Henry A. Beers

Willis took lodgings at No. 2 Vigo Street. During the next ten months, which he spent in London and its vicinity, he found himself something of a lion. His articles in the English magazines had begun to be talked about in the clubs, and society people who had known him abroad or in London only as a dandy attachÉ were surprised to learn that “that nice, agreeable Mr. Willis” was identical with “Slingsby,” the brilliant American raconteur of the “New Monthly.” He had contributed in the summer and autumn of 1834 a number of sketches—“By a Here and Thereian”—to the “Court Magazine:” “Love and Diplomacy,” “Niagara and So On;” to Captain Marryat’s “Metropolitan:” an episode of Italian travel, “The Madhouse of Palermo;” and to Colburn’s “New Monthly:” “Incidents on the Hudson,” “Tom Fane and I,” “Pedlar Karl,” “The Lunatic,” and “My Hobby—Rather” (the same as “The Mad Senior” in “Scenes of Fear”). The nom de plume of Philip Slingsby he borrowed from the luckless wanderer in Irving’s “Sketch-Book.” He followed these up during 1835-36 with “F. Smith,” “Love in the Library” (“Edith Linsey”), “The Gypsy of Sardis,” “The Cherokee’s Threat,” “The Revenge of the Signor Basil,” and “Larks in Vacation.” For his “Slingsby” papers Willis got double pay: Colburn gave him a guinea a page, and Morris, in his contract with whom he had reserved the right to print twelve sketches a year in the English magazines, published them simultaneously in the “Mirror,” and paid for them at the same rate as for original articles. They were forwarded to him in proof-sheets or in duplicate MSS., so as to arrive in advance of the English periodicals, which sometimes, however, reached America first, because of the uncertainties of the mail-carriage by sailing packet. To the “New Monthly” Willis also contributed a number of short poems, “Thoughts in a Balcony at Daybreak,” “The Absent,” “Chamber Scene,” and “To ——” (“Were I a star,” etc.). He wrote for it after his return to America and after it was united with “The Humorist” in 1837, under the editorship of Theodore Hook. His last contribution to it was “The Picker and Piler,” in the April number for 1839.

Lady Blessington’s kindness continued after his return to London, and he was taken up by other fashionable bluestockings, dined and wined, fÊted and caressed to a degree that may well have made him giddy. The two rival salons to Lady Blessington’s were Holland House and the residence of the Dowager Lady Charleville in Cavendish Square. It does not appear that Willis was invited to the former, but he went to the reunions at Charleville House, though not so constantly as to Seamore Place. Through Lady Blessington’s influence he was admitted to the Travellers’ Club, which was the resort of the ultra fashionable; and, on Sir George Staunton’s nomination, to the AthenÆum, which had more of a literary tinge than the Alfred or the Travellers’. Sir George Staunton also presented him at court, a favor which Mr. Vail, the American minister, who disliked Willis for some reason, had declined to render. Another friend gave him a perpetual ticket to the opera. Among his patronesses were the Countess of Arundel and Lady Stepney, who wrote bad novels but gave good dinners. Lady Blessington’s biographer, Madden, who saw a great deal of him in those days, has recorded his recollections of him as follows:—

“I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Willis on many occasions at Gore House, to which reference is made in the rather too celebrated ‘Pencillings by the Way,’ and also at the soirÉes of the late Lady Charleville in Cavendish Square. Mr. Willis was an extremely agreeable young man in society, somewhat overdressed and a little too demonstratif, but abounding in good spirits, pleasing reminiscences of Eastern and Continental travel and of his residence there for some time as attachÉ to a foreign legation. He was observant and communicative, lively and clever in conversation, having the peculiar art of making himself agreeable to ladies, old as well as young, dÉgagÉ in his manner, and on exceedingly good terms with himself and with the Élite of the best society, wherever he went.”

The secret of Willis’s agreeableness to ladies lay in his unfailing deference. It is extraordinary how many women much older than himself cherished a warm affection for him. He had considered the meaning of Bacon’s saying, “No Youth can be comely, but by Pardon,” and several of his stories are studies on the thesis that there is a beauty in age which may inspire passion. One in particular, not found among his collected writings, deals with this speculation: “Poyntz’s Aunt,” published in “The Ladies’ Companion” of December, 1842, where the hero falls violently in love with a woman of sixty, to whose niece the family expected him to pay his court.

