would be more poetical and republican, that a ride in the wild and unfenced forest of my own country would have been more to my taste.'

Willis came to the conclusion that a North American Indian, in his more dignified phase, closely resembled an English nobleman in manner, since it was impossible to astonish either. All violent sensations, he observes, are avoided in high life. 'In conversation nothing is so "odd" (a word that in English means everything disagreeable) as emphasis, or a startling epithet, or gesture, and in common intercourse nothing is so vulgar as any approach to "a scene." For all extraordinary admiration, the word "capital" suffices; for all ordinary praise, the word "nice"; for all condemnation in morals, manners, or religion, the word "odd.".... What is called an overpowering person is immediately shunned, for he talks too much, and excites too much attention. In any other country he would be considered amusing. He is regarded here as a monopoliser of the general interest, and his laurels, talk he never so well, overshadow the rest of the company.'

On leaving Gordon Castle, Willis crossed Scotland by the Caledonian Canal, and from Fort William jolted in a Highland cart through Glencoe to Tarbet on Lomond. Thence the regulation visits were paid to Loch Katrine, the Trossachs and Callander. Another stay at Dalhousie Castle gave the tourist an opportunity of seeing Abbotsford, where he heard much talk of Sir Walter Scott. Lord Dalhousie had many anecdotes to tell of Scott's school-days, and Willis recalled some reminiscences of the Wizard that he had heard from Moore in London. 'Scott was the soul of honesty,' Moore had said. 'When I was on a visit to him, we were coming up from Kelso at sunset, and as there was to be a fine moon, I quoted to him his own rule for seeing "fair Melrose aright," and proposed to stay an hour and enjoy it. "Bah," said Scott. "I never saw it by moonlight." We went, however, and Scott, who seemed to be on the most familiar terms with the cicerone, pointed to an empty niche, and said to him: "I think I have a Virgin and Child that will just do for your niche. I'll send it to you." "How happy you have made that man," I said. "Oh," said Scott, "it was always in the way, and Madam Scott is constantly grudging it house-room. We're well rid of it." Any other man would have allowed himself at least the credit of a kind action.'

After a stay at a Lancashire country-house, Willis arrived at Liverpool, where he got his first sight of the newly-opened railway to Manchester. In the letters and journals of the period, it is rather unusual to come upon any allusion to the great revolution in land-travelling. We often read of our grandfathers' astonishment at the steam-packets that crossed the Atlantic in a fortnight, but they seem to have slid into the habit of travelling by rail almost as a matter of course, much as their descendants have taken to touring in motor-cars. Willis the observant, however, has left on record his sensations during his first journey by rail.

'Down we dived into the long tunnel,' he relates, 'emerging from the darkness at a pace that made my hair sensibly tighten, and hold on with apprehension. Thirty miles in the hour is pleasant going when one is a little accustomed to it, it gives one such a pleasant contempt for time and distance. The whizzing past of the return trains, going in the opposite direction with the same degree of velocity—making you recoil in one second, and a mile off the next—was the only thing which, after a few minutes, I did not take to very kindly.'

Willis adds to our obligations by reporting the cries of the newsboys at the Elephant and Castle, where all the coaches to and from the South stopped for twenty minutes. On the occasion that our traveller passed through, the boys were crying 'Noospipper, sir! Buy the morning pippers, sir! Times, Herald, Chrinnicle, and Munning Post, sir—contains Lud Brum's entire innihalation of Lud Nummanby—Ledy Flor 'Estings' murder by Lud Melbun and the Maids of Honour—debate on the Croolty-Hannimals Bill, and a fatil catstrophy in conskens of loosfer matches! Sixpence, only sixpence!'

In November Willis returned to London, and took lodgings in Vigo Street. During the next ten months he seems to have done a good deal of work for the magazines, and to have been made much of in society as a literary celebrity. His stories and articles, which appeared in the New Monthly Magazine under the pseudonym of Philip Slingsby, were eagerly read by the public of that day. He was presented at court, admitted to the Athenacum and Travellers' Clubs, and patronised by Lady Charlotte Bury and Lady Stepney, ladies who were in the habit of writing bad novels, and giving excellent dinners. Madden, Lady Blessington's biographer, who saw a good deal of Willis at this time, says that he was an extremely agreeable young man, somewhat over-dressed, and a little too demonstratif, but abounding in good spirits. 'He was observant and communicative, lively and clever in conversation, having the peculiar art of making himself agreeable to ladies, old and young, degage in his manner, and on exceedingly good terms with himself.'

