On his arrival in London, Willis was attacked with a brain fever, which confined him to his bed for a fortnight. As soon as he could get about he brought his little daughter to see Lady Blessington, and then took her and her nurse to Steventon Vicarage, near Abingdon, in Berkshire, to stay with her aunt, the wife of Rev. William Vincent, formerly of Bolney Priory. He took lodgings for himself in the village near by, and, after a short trip to Bath, returned to London and spent some time in visiting, dining out, sight-seeing, and making new acquaintances. He met a Mr. Stiles of Georgia, an old schoolmate, who was passing through England on his way to Vienna, where he had lately been appointed chargÉ d’affaires, and who gave him a complimentary appointment as attachÉ to his legation, an addition to his passport of the kind that had proved so serviceable in the days of his “Pencillings.” This determined him to shape his course for the capital of Austria, taking in Germany, which was new to him, on the way. Leaving his daughter at Steventon, he crossed the Channel, went up the Rhine, and joined his brother Richard, who was studying music at Leipsic. Here he passed a month, and then, accompanied by his brother, went on to Dresden. There the two parted, and Willis traveled alone to Berlin, where he was again seriously ill, and was kindly ministered to by his old friend and associate on the “New York Mirror,” T. S. Fay, at that time secretary of legation at Berlin. Mr. Henry Wheaton, the American minister, attached Willis also to the Prussian mission. But of these appointments and the opportunities they promised he was unable to avail himself. Continued ill health forced him to abandon his journey to Vienna, and to make his way back to England, whence he sailed for home in the spring of 1846. He had meant to leave Imogen with her mother’s family for a time, to be put to school in England. But his heart failed him at the last, and he brought her back with him to America, sending her, still in charge of her nurse, to live with his sister, Mrs. Louis Dwight, in Boston. He himself took rooms in New York until other arrangements could be made. His child’s nurse, Harriet Jacobs, who was in his employ from 1842 to 1861, was a remarkable woman, whose career, if fully told, would form an interesting chapter in the history of American slavery. She was an escaped slave from a plantation near Edenton, North Carolina. She had run away from her master when a young woman, and taken refuge with a family of free negroes, her kinsfolk. They kept her hidden for five years in a cubby under the roof, during which time she supported herself by fine needlework which her friends sold for her in town. At last she escaped to the North, and was engaged by Willis as a house servant when he went to Glenmary. Her attachment to the interests of the family during the whole period of her service was a beautiful instance of the fidelity and affection which sometimes, but not often, distinguish the relation of master and servant even in this land of change. Mrs. Jacobs’s former owners, having got wind in some way of her whereabouts, came North in quest of her, and spared no pains to reclaim the runaway. Several times she had to leave the Willises and go into hiding at Boston and elsewhere. At last, tired of these alarms, Willis sacrificed whatever scruples he might have had against such a step, and bought her freedom out and out. When the civil war began she went to Washington, and employed her practical abilities, which were of a high order, in the post of matron to a soldiers’ hospital. In that city she is still living, at an advanced age.

Though ill nearly all the time of this his third trip abroad, Willis managed to write a number of “Invalid Letters” to the “Evening Mirror,” which were collected in “Famous Persons and Places” and in “Rural Letters.” They were scarcely worth preserving. England was now a twice-told tale, and in Germany, which was a pasture new, he was too tired and sick and borne down by his recent bereavement to take much interest in anything. His articles about the great fair at Leipsic—“What I saw at the Fair,” in “Godey’s” for October, 1847; and “On Dress,” in “The Opal” for 1848, and “Godey’s” for June, 1849—were the most considerable literary results of the journey. He also superintended the publication of an English edition of “Dashes at Life,” in three volumes, and came home under engagement to write for the London “Morning Chronicle.”