Willis saw more “life” in London than was quite good for him, and went into companies which were less select than the Gore House coterie, although, to say truth, Lady Blessington herself was looked upon by “the best people” as a trifle off color. Her house was frequented by men who were entirely irreproachable, but the English ladies were shy of visiting there. This was due mainly to her rather unusual relations with the Count d’Orsay. In obedience to the wishes of the Earl of Blessington, his daughter by a former marriage had been compelled to wed the count under penalty of forfeiting her inheritance. The poor girl reluctantly espoused the brilliant stranger provided for her by her father’s eccentric caprice; but the match was unhappy, and was almost immediately followed by a separation; notwithstanding which, D’Orsay continued to live in the closest intimacy with his wife’s stepmother after the earl’s death, and in time under the same roof with her. This last arrangement, which was, to say the least, odd, and caused much scandal in British society, had not, however, gone into effect when Willis first came to London. Lady Blessington had not as yet moved to Gore House, but was living in Seamore Place, while D’Orsay had lodgings in Curzon Street. Nor did the latter’s formal separation from his wife take place till 1838. Another intimate friend of Willis in London was that very unconventional, not to say rapid, woman, Lady Dudley Stuart, the daughter of Lucien Bonaparte, “a lady of remarkably small person, with the fairest foot ever seen,” under whose bonnet “burn the most lambent and spiritual eyes that night and sleep ever hid from the world.” She had about her a semi-foreign society, not without its fascinations, of artists, actors, opera-singers, refugee nobles, and adventurers of more or less shady antecedents. In his “Sketches of Travel” Willis described a very free and easy supper party, following a private concert given by Lady Antrobus, at which he and Lady Dudley Stuart assisted, together with Grisi, Lablache, Rubini, and other members of the Italian opera troupe then in London. Of course neither Lady Antrobus nor Lady Stuart was mentioned by name in this account.

But Willis’s acquaintance was by no means confined to the Blessington set, or to the Bohemian circle that surrounded Lady Dudley Stuart, but included many families of unquestioned position. The Ramsays, for instance, were solid people, above any suspicion of queerness, and the earl’s niece, Lady Moncrieff, whom Willis visited in London, was decidedly “evangelical.” There were two households in particular which were like homes to him during the last year and more of his stay in England. These were Shirley Park, near Croydon in Surrey, the residence of the Skinner family, and the Manor House of the Shaws at Lee, in Kent, only a ten miles’ drive across country from Shirley Park. The Hon. Mrs. Fanny Shaw was a daughter to Lord Erskine and a sworn friend of Willis. Mrs. Mary Skinner was wife to an Indian nabob, a leader of fashion, and a woman of intellectual tastes, who patronized letters and entertained literary people, a kind of Mrs. Leo Hunter, in short. Willis was introduced to her at Lady Simpkins’s by Sir John Franklin, in February, 1835, and met her again at a dinner given by Longman, the publisher, at Hampstead, where were present, among others, Moore, Joanna Baillie, Jane Porter, and Miss Pardoe. The last was a very pretty woman, author of “Beauties of the Bosphorus,” and other books more remarkable for their sumptuous illustrations than for their literary quality. She was a poetess, too, after her fashion, and once addressed a tribute in verse “To the Author of Melanie,” which was printed in the “Mirror” of October 17, 1835. Both Mrs. Shaw and Mrs. Skinner treated their young guest with the most delicate and considerate kindness. They made him offers of pecuniary help, of which, fortunately, he had no need to avail himself, as his letters to the “Mirror” and his “New Monthly” stories (which added fifteen or twenty guineas a month to his “poor two hundred a year”) brought him in returns which were ample for his occasions. The Skinners had a town house in Portland Place, and their carriage in London was always at Willis’s service. Both of these ladies regarded him as a son or a younger brother. Bruce Skinner, a son of Willis’s hostess, named one of his children after him. At Shirley Park and at the Shaws’ he met a number of very charming people, and his time there was spent in drives, lawn-parties, etc. In the library at Shirley Park two nieces of Walter Scott, the Misses Swinton, copied for him “Melanie” and “Love in the Library,” which he was preparing for the press. An extract from a very confidential letter from Willis to Mrs. Skinner may be worth transcribing, to show the terms of frank and cordial familiarity on which he lived with these excellent people. After a brief history of his life and a statement of his financial situation, the letter concludes as follows:—

“There is a passage in your note which pleased me. You say if you had a daughter you would give her to me. If you had one I certainly would take you at your word, provided this exposÉ of my poverty did not change your fancy. I should like to marry in England, and I feel every day (more and more) 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 any affectionate and good girl who would be content to live rather a quiet life, and could love your humble servant, you have full power of attorney 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 sooner than bring a delicate woman down to a dependence on my brains for support, though in a case of exigency I could always retreat to America, and live comfortably by my labors. Meantime I am the only sufferer by my poverty, and am not poor, for no man is so who lives upon his income. Comprends-tu? My dear friend, I have told you what I have told no other person in the world. Most men and women would think it incredible that an attachÉ to a legation could keep up appearances on two hundred a year, or pity him if he could; and I never thought anybody worth the confidence—save only yourself. I would tell Miss Porter just the same, or Mr. Swinton, but who else? No one! so gardez cela!

“I enjoyed the ball at the Ravenshaws’ exceedingly, and am so much obliged to you for introducing me to Praed, whom I like.”