Not only had Willis the entree into fashionable Bohemia, but he was well received in many families of unquestionable respectability. Elderly and middle-aged ladies were especially attracted by his flattering attentions and deferential manners, and at this time two of his most devoted friends were Mrs. Shaw of the Manor House, Lee, a daughter of Lord Erskine, and Mrs. Skinner of Shirley Park, the wife of an Indian nabob. Their houses were always open to him, and he says in a letter to his mother: 'I have two homes in England where I am loved like a child. I had a letter from Mrs. Shaw, who thought I looked low-spirited at the opera the other night. "Young men have but two causes of unhappiness," she writes, "love and money. If it is money, Mr. Shaw wishes me to say you shall have as much as you want; if it is love, tell us the lady, and perhaps we can help you." I spend my Sundays alternately at their splendid country-house, and at Mrs. Skinner's, and they can never get enough of me. I am often asked if I carry a love-philter with me.'

At Shirley Park, Willis struck up a friendship with Jane Porter, and made the acquaintance of Lady Morgan, Praed, John Leech, and Martin Tupper. Mrs. Skinner professed to be extremely anxious to find him a suitable wife, and in a confidential letter to her, he writes: 'You say if you had a daughter you would give her to me. If you had one, I should certainly take you at your word, provided this expose of my poverty did not change your fancy. I should like to marry in England, and I feel every day that my best years and best affections are running to waste. I am proud to be an American, but as a literary man, I would rather live in England. So if you know of any affectionate and good girl who would be content to live a quiet life, and could love your humble servant, you have full power to dispose of me, provided she has five hundred a year, or as much more as she likes. I know enough of the world to cut my throat, rather than bring a delicate woman down to a dependence on my brains for support.'

In March of this year, 1835, Willis produced his Melanie, and other Poems, which was 'edited' by Barry Cornwall. He received the honour of a parody in the Bon Gaultier Ballads, entitled 'The Fight with the Snapping Turtle, or the American St. George.' In this ballad Willis and Bryant are represented as setting out to kill the Snapping Turtle, spurred on by the offer of a hundred dollars reward. The turtle swallows Willis, but is thereupon taken ill, and having returned him to earth again, dies in great agony. When he claims the reward, he is informed that:—

'Since you dragged the tarnal crittur From the bottom of the ponds, Here's the hundred dollars due you All in Pennsylvanian bonds.'

At the end of the poem is a drawing of a pair of stocks, labelled 'The only good American securities,' Willis seems to have been too busy to Boswellise this season, but we get a glimpse of him in his letters to Miss Mitford, and one or two of the notes in his diary are worth quoting. On April 22 he writes to the author of Our Village in his usual flattering style: 'I am anxious to see your play and your next book, and I quite agree with you that the drama is your pied, though I think laurels, and spreading ones, are sown for you in every department of writing. Nobody ever wrote better prose, and what could not the author of Rienzi do in verse. For myself, I am far from considering myself regularly embarked in literature, and if I can live without it, or ply any other vocation, shall vote it a thankless trade, and save my "entusymussy" for my wife and children—when I get them. I am at present steeped to the lips in London society, going to everything, from Devonshire House to a publisher's dinner in Paternoster Row, and it is not a bad olla podrida of life and manners. I dote on "England and true English," and was never so happy, or so at a loss to find a minute for care or forethought.'

In his diary for June 30, Willis notes: 'Breakfasted with Samuel Rogers. Talked of Mrs. Butler's book, and Rogers gave us suppressed passages. Talked critics, and said that as long as you cast a shadow, you were sure that you possessed substance. Coleridge said of Southey, "I never think of him but as mending a pen." Southey said of Coleridge, "Whenever anything presents itself to him in the form of a duty, that moment he finds himself incapable of looking at it."' On July 9 we have the entry: 'Dined with Dr. Beattie, and met Thomas Campbell.... He spoke of Scott's slavishness to men of rank, but said it did not interfere with his genius. Said it sunk a man's heart to think that he and Byron were dead, and there was nobody left to praise or approve.... He told a story of dining with Burns and a Bozzy friend, who, when Campbell proposed the health of Mr. Burns, said, "Sir, you will always be known as Mr. Campbell, but posterity will talk of Burns." He was playful and amusing, and drank gin and water.'