“I have one or two homes in England,” wrote Willis to his mother, July 22, 1835, “where I am loved like a child. I had a letter the other day from Honorable Mrs. Shaw, who fancied I looked low-spirited at the opera. ‘Young men have but two causes of unhappiness,’ she says, ‘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.’ Where could be kinder friends? I spend my Sundays alternately at their splendid country house and Mrs. Skinner’s, and they never can get enough of me. I have a room always kept for me at both places, and there is universal rejoicing when I come and mourning when I go. I am often asked whether I carry a love philter with me; yet with all the uncommon honors and favors shown me in England, I assure you I never asked or made interest directly or indirectly for any acquaintance or any favor since I landed at Dover. What has come has come of its own accord.”

Miss Porter and Miss Pardoe were both domesticated at Shirley Park, and he met there at different times, as fellow guests, Lady Franklin, Lady Sidney Morgan, author of once popular French and Italian travels, and the brilliant young orator, poet, and wit, Winthrop Mackworth Praed. Of the latter Willis wrote in the “Home Journal” many years later: “We were followers together in the train of the admired belle (a visitor under the same hospitable roof) whom I afterward brought home with me to Glenmary.” Willis attributed to his religious poetry the honor of his first acquaintance with Joanna Baillie, Jane Porter, and the Byrons. For the authoress of “The Scottish Chiefs,” especially, he formed an enduring attachment, and she regarded him with an almost motherly affection. A lifelong correspondence was kept up between them, and at the death of Admiral Robert Ker Porter at St. Petersburg in 1842, among the MSS. found in his sea-chests were ninety letters from Willis to his sister. The letters from Miss Porter, among Willis’s private papers, show that she was an equally indefatigable, through a not very legible correspondent. Willis encountered Ada Byron at an evening party in London, and thought her “earnest and sweet.” Lady Byron, who was a Unitarian, was much interested by the spirited sketch of Dr. Channing in a series of papers on American literature which Willis had contributed to the “AthenÆum,” and she expressed her favorable opinion of them in a letter to Miss Baillie, as also her pleasure that her daughter had made the author’s acquaintance. Miss Baillie gave this note to Willis for his autograph book. Byron’s sister, Augusta Leigh, he also met in London society. She gave him an autograph letter of Byron, and on the appearance of “Melanie and Other Poems,” in March 1835, he sent her a copy, and received an acknowledgment in which she said that the book contained “some of the most touching and exquisite lines I ever read.” The venerable Joanna Baillie wrote him, on the same occasion, a letter filled with the most graceful compliments.

Among other London acquaintances of Willis’s at this time were John Leech, the artist, and Martin Farquhar Tupper, the proverbial philosopher, who afterwards visited him in America. A few extracts from a manuscript diary irregularly kept by Willis from June, 1835, to March, 1836, will serve to show the nature of his daily engagements and occupations:—

“June 30. Breakfasted with Samuel Rogers. Met Dr. Delancey, of Philadelphia, and Corbin, ditto. Talked of Mrs. Butler’s book, and Rogers gave us suppressed passages. Talked of critics, and said that ‘as long as you cast a shadow, you were sure 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 shape of a duty, that moment he finds himself incapable of looking at it.’

“Went to the opera with Hon. Mrs. Shaw and heard Grisi in ‘I Puritani,’ and saw Taglioni: both divine. Visited Lady Blessington’s box and Lady Vincent.

“After to a party at Mrs. Leicester Stanhope’s. Saw Guiccioli, and was stuffed to the eyelids by Lady Mary Shepard about my shorter and scriptural poems.

“July 1. Mrs. Skinner drove Jane Porter and myself to Harrow to hear the speeches.…

“In the evening to a party at Lady Cork’s, and after to Lady Vincent’s soirÉe.”

Lady Cork was the aged but still beautiful Dowager Countess of Cork and Derry; who in her youth, as Miss Moncton, had been a favorite of Dr. Johnson, and whose soirÉes in New Burlington Street, between 1820 and 1840, were crowded with talent and fashion.

This fÊte furnished some items for Willis’s story of “Lady Ravelgold.”

And thus the journal proceeds with its daily count of dinners, balls, soirÉes, garden parties, and opera-going, the diarist finally recording himself as “fatigued to death with dinners and dissipations.” In fact the pace began to tell upon him. Following the last entry that I have copied here, for July 12th, comes the first draft of a poem, “Thoughts on the Balcony of Devonshire House at Sunrise after a Splendid Ball:”

This is one of Willis’s most genuine utterances. The same revulsion of feeling is expressed in “Better Moments” and “She was not There.” There were two men in him, the worldling and the poet; and when worn with fashionable dissipation he was sensitive to the rebuke of the midnight heaven or of that “awful rose of dawn” which God makes for himself in the “Vision of Sin.” But the mood, though sincere, was not lasting. “Recovered my spirits,” runs the entry for July 15th, “after a causeless depression for a week.”