While staying with the Skinners in August, Willis met his fate in the person of Miss Mary Stace, daughter of a General Stace. After a week's acquaintance he proposed to her, and was accepted. She was, we are told, a beauty of the purest Saxon type, with a bright complexion, blue eyes, light-brown hair, and delicate, regular features. Her disposition was clinging and affectionate, and she had enjoyed the religious bringing up that her lover thought of supreme importance to a woman. General Stace agreed to allow his daughter L300 a year, which with the L400 that Willis made by his pen, was considered a sufficient income for the young couple to start housekeeping upon.

Willis, who had promised to pay Miss Mitford a visit in the autumn, writes to her on September 22, to explain that all his plans were altered. 'Just before starting with Miss Jane Porter on a tour that was to include Reading,' he says, 'I went to a picnic, fell in love with a blue-eyed girl, and (after running the gauntlet successfully through France, Italy, Greece, Germany, Asia Minor, and Turkey) I renewed my youth, and became "a suitor for love." I am to be married (sequitur) on Thursday week.... The lady who is to take me, as the Irish say, "in a present," is some six years younger than myself, gentle, religious, relying, and unambitious. She has never been whirled through the gay society of London, so is not giddy or vain. She has never swum in a gondola, or written a sonnet, so has a proper respect for those who have. She is called pretty, but is more than that in my eyes; sings as if her heart were hid in her lips, and loves me.... We are bound to Paris for a month (because I think amusement better than reflection when a woman makes a doubtful bargain), and by November we return to London for the winter, and in the spring sail for America to see my mother. I have promised to live mainly on this side of the water, and shall return in the course of a year to try what contentment may be sown and reaped in a green lane in Kent.'

While the happy pair were on their honeymoon, Lady Blessington had undertaken to see the Pencillings by the Way through the press. For the first edition Willis received L250, but he made, from first to last, about a thousand pounds by the book. Its appearance in volume form had been anticipated by Lockhart's scathing review in the Quarterly for September 1835. The critic, annoyed at Willis's strictures on himself in the interview with Professor Wilson, attacked the Pencillings, as they had appeared in the New York Mirror, with all proper names printed in full, and many personal details that were left out in the English edition. Lockhart always knew how to stab a man in the tenderest place, and he stabbed Willis in his gentility. After pointing out that while visiting in London and the provinces as a young American sonneteer of the most ultra-sentimental delicacy, the Penciller was all the time the regular paid correspondent of a New York Journal, he observes that the letters derive their powers of entertainment chiefly from the light that they reflect upon the manners and customs of the author's own countrymen, since, from his sketches of English interiors, the reader may learn what American breakfast, dinners, and table-talk are not; or at all events what they were not in those circles of American society with which the writer happened to be familiar.

'Many of this person's discoveries,' continues Lockhart, warming to his work, 'will be received with ridicule in his own country, where the doors of the best houses were probably not opened to him as liberally as those of the English nobility. In short, we are apt to consider him as a just representative—not of the American mind and manners generally—but only of the young men of fair education among the busy, middling orders of mercantile cities. In his letters from Gordon Castle there are bits of solid, full-grown impudence and impertinence; while over not a few of the paragraphs is a varnish of conceited vulgarity which is too ludicrous to be seriously offensive.... We can well believe that Mr. Willis depicted the sort of society that most interests his countrymen, "born to be slaves and struggling to be lords," their servile adulation of rank and talent; their stupid admiration of processions and levees, are leading features of all the American books of travel.... We much doubt if all the pretty things we have quoted will so far propitiate Lady Blessington as to make her again admit to her table the animal who has printed what ensues. [Here follows the report of Moore's conversation on the subject of O'Connell.] As far as we are acquainted with English or American literature, this is the first example of a man creeping into your home, and forthwith, before your claret is dry on his lips, printing table-talk on delicate subjects, and capable of compromising individuals.'