Toward the end of July he escaped to the country and “passed a month at Shirley Park and the Manor, Lee, alternately reading and lying on the grass in delightful idleness, with the kindest friends and the greatest contentment.” At Shirley Park there were archery fÊtes, the Archbishopess of Canterbury, “lords and ladies in abundance, and poets and travelers ad libitum. It is midsummer,” continues the letter from which I quote (August 5th), “in cool and breezy England, five o’clock in the afternoon, and a beautiful day. The house is in the middle of a park (nothing but grass and trees) as large as the Common in Boston, the soft velvet greensward closely shaven all around the house, and a lovely archery ground on the edge of the lake just beneath my window, with red and gold targets, and a dozen young girls and beaux with beautiful bows and quivers shooting with all the merriment conceivable. There is a beautiful daughter of Sir Henry Brydges beating everybody, and my friend Mrs. Shaw, and Lady Encombe, and quantities of nice people.”

At Shirley Park he had a letter from Jane Porter, inclosing an invitation to him from Sir Charles Throckmorton, a Catholic gentleman in Warwickshire, at whose country seat she was staying. Willis joined her there on September 10th, but meanwhile something else of great importance to him had happened. While visiting at the Skinners’ he had met his fate in the person of Miss Mary Stace, a daughter of General William Stace of Woolwich. He saw her first at a picnic on the grounds of Lord Londonderry, at North Cray, and “thought her the loveliest girl he had ever seen.” At Shirley Park—whither she came as a guest—he was thrown much in her company, and after a week’s acquaintance made her a proposal of marriage, and was accepted. On the 1st of September he went to Woolwich on a visit to the Staces, and in the course of a day or two asked the general for his daughter’s hand. It was agreed that the engagement should be short, like the courtship, and that the wedding should come off on the 1st of October. Mary Stace, who became Mrs. Willis on the day fixed, was a girl of uncommon beauty and sweetness. In appearance she was of the purest Saxon type, a blonde, with bright color, blue eyes, light brown hair, and delicate, regular features. She had a gentle, clinging, affectionate disposition, adored her husband, had been religiously and carefully educated, and possessed the true Englishwoman’s sense of the importance of the male sex and the due subordination of woman. Her family were most worthy and substantial people, and strictly evangelical. General Stace was the Royal Ordnance Storekeeper at Woolwich Arsenal. He had been commissary to the British navy in Egypt, and commissary of ordnance at the battle of Waterloo, and had been rewarded for gallant service in that famous action. He gave Willis, as a souvenir, a military cloak and an eagle clasp taken from the body of a French officer after the battle, which are still preserved in the family. His son-in-law described him as honest, hearty, and plain-spoken, with the common soldierly weakness for telling post-prandial stories of his campaigns. Mrs. Stace was Irish, a great singer, and a friend of Tom Moore, who used to listen to her songs by the hour. There were five other children besides Mary. Two of the sons were in the army, and afterwards there were three Colonels Stace. The general agreed to give his daughter £300 a year, which, with the £300 or £400 which Willis counted upon making by literary work, would do, wrote the latter to Mrs. Skinner, for a poet. Having completed the arrangements for his marriage, he set out from London, September 10th, by the Tantivy coach for Sir Charles Throckmorton’s seat of Coughton Court. This was a fine old Elizabethan mansion near Alcester, and Willis spent ten days there very agreeably, visiting, in company with Miss Porter and his host, Warwick Castle, Kenilworth, Stratford, and other points of interest in the neighborhood. Of these jaunts an ample narrative is given in “Sketches of Travel,” originally communicated to the “Mirror.” Thence he returned to Woolwich, receiving on his departure an invitation from the hospitable baronet to bring his wife and stay a fortnight with him. At Woolwich he was again joined by Miss Porter, on the 25th, who came for a week’s visit to the Staces and to be present at the wedding. From Coughton Court the expectant groom had written to his friends announcing his engagement, and received in reply many expressions of good wishes. Among others, Lady Blessington wrote as follows:—

The old Earl of Dalhousie wrote a letter of hearty congratulation.

His son, the young Lord Ramsay, had jestingly promised to be Willis’s groomsman some day at Niagara, and the former now reminded him of it, and asked him to stand up with him, and Ramsay sent the following excuses some three weeks after the wedding:—

Mrs. Skinner wrote, in a letter to Jane Porter:—

In his letters to his folks at home announcing his betrothal, Willis insisted a good deal on this point of his fiancÉe’s religiousness, and he evidently shared the belief commonly held and proclaimed among men of the world, that religion, like a low voice, is an excellent thing—in woman; a theory which some women resent as a covert insult to their understandings, and some men as an open insult to their religion, and which may be described as the converse of the proposition that a reformed rake makes the best husband.

In another letter he says:—

They were married in Plumstead Church, by the Rev. Mr. Shackleton, on the 1st of October. “It was a kind of April day,” writes Willis, “half sunshine, half rain,”—recalling, somehow, the coincidence in Julia Mills’s diary between the checker-board tavern-sign and checkered human existence on a similar occasion in David Copperfield’s life,—“but everybody was kind, the villagers strewed flowers in the way, the church was half full of people, and my heart and eyes were more than full of tears.” The bridal pair were driven in Mr. Stace’s carriage to Rochester, posted next day to Dover, and crossed the Channel on the 3d. They passed a fortnight at the HÔtel Castiglione in Paris, and then returned to England, where they spent the winter, partly in London and partly at Woolwich, and in visits to the Shaws, Skinners, and other friends. Willis was busy in getting out the first and second English editions of “Pencillings” and the “Inklings of Adventure.” He presented his bride to his “swell” acquaintances in London, and was himself introduced by his brothers-in-law to numbers of military people, dined at the Artillery Mess, and was given the freedom of the Army and Navy Club. He set up an “establishment,” a cabriolet and a gray cab-horse, “tall, showy, and magnificent.” He had taken into service a young fellow named William Michell, the son of his landlady, a bright and handsome lad, who now made a very presentable tiger. William went to America with his master in the spring, remained in his service during his residence at Glenmary, and came back with him, in 1839, to England, where he ultimately got employment as a machinist, having a good education and a knack at mechanics.

In May, 1836, after many leave-takings, Willis sailed with his wife for America. His “Lines on Leaving Europe,”—

dated in the English Channel, express the feelings at once of regret and of hope with which he set his face homeward after an absence of four years and a half. These spirited lines are among the very few poems of Willis which seem destined to last. They have the real lyrical impulse, and it is not easy to read them without emotion. Emerson, who gives part of the poem in “Parnassus,” omits the closing stanza, in which the poet touchingly bespeaks a welcome for his English bride.

Willis published three books while in England. “Melanie and Other Poems” appeared March 31, 1835. It was divided into three parts and included a selection from the three volumes of verse published in America, but unfamiliar to the British public, besides some half dozen new poems, dated, said the author, in his prefatory note, from “the corner of a club [the Travellers’] in the ungenial month of January.” It was introduced by Barry Cornwall, who speaks of the poet as “a man of high talent and sensibility,” and then goes on with some reflections of a friendly nature on American literature and the desirableness of cultivating kinder feelings between England and America. Wilson, who reviewed “Melanie” very favorably in “Blackwood’s,” made Procter’s introduction to it the theme of much elaborate ridicule, in the well-known style of “Maga,” when rending a cockney author. He affected to have gathered an impression from the title-page,—which described the poems as “edited” by Barry Cornwall,—that Willis was dead, and that Procter was performing the office of literary undertaker for “poor Willis’s remains.” “Alas! thought we, on reading this title-page; is Willis dead? Then America has lost one of the most promising of her young poets. We had seen him not many months before in high health and spirits and had much enjoyed his various and vivacious conversation.… But why weep for him, the accomplished acquaintance of an hour?” He goes out on the street and tells the first friend he meets that Willis is dead. “Impossible,” answers the friend; “day before yesterday he was sitting very much alive in the AthenÆum Club: here is a letter from him franked Mahon,” etc. Another Scotch professor—Aytoun—who belonged, like Wilson, to the Tory light artillery, was moved to write a parody of “Melanie.” The same humorist also paid his respects to Willis in one of his “Ballads of Bon Gaultier,”—a strenuous piece of North British playfulness, in which Willis and Bryant are represented as sallying forth like knights errant on the Quest of the Snapping Turtle:—

The two longest and most ambitious poems in this volume were “Melanie” and “Lord Ivon and his Daughter.” The first is the story “told during a walk around the cascatelles of Tivoli,” of an English girl, “the last of the De Brevern race,” who betroths herself in Italy to a young painter of unknown parentage; but at their bridal at St. Mona’s altar a nun shrieks through the lattice of the chapel:—

and the bride thereupon “sunk and died, without a sign or word.” The stanza and style are taken from Byron’s and Scott’s metrical romances. The very first line—