The Quarterly having thus given the lead, the rest of the Tory magazines gaily followed suit. Maginn flourished his shillelagh, and belaboured his victim with a brutality that has hardly ever been equalled, even by the pioneer journals of the Wild West. 'This is a goose of a book,' he begins, 'or if anybody wishes the idiom changed, the book of a goose. There is not an idea in it beyond what might germinate in the brain of a washerwoman.' He then proceeds to call the author by such elegant names as 'lickspittle,' 'beggarly skittler,' jackass, ninny, haberdasher, 'fifty-fifth rate scribbler of gripe-visited sonnets,' and 'namby-pamby writer in twaddling albums kept by the mustachioed widows or bony matrons of Portland Place.'

The people whose hospitality Willis was accused of violating wrote to assure him of the pleasure his book had given them. Lord Dalhousie writes: 'We all agree in one sentiment, that a more amusing and delightful production was never issued by the press. The Duke and Duchess of Gordon were here lately, and expressed themselves in similar terms.' Lady Blessington did not withdraw her friendship, but Willis admits, in one of his letters, that he had no deeper regret than that his indiscretion should have checked the freedom of his approach to her. As a result of the slashing reviews, the book sold with the readiness of a succes de scandale, though it had been so rigorously edited for the English market, that very few indiscretions were left.

The unexpurgated version of the Pencillings was, however, copied into the English papers and eagerly read by the persons most concerned, such as Fonblanque, who bitterly complained of the libel upon his personal appearance, O'Connell, who broke off his lifelong friendship with Moore, and Captain Marryat, who was furious at the remark that his 'gross trash' sold immensely in Wapping. Like Lockhart, he revenged himself by an article in his own magazine, the Metropolitan, in which he denounced Willis as a 'spurious attache,' and made dark insinuations against his birth and parentage. This attack was too personal to be ignored. Willis demanded an apology, to which Marryat replied with a challenge, and after a long correspondence, most of which found its way into the Times, a duel was fixed to take place at Chatham. At the last moment the seconds managed to arrange matters between their principals, and the affair ended without bloodshed. This was fortunate for Willis, who was little used to fire-arms, whilst Marryat was a crack shot.

In his preface to the first edition of the Pencillings Willis explains that the ephemeral nature and usual obscurity of periodical correspondence gave a sufficient warrant to his mind that his descriptions would die where they first saw the light, and that therefore he had indulged himself in a freedom of detail and topic only customary in posthumous memoirs. He expresses his astonishment that this particular sin should have been visited upon him at a distance of three thousand miles, when the Quarterly reviewer's own fame rested on the more aggravated instance of a book of personalities published under the very noses of the persons described (Peter's Letters to his Kinsfolk). After observing that he was little disposed to find fault, since everything in England pleased him, he proceeds: 'In one single instance I indulged myself in strictures upon individual character.... I but repeated what I had said a thousand times, and never without an indignant echo to its truth, that the editor of that Review was the most unprincipled critic of the age. Aside from its flagrant literary injustice, we owe to the Quarterly every spark of ill-feeling that has been kept alive between England and America for the last twenty years. The sneers, the opprobrious epithets of this bravo of literature have been received in a country where the machinery of reviewing was not understood, as the voice of the English people, and animosity for which there was no other reason has been thus periodically fed and exasperated. I conceive it to be my duty as a literary man—I know it is my duty as an American—to lose no opportunity of setting my heel on this reptile of criticism. He has turned and stung me. Thank God, I have escaped the slime of his approbation.'

The winter was spent in London, and in the following March Willis brought out his Inklings of Adventure, a reprint of the stories that had appeared in various magazines over the signature of Philip Slingsby. These were supposed to be real adventures under a thin disguise of fiction, and the public eagerly read the tawdry little tales in the hope of discovering the identities of the dramatis personae. The majority of the 'Inklings' deal with the romantic adventures of a young literary man who wins the affection of high-born ladies, and is made much of in aristrocratic circles. The author revels in descriptions of luxurious boudoirs in which recline voluptuous blondes or exquisite brunettes, with hearts always at the disposal of the all-conquering Philip Slingsby. Fashionable fiction, however, was unable to support the expense of a fashionable establishment, and in May 1836 the couple sailed for America. Willis hoped to obtain a diplomatic appointment, and return to Europe for good, but all his efforts were vain, and he was obliged to rely on his pen for a livelihood. His first undertaking was the letterpress for an illustrated volume on American scenery; and for some months he travelled about the country with the artist who was responsible for the illustrations. On one of his journeys he fell in love with a pretty spot on the banks of the Owego Creek, near the junction with the Susquehanna, and bought a couple of hundred acres and a house, which he named Glenmary after his wife.