is a reminiscence of “The Isles of Greece.” The second poem, which is equally melodramatic in its catastrophe, is in blank verse and in the form of a dialogue between the Lady Isidore and her father, Lord Ivon. He tells his daughter (with a few interruptions from her, such as “Impossible!” and “Nay, dear father! Was’t so indeed?”) how he had in vain wooed her grandmother with minstrelsy and feats of arms, and then her mother more successfully with gold: marrying whom, he had begotten Isidore, and afterwards, in remorse for having dragged his young bride to the altar, had been on the point of draining a poisoned chalice, when she had anticipated him by running away with a younger lover, leaving to his care the babe, now grown to a woman, who dutifully concludes the dialogue with, “Thank God! Thank God!” Both of these poems were imitative and artificial, and the last not a little absurd. Willis had no genius for narrative or dramatic poetry, and when he tried to be impersonal and “objective,” he wrought against the grain. The lyrical pieces in the book were almost all of them graceful and sweet. He himself thought that the best thing in the volume was “Birth-Day Verses,” addressed to his mother on January 20, 1835. Similar in theme were the lines, “To my Mother, from the Apennines,” written at an auberge on the mountains, August 3, 1832. The verses to Mary Benjamin, written in Scotland in September, 1834, have been already mentioned. They stand in his collected poems as “To M——, from Abroad,” and were also incorporated in “Edith Linsey,” under the title “To Edith, from the North.” “The Confessional,” dated Hellespont, October 1, 1833, was also meant for Mary Benjamin. This and “Florence Gray” had the note of travel. But a Boston poem, “The Belfry Pigeon,” was the most popular of anything in the book and has retained a place in readers and collections to the present day. These shorter pieces, like all of Willis’s truest poetry, were purely poems of sentiment. His description, in “Edith Linsey,” of Job Smith’s verses as “the mixed product of feeling and courtesy” applies consciously to his own. They were “the delicate offspring of tenderness and chivalry,” airy, facile, smooth, but thin in content: not rich, full, concrete, but buoyed up by light currents of emotion in a region, to quote his own words again, of “floating and colorless sentiments.” This disembodied character is a mark of almost all the American poetry of the Annual or Gemmiferous period, and is seen at its extreme in the unsubstantial prolixity of Percival and the drab diffuseness of Mrs. Sigourney. It was the reflection on this side the water from Shelley, from Byron’s earlier manner, from Wordsworth’s most didactic passages, and from the imitations of all these by secondary poets, like Mrs. Norton and L. E. L. Willis’s verses were much better than Percival’s or Mrs. Sigourney’s—defter, briefer, more pointed. But they had a certain poverty of imagery and allusion which belonged to the school, a recurrence of stock properties, such as roses, stars, and bells. He was ridiculed by the critics, in particular, for his constancy to the Pleiades, which would almost seem to have been the only constellation in his horizon.

Toward the last of November, 1835, the first edition of “Pencillings by the Way” was published. It was an imperfect one, made up hastily for the London market from a broken set of the “Mirror,” and gave only seventy-nine out of the one hundred and thirty-nine letters since printed in the complete editions. From this imperfect copy the first American impression (1836) was taken, and all in fact down to 1844. The book reached a second English edition in March, 1836, and a seventh in 1863. For this first edition Willis received £250. He afterwards testified, that from the republication of the original “Pencillings,” for which Morris had paid him $500 a year, he had made, all told, about $5,000. Their appearance in book form had been anticipated by a severe criticism of the original “Mirror” letters, written by Lockhart for the “London Quarterly” of September, 1835. This was echoed by the Tory press generally, and it was their attacks which led to the issue of the London edition and greatly stimulated its sale. There were several reasons why the Tory papers were “down on” Willis. In the first place he was an American. In the next place he had been admitted and made much of in English social circles, where English men of letters, who were merely men of letters, did not often go. And, finally, he had spoken disrespectfully in these letters of the editor of the “Quarterly” himself. “Do you know Lockhart?” Wilson is made to ask in Willis’s report of their conversation at Edinburgh. “No, I do not,” replies his interlocutor. “He is almost the only literary man in London I have not met; and I must say, as the editor of the ‘Quarterly,’ 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 probably have met a hundred of his acquaintances, but I have not yet seen one who pretended to be his friend.”

This paragraph was enough to account for the “Quarterly” article; but the personal grievance was kept well out of sight, and Willis was taken to task for his alleged abuse of the rights of hospitality in reporting for a public journal private conversations at gentlemen’s tables. The article was a very offensive one, written with ability and with that air of cold contempt of which Lockhart was master. It sneered at Willis as a “Yankee poetaster,” and a “sonneteer of the most ultra-sentimental delicacy;” intimated that his surprise and delight at the manners of the English aristocracy came from his not having been familiar with the usages of the best society at home, and accused him of “conceited vulgarity” and “cockneyism” (an awful word, under which the Scotch Tories connoted all possible offenses against sound politics and good literature). The passages that seem to have given most offense to the critic were the report of the conversation with Lord Aberdeen at Gordon Castle and the remarks of Moore about O’Connell at Lady Blessington’s. “It is fortunate in this particular case,” wrote Lockhart, “that what Lord Aberdeen said to Mr. Willis might be repeated in print without paining any of the persons his lordship talked of; but what he did say, he said under the impression that the guest of the Duke of Gordon was a gentleman, and there are abundance of passages in Mr. Willis’s book which can leave no doubt that, had the noble earl spoken in a different sense, it would not, at all events, have been from any feeling of what was due to his lordship, or to himself, that Mr. Willis would have hesitated to report the conversation with equal freedom.” The article concludes as follows: “This is the first example of a man creeping into your home and forthwith printing,—accurately or inaccurately, no matter which,—before your claret is dry on his lips,—unrestrained table-talk on delicate subjects, and capable of compromising individuals.” Lockhart, as usual, contrived to insult Willis’s country, through her representative. “We can well believe,” he said, “that Mr. Willis has been depicting the sort of society that most interests his countrymen.

their servile adulation of rank and title, their stupid admiration of processions and levÉes, and so forth, are leading features in almost all the American books of travels that we have met with.”

To this censure Willis replied, in substance, in the preface to the first London edition of “Pencillings,” first, that from “the distance of America, and the ephemeral nature and usual obscurity of periodical correspondence,” he had never expected that the “Mirror” letters would reach England; nor would they have done so, had not the “Quarterly” “made a long arm over the water,” and reprinted all the offending portions; thereby forcing the author’s hand and compelling him to publish the entire collection in justification of himself. Secondly, that his sketches of distinguished people were neither ill-natured nor untrue; that he had said nothing in them which could injure the feelings of those who had admitted him to their confidence or hospitality. “There are passages,” he allows, “I would not rewrite, and some remarks on individuals which I would recall at some cost,” but “I may state as a fact that the only instance in which a quotation by me from the conversation of distinguished men gave the least offense in England was the one remark made by Moore, the poet, at a dinner party, on the subject of O’Connell. It would have been harmless, as it was designed to be, but for the unexpected celebrity of my ‘Pencillings;’ yet with all my heart I wish it unwritten.” And finally, that whatever violations of delicacy and good taste might have been committed in the “Pencillings,” the author of “Peter’s Letters to his Kinsfolk” was not the one to throw a stone at them. The first plea in this defense was sincerely made, as might be easily proved from Willis’s private letters. It was a disagreeable surprise to him when the “Quarterly” reprinted passages from the “Mirror” letters. And it is true that America was much farther away from England than England was from America. Still, if Willis had published anything that he should not have published, it was not a perfect excuse to say that he had done it in a corner. As the event showed, foreign correspondence in an American newspaper might reach England. But this apology was not needed, for his second plea covered the ground. There was, in truth, nothing malicious or slanderous in “Pencillings;” almost nothing that could give pain even to the most sensitive. The people described were, nearly all of them, in a sense, public characters, accustomed to seeing themselves gossiped about in print. In one or two instances Willis had been indiscreet, as he freely admitted. But it is hard for one living in these times of society journals and “interviewers” to understand why the papers should have made such a pother over a comparatively trifling trespass upon the reserves of private life. The best proof of Willis’s innocence in the matter is that the people whose hospitality and confidence he was charged with abusing took no kind of umbrage at the liberty. On the contrary, Lord Aberdeen, Wilson, Dalhousie, and others wrote to him in warm approval of his book. “With what feelings,” said the “Quarterly” article, apropos of the description of Gordon Castle, “the whole may have been perused by the generous lord and lady of the castle themselves, it is no business of ours to conjecture.” This point, however, need not be left to conjecture, as it is amply answered in the following letter to Willis from the Earl of Dalhousie, dated February 25, 1836:—

Lady Dalhousie had written some two mouths before:—

It has been said above that there was almost nothing in “Pencillings” that could give pain to any one; but to this statement there are one or two exceptions. The first was the instance of Moore and O’Connell, in which Willis acknowledged and regretted his imprudence. “This publication, to my knowledge,” says Madden in his “Life of the Countess of Blessington,” “was attended with results which I cannot think Mr. Willis contemplated when he transmitted his hasty notes to America,—to estrangements of persons who, previously to the printed reports of their private conversations, had been on terms of intimate acquaintance. This was the case with respect to O’Connell and Moore. Moore’s reported remarks on O’Connell gave offense to the latter, and aroused bad feelings between them which had never previously existed, and which, I believe, never ceased to exist.”

It also appears from a letter from Willis to Lady Blessington, and an unsigned note from a friend of hers to Willis, both of which are printed in Madden’s “Life,” that Fonblanque resented the description of himself in “Pencillings,” and had written the author a note in terms which the latter thought “very unjustifiable.” Fonblanque was an able and estimable man, and Willis’s portrait, or caricature, of him, though not unkindly meant and applying merely to his personal appearance, was certainly not pleasant for the subject of it to see in print.

With the exception of Lockhart, Moore, Fonblanque, and Captain Marryat, whose case will be mentioned presently, it does not appear that anyone took offense at anything in “Pencillings.” As to Lady Blessington, Lockhart’s misgiving as to whether she would ever “again admit to her table the animal who has printed what ensues” was needless. It was she who saw the book through the press while Willis was in France on his wedding journey. He went to see her frequently during the remainder of his stay in London, and called upon her on his two subsequent visits to England; and their friendship and correspondence continued unbroken till her death in 1849. His poem, “To a Face Beloved,” originally printed in the “Mirror” of November 14, 1835, was addressed to her. It may well have been, however, that the noise made about the book, and the cause for complaint given to a few of the habituÉs of Gore House, put a certain constraint upon his visits there, and he probably absented himself from the dinners and receptions given by the mistress of the mansion, and which it had formerly been his chief pleasure to attend. In a letter to her from Dublin, January 25, 1840, he says: “I have, I assure you, no deeper regret than that my indiscretion (in ‘Pencillings’) should have checked the freedom of my approach to you. Still my attachment and admiration (so unhappily recorded) are always on the alert for some trace that I am still remembered by you.… My first pleasure when I return to town will be to avail myself of your kind invitation, and call at Gore House.”