Here the pair settled down happily for some five years, and here Willis wrote his pleasant, gossiping Letters from Under a Bridge for the New York Mirror. In these he prattled of his garden, his farm, his horses and dogs, and the strangers within his gates. Unfortunately, he was unable to devote much attention to his farm, which was said to grow nothing but flowers of speed, but was forced to spend more and more time in the editorial office, and to write hastily and incessantly for a livelihood. In 1839, owing to a temporary coolness with the proprietor of the Mirror, Willis accepted the proposal of his friend, Dr. Porter, that he should start a new weekly paper called the Corsair, one of a whole crop of pirate weeklies that started up with the establishment of the first service of Atlantic liners. In May 1839 the first steam-vessel that had crossed the ocean anchored in New York Harbour, and thenceforward it was possible to obtain supplies from the European literary markets within a fortnight of publication. It was arranged between Dr. Parker and Willis that the cream of the contemporary literature of England, France, and Germany should be conveyed to the readers of the Corsair, and of course there was no question of payment to the authors whose wares were thus appropriated.

The first number of the Corsair appeared in January 1839, but apparently piracy was not always a lucrative trade, for the paper had an existence of little more than a year. In the course of its brief career, however, Willis paid a flying visit to England, where he accomplished a great deal of literary business. He had written a play called The Usurer Matched, which was brought out by Wallack at the Surrey Theatre, and is said to have been played to crowded houses during a fairly long run, but neither this nor any of his other plays brought the author fame or fortune. During this season he published his Loiterings of Travel, a collection of stories and sketches, a fourth edition of the Pencillings, an English edition of Letters from Under a Bridge, and arranged with Virtue for works on Irish and Canadian scenery. In addition to all this, he was contributing jottings in London to the Corsair. As might be supposed, he had not much time for society, but he met a few old friends, made acquaintance with Kemble and Kean, went to a ball at Almack's, and was present at the famous Eglinton Tournament, which watery catastrophe he described for his paper. One of the most interesting of his new acquaintances was Thackeray, then chiefly renowned as a writer for the magazines. On July 26 Willis writes to Dr. Porter:—

'I have engaged a new contributor to the Corsair. Who do you think? The author of Yellowplush and Major Gahagan. He has gone to Paris, and will write letters from there, and afterwards from London for a guinea a close column of the Corsair—cheaper than I ever did anything in my life. For myself, I think him the very best periodical writer alive. He is a royal, daring, fine creature too.' In his published Jottings, Willis told his readers that 'Mr. Thackeray, the author, breakfasted with me yesterday, and the Corsair will be delighted to hear that I have engaged this cleverest and most gifted of all the magazine-writers of London to become a regular correspondent of the Corsair.... Thackeray is a tall, athletic-looking man of about forty-five [he was actually only eight-and-twenty], with a look of talent that could never be mistaken. He is one of the most accomplished draughtsmen in England, as well as the most brilliant of periodical writers.' Thackeray only wrote eight letters for the Corsair, which were afterwards republished in his Paris Sketch-book. There is an allusion to this episode in The Adventures of Philip, the hero being invited to contribute to a New York journal called The Upper Ten Thousand, a phrase invented by Willis.

When the Corsair came to an untimely end, Willis had no difficulty in finding employment on other papers. He is said to have been the first American magazine-writer who was tolerably well paid, and at one time he was making about a thousand a year by periodical work. That his name was already celebrated among his own countrymen seems to be proved by the story of a commercial gentleman at a Boston tea-party who 'guessed that Goethe was the N.P. Willis of Germany.' The tales written about this time were afterwards collected into a volume called Dashes at Life with a Free Pencil. Thackeray made great fun of this work in the Edinburgh Review for October 1845, more especially of that portion called 'The Heart-book of Ernest Clay.' 'Like Caesar,' observed Thackeray, 'Ernest Clay is always writing of his own victories. Duchesses pine for him, modest virgins go into consumption and die for him, old grandmothers of sixty forget their families and their propriety, and fall on the neck of this "Free Pencil."' He quotes with delight the description of a certain Lady Mildred, one of Ernest Clay's numerous loves, who glides into the room at a London tea-party, 'with a step as elastic as the nod of a water-lily. A snowy turban, from which hung on either temple a cluster of crimson camellias still wet with the night-dew; long raven curls of undisturbed grace falling on shoulders of that indescribable and dewy coolness which follows a morning bath.' How naively, comments the critic, does this nobleman of nature recommend the use of this rare cosmetic!

In spite of his popularity, Willis's affairs were not prospering at this time. He had received nothing from the estate of his father-in-law, who died in 1839, his publisher failed in 1842, and he was obliged to sell Glenmary and remove to New York, whence he had undertaken to send a fortnightly letter to a paper at Washington. This was the year of Dickens's visit to America, and Willis was present at the 'Boz Ball,' where he danced with Mrs. Dickens, to whom he afterwards did the honours of Broadway. In 1843 Willis made up his difference with Morris, and again became joint-editor of the Mirror, which, a year later, was changed from a weekly to a daily paper. His contributions to the journal consisted of stories, poems, letters, book-notices, answers to correspondents, and editorial gossip of all kinds.

In March 1845 Mrs. Willis died in her confinement, leaving her (temporarily) broken-hearted husband with one little girl. 'An angel without fault or foible' was his epitaph upon the woman to whom, in spite of his many fictitious bonnes fortunes, he is said to have been faithfully attached. But Willis was not born to live alone, and in the following summer he fell in love with a Miss Cornelia Grinnell at Washington, and was married to her in October, 1846. The second Mrs. Willis was nearly twenty years younger than her husband, but she was a sensible, energetic young woman, who made him an excellent wife.

The title of the Mirror had been changed to that of The Home Journal, and under its new name it became a prosperous paper. Willis, who was the leading spirit of the enterprise, set himself to portray the town, chronicling plays, dances, picture-exhibitions, sights and entertainments of all kinds in the airy manner that was so keenly appreciated by his countrymen. He was recognised as an authority on fashion, and his correspondence columns were crowded with appeals for guidance in questions of dress and etiquette. He was also a favourite in general society, though he is said to have been, next to Fenimore Cooper, the best-abused man of letters in America. One of his most pleasing characteristics was his ready appreciation and encouragement of young writers, for he was totally free from professional jealousy. He was the literary sponsor of Aldrich, Bayard Taylor, and Lowell, among others, and the last-named alludes to Willis in his Fable for Critics (1848) in the following flattering lines:

'His nature's a glass of champagne with the foam on't, As tender as Fletcher, as witty as Beaumont; So his best things are done in the heat of the moment. * * * * * He'd have been just the fellow to sup at the 'Mermaid,' Cracking jokes at rare Ben, with an eye to the barmaid, His wit running up as Canary ran down,— The topmost bright bubble on the wave of the town.'

After 1846 Willis wrote little except gossiping paragraphs and other ephemera. In answer to remonstrances against this method of frittering away his talents, he was accustomed to reply that the public liked trifles, and that he was bound to go on 'buttering curiosity with the ooze of his brains.' He read but little in later life, nor associated with men of high intellect or serious aims, but showed an ever-increasing preference for the frivolous and the feminine. In 1850 he published another volume of little magazine stories called People I have Met. This appeared in London as well as in New York, and Thackeray again revenged himself for that close column which had been rewarded by an uncertain guinea, by holding up his former editor to ridicule. With mischievous delight he describes the amusement that is to be found in N.P. Willis's society, 'amusement at the immensity of N.P.'s blunders; amusement at the prodigiousness of his self-esteem; amusement always with or at Willis the poet, Willis the man, Willis the dandy, Willis the lover—now the Broadway Crichton—once the ruler of fashion and heart-enslaver of Bond Street, and the Boulevard, and the Corso, and the Chiaja, and the Constantinople Bazaars. It is well for the general peace of families that the world does not produce many such men; there would be no keeping our wives and daughters in their senses were such fascinators to make frequent apparitions among us; but it is comfortable that there should have been a Willis; and as a literary man myself, and anxious for the honour of that profession, I am proud to think that a man of our calling should have come, should have seen, should have conquered as Willis has done.... There is more or less of truth, he nobly says, in these stories—more or less truth, to be sure there is—and it is on account of this more or less truth that I for my part love and applaud this hero and poet. We live in our own country, and don't know it; Willis walks into it, and dominates it at once. To know a duchess, for instance, is given to very few of us. He sees things that are not given to us to see. We see the duchess in her carriage, and gaze with much reverence on the strawberry-leaves on the panels, and her grace within; whereas the odds are that that lovely duchess has had, one time or the other, a desperate flirtation with Willis the Conqueror. Perhaps she is thinking of him at this very moment, as her jewelled hand presses her perfumed handkerchief to her fair and coroneted brow, and she languidly stops to purchase a ruby bracelet at Gunter's, or to sip an ice at Howell and James's. He must have whole mattresses stuffed with the blonde or raven or auburn tresses of England's fairest daughters. When the female English aristocracy read the title of People I have Met, I can fancy the whole female peerage of Willis's time in a shudder; and the melancholy marchioness, and the abandoned countess, and the heart-stricken baroness trembling as each gets the volume, and asks of her guilty conscience, "Gracious goodness, is the monster going to show up me?"'