In spite of the “Quarterly’s” attack—partly no doubt in consequence of it—“Pencillings by the Way” met, on the whole, with a generous reception from the English public, and even from the English press. Literary criticism in those days was largely influenced by political prejudice. It was useless for a Whig, a “Cockney,” or an American, to hope for justice from the Tory reviews. The “Westminster” (Radical) was edited by Willis’s friend, Dr. Bowring; the “Edinburgh” (Whig), by his acquaintance, Lord Jeffrey. The former accordingly greeted his book with warm approval, and the latter praised it with faint damns. On the other hand, “Fraser’s,” the lightest and brightest of the Tory organs, received it with uproarious contempt. The notice of “Pencillings” in the February number of the magazine for 1836 was by Maginn,—the “Odoherty” of the “Noctes,”—a witty Irish blackguard, the hired bravo of the Tory press, who spent his time, except when drunk or in jail for debt, in writing lampoons and rollicking songs for “Blackwood” and “Fraser,” expressive chiefly of convivial joys and of boisterous scorn of the Whigs. There was a flavor of whiskey and Donnybrook about whatever Maginn wrote, and he wielded his blackthorn with such droll abandon that his victims could hardly help laughing, while rubbing their heads. His onslaught on “Pencillings” began, “This is really a goose of a book, or if anybody wishes the idiom to be changed, a book of a goose. There is not a single idea in it, from the first page to the last, beyond what might germinate in the brain of a washerwoman.” He then goes on to call the author a lickspittle, a “beggarly skittler,” a jackass, a ninny, a haberdasher, a “namby-pamby writer in twaddling albums, kept by the moustachioed and strong-smelling widows or bony matrons of Portland Place;” a “fifty-fifth rate scribbler of gripe-visited sonnets,” a “windy-gutted visitor,” and a “sumph,” whatever that mystic monosyllable may import.[3] His writing is characterized as “chamber-maid gabble,” “small beer,” “penny-trumpet eloquence,” “Willis’s bray,” and “Niagara in a jordan.” President Jackson, whom Maginn supposes to have appointed Willis attachÉ to the French embassy, is “that most open-throated of flummery-gulpers, Old Hickory.” Alluding to a passage in Willis’s “slimy preface,” the reviewer says, “that Willis should literally set his foot on Lockhart’s head is what we think no one imagines the silly man to have meant. The probabilities are that if the imposition of feet should take place between them, the toe of Lockhart would find itself in disgusting contact with a part of Willis which is considerably removed from his head, and deemed to be the quarter in which the honor of such persons is most peculiarly called into action.” Such were the amenities of criticism half a century ago. Of course this animated billingsgate could not hurt Willis in anybody’s esteem, and called for no reply. Maginn was a wretched creature and no one minded what he said; though, to be sure, the Hon. Grantley Berkeley thought it necessary, in this same year, 1836, to call him out for a scurrilous attack upon himself and his cousin, Lady Euston, in a notice of Berkeley’s novel, “Castle Berkeley.” The latter, in his very diverting “Life and Recollections,” gives a circumstantial history of this duel and of the flogging which he administered to Fraser for publishing the article, and of Maginn’s shameful treatment of poor Miss Landon.

But one of the notices provoked by “Pencillings” came near having serious consequences for Willis. In a letter in the “Mirror” of April 18, 1835, he had inserted a postscript, after his signature, as he claimed, and meant only for Morris’s private eye, giving some information about the sales of books in London. In this occurred, among other things, the sentence following: “Captain Marryat’s gross trash sells immensely about Wapping and Portsmouth, and brings him five or six hundred the book, but that can scarce be called literature.” Morris printed it with the rest of the letter, and when it reached England the gallant captain was naturally displeased by it. His revenge was to publish in his magazine, the “Metropolitan” for January, 1836, a review of “Pencillings,” or rather a grossly personal review of the author of “Pencillings.” The article was less telling than the “Quarterly’s,” simply because Marryat did not drive so sharp a quill as the editor of the “Quarterly.” But the latter knew his business as a reviewer and confined himself to the book in hand. Marryat, on the contrary, traveled outside the record and helplessly allowed his private grievance to appear. He declared that Willis was a “spurious attachÉ,” who had made his way into English society under false colors.

“He makes invidious, uncharitable, and ill-natured remarks upon authors and their works; all of which he dispatches for the benefit of the reading public of America, and, at the same time that he has thus stabbed them behind their backs, he is requesting to be introduced to them—bowing, smiling, and simpering.” “Although we are well acquainted with the birth, parentage, and history of Mr. Willis, previous to his making his continental tour, we will pass them over in silence; and we think that Mr. Willis will acknowledge that we are generous in so doing.” “It is evident that Mr. Willis has never, till lately, been in good society, either in England or America.”