In 1853 Willis, who had been obliged to travel for the benefit of his declining health, took a fancy to the neighbourhood of the Hudson, and bought fifty acres of waste land, upon which he built himself a house, and called the place Idlewild. Here he settled down once more to a quiet country life, took care of his health, cultivated his garden, and wrote long weekly letters to the Home Journal. He had by this time five children, middle age had stolen upon him, and now that he could no longer pose as his own allconquering hero, his hand seems to have lost its cunning. His editorial articles, afterwards published under the appropriate title of Ephemera, grew thinner and flatter with the passing of the years; yet slight and superficial as the best of them are, they were the result of very hard writing. His manuscripts were a mass of erasures and interlineations, but his copy was so neatly prepared that even the erasures had a sort of 'wavy elegance' which the compositors actually preferred to print. His mannerisms and affectations grew upon him in his later years, and he became more and more addicted to the coining of new words and phrases, only a few of which proved effective. Besides the now well-worn term, the 'upper ten thousand,' he is credited with the invention of 'Japonicadom,' 'come-at-able,' and 'stay-at-home-ativeness.' One or two of his sayings may be worth quoting, such as his request for Washington Irving's blotting-book, because it was the door-mat on which the thoughts of his last book had wiped their sandals before they went in; and his remark that to ask a literary man to write a letter after his day's work was like asking a penny-postman to take a walk in the evening for the pleasure of it.

On the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, Willis went to Washington as war-correspondent of his paper. It does not appear that he saw any harder service than the dinners and receptions of the capitol, since an opportune fit of illness prevented his following the army to Bull's Run. The correspondent who took his place on the march had his career cut short by a Southern bullet. Willis, meanwhile, was driving about with Mrs. Lincoln, with whom he became a favourite, although she reproached him for his want of tact in speaking of her 'motherly expression' in one of his published letters, she being at that time only thirty-six. He met Hawthorne at Washington, and describes him as very shy and reserved in manner, but adds, 'I found he was a lover of mine, and we enjoyed our acquaintance very much.' One of the minor results of the great Civil War was the extinguishing of Willis's literary reputation; his frothy trifling suddenly became obsolete when men had sterner things to think about than the cut of a coat, or the etiquette of a morning call. The nation began to demand realities, even in its fiction, the circulation of the Home Journal fell off, and Willis, who had always affected a horror of figures and business matters generally, found himself in financial difficulties. He was obliged to let Idlewild, and return, in spite of his rapidly failing health, to the editorial office at New York.

The last few years of Willis's career afford a melancholy contrast to its brilliant opening. Health, success, prosperity—all had deserted him, and nothing remained but the editorial chair, to which he clung even after epileptic attacks had resulted in paralysis and gradual softening of the brain. The failure of his mental powers was kept secret as long as possible, but in November, 1866, he yielded to the entreaties of his wife and children, knocked off work for ever, and went home to die. His last few months were passed in helpless weakness, and he only occasionally recognised those around him. The end came on January 20, 1867, his sixty-first birthday.

Selections from Willis's prose works have been published within recent years in America, and a new edition of his poems has appeared in England, while a carefully written Life by Mr. De Beers is included in the series of 'American Men of Letters.' But in this country at least his fame, such as it is, will rest upon his sketches of such celebrities as Lamb, Moore, Bulwer, D'Orsay, and D'Israeli. As long as we retain any interest in them and their works, we shall like to know how they looked and dressed, and what they talked about in private life. It is impossible altogether to approve of the Penciller—his absurdities were too marked, and his indiscretions too many—yet it is probable that few who have followed his meteor-like career will be able to refrain from echoing Thackeray's dictum: 'It is comfortable that there should have been a Willis!'



LADY HESTER STANHOPE

PART I



There are few true stories that are distinguished by a well-marked moral. If we study human chronicles we generally find the ungodly flourishing permanently like a green bay-tree, and the righteous apparently forsaken and begging his bread. But it occasionally happens that a human life illustrates some moral lesson with the triteness and crudity of a Sunday-school book, and of such is the career of Lady Hester Stanhope, a Pitt on the mother's side, and more of a Pitt in temper and disposition than her grandfather, the great Commoner himself. Her story contains the useful but conventional lesson that pride goeth before a fall, and that all earthly glory is but vanity, together with a warning against the ambition that o'erleaps itself, and ends in failure and humiliation. That humanity will profit by such a lesson, whether true or invented for didactic purposes, is doubtful, but at least Nature has done her best for once to usurp the seat of the preacher, 'to point a moral and adorn a tale.' Lady Hester, who was born on March 12,1776, was the eldest daughter of Charles, third Earl of Stanhope, by his first wife Hester, daughter of the great Lord Chatham. Lord Stanhope seems to have been an uncomfortable person, who combined scientific research with democratic principles, and contrived to quarrel with most of his family. In order to live up to his theories he laid down his carriage and horses, effaced the armorial bearings from his plate, and removed from his walls some famous tapestry, because it was 'so d——d aristocratical.' If one of his daughters happened to look better than usual in a becoming hat or frock, he had the garment laid away, and something coarse put in its place. The children were left almost entirely to the care of governesses and tutors, their step-mother, the second Lady Stanhope (a Grenville by birth) being a fashionable fine lady, who devoted her whole time to her social duties, while Lord Stanhope was absorbed by his scientific pursuits. The home was not a happy one, either for the three girls of the first marriage, or for the three sons of the second. In 1796 Rachel, the youngest daughter, eloped with a Sevenoaks apothecary named Taylor, and was cast off by her family; and in 1800 Griselda, the second daughter, married a Mr. Tekell, of Hampshire. In this year Hester left her home, which George III used to call Democracy Hall, and went to live with her grandmother, the Dowager Lady Stanhope.

On the death of Lady Stanhope in 1803, Lady Hester was offered a home by her uncle, William Pitt, with whom she remained until his death in 1806. Pitt became deeply attached to his handsome, high-spirited niece. He believed in her sincerity and affection for himself, admired her courage and cleverness, laughed at her temper, and encouraged her pride. She seems to have gained a considerable influence over her uncle, and contrived to have a finger in most of the ministerial pies. When reproached for allowing her such unreserved liberty of action in state affairs, Pitt was accustomed to reply, 'I let her do as she pleases; for if she were resolved to cheat the devil himself, she would do it.' 'And so I would,' Lady Hester used to add, when she told the story. If we may believe her own account, Pitt told her that she was fit to sit between Augustus and Maecenas, and assured her that 'I have plenty of good diplomatists, but they are none of them military men; and I have plenty of good officers, but not one of them is worth sixpence in the cabinet. If you were a man, Hester, I would send you on the Continent with 60,000 men, and give you carte blanche, and I am sure that not one of my plans would fail, and not one soldier would go with his boots unblacked.' This admiration, according to the same authority, was shared by George III, who one day on the Terrace at Windsor informed Mr. Pitt that he had got a new and superior minister in his room, and one, moreover, who was a good general. 'There is my new minister,' he added, pointing at Lady Hester. 'There is not a man in my kingdom who is a better politician, and there is not a woman who better adorns her sex. And let me say, Mr. Pitt, you have not reason to be proud you are a minister, for there have been many before you, and will be many after you; but you have reason to be proud of her, who unites everything that is great in man and woman.'