Meanwhile the editorial corps of the “Evening Mirror” had tapered down to Hiram Fuller. Willis had practically retired from any active share in its management when he left the country in the spring of 1845. He was still abroad when Morris withdrew from it and started a new paper, the “National Press,” toward the close of the same year. Willis joined him in this enterprise as soon as he got back from England. During the spring and summer of 1846 he was often in Washington, as correspondent of the “National Press” and the “Morning Chronicle,” and while there he met Miss Cornelia Grinnell, the niece and adopted daughter of the Hon. Joseph Grinnell, who was then representative in Congress from New Bedford, Massachusetts. To this lady he was married on October 1, 1846, the eleventh anniversary of his first marriage. She was his junior by nearly twenty years, but she united to her graces of person and character a penetrating mind and an uncommon energy and firmness of will, which made her an invaluable helpmate through the years of trial that were in store for both. On the 21st of November following, the name of the “National Press” was changed to the “Home Journal,” under which title the paper has ever since been published. This was Morris’s and Willis’s final and most prosperous experiment in journalism. They both remained connected with it till death: in Willis’s case a service of twenty-one years, during which his literary toil was devoted almost exclusively to building up the paper. “For the cultivation of the memorable, the progressive, and the beautiful,” ran the legend upon its title-page, followed by a sentence from Goethe, which still stands as the motto of the paper, and would have served well enough as the motto of Willis’s own career: “We should do our utmost to encourage the beautiful, for the useful encourages itself.” It was not a very solid type of literature which was fostered by the “Home Journal,” but it made for itself a peculiar constituency, and a place in the world of letters which it still successfully occupies, under the editorship of Morris Phillips, General Morris’s adopted son, who has carried out the traditions of the paper as established by his predecessors. It was and is the organ of “japonicadom,” the journal of society and gazette of fashionable news and fashionable literature, addressing itself with assiduous gallantry to “the ladies.”

Willis set himself more especially in both the “New Mirror” and the “Home Journal” to portray the town. He became a sort of Knickerbocker Spectator, and his “Ephemera,” published in 1854, is a running record of the notabilities of New York for a dozen years. He chronicled the operas and theatres: Ole Bull, Jenny Lind, and Macready; the shops, the omnibuses, the endless procession of Broadway, the museum, the art galleries, the Tombs, the Alhambra, the Five Points, the Croton water, the cafÉs, the hotels, the balls and receptions, the changes in equipages, customs, dress. He grew to be a recognized arbiter elegantiarum, and his correspondence columns were crowded with appeals on knotty points of etiquette or costume. His decisions of these social problems were always marked by good sense and good taste. There are many nice bits in “Ephemera,” and some little wholes,—like the letter from Saratoga, “To the Julia of Some Years Ago,”—which deserve to be rescued from the oblivion of a book of scraps and trifles. He was a skillful paragrapher; he had unfailing tact and knew when to stop. Above all, he was eminently human; his gregariousness and his cheerful philosophy cast a gleam of their own on this looking-glass of urban life. He imported a rural air into the city; watched how April greened the grass in the public squares, and June spread the leaves in Trinity Churchyard; stopped to pick “a clovertop or an aggravating dandelion ’twixt post office and city hall;” and discovered even in the stream that washed the curbstone, “a clear brook—a brook with a song, tripping as musically (when the carts are not going by) as the beloved brook” in Glenmary. Pan, we know, has been found in Wall Street; and Willis contrived to find something like a nymph in the waste of the Park fountain. When his work kept him at the desk all through the hot summer, he borrowed a breeze from “the outermost bastion of Castle Garden,” and made the Jersey ferryboat his “substitute for a private yacht.”

When he came to New York to live, in 1842, and during his continued residence there for more than ten years from that date, Manhattan was by no means the metropolis that it is to-day, though it had begun to assume already that cosmopolitan and intensely commercial character which distinguishes it from all other American cities. It had a considerable and swiftly growing foreign population, and its society was marked by a liveliness and extravagance which contrasted with the plainer and more earnest tone prevailing in Boston, and with the somewhat provincial cast of Philadelphia life. The Battery was still the fashionable promenade, Canal Street was “up town,” Hoboken, a rural suburb, Pine, Ann, and William Streets, and the Bowling Green were genteel residence quarters. The old Park Theatre was—after the burning of the National—the only respectable playhouse, until Niblo’s was opened in what was then the outskirt of the town. New York prided itself, moreover, on being a literary centre. The term “Knickerbocker School,” which has been invented to describe a group of metropolitan writers who owed their inspiration, in some sort, to Washington Irving, is of uncertain application; and there was no such cohesion among the members of the group as to warrant the name of a school. But if the term be extended to cover all the authors whose birth or long residence identified them with New York city, it may include Bryant and Halleck, who were the most prominent literary figures when Willis went there to live, though both of them, like him, were of New England birth and breeding. Bryant had been since 1826 editor of the “Evening Post” and Halleck, who had almost ceased to write and was devoting himself exclusively to his duties as secretary to Mr. John Jacob Astor, left the city in 1849, and retired to his old home in Guilford, Connecticut. With both of these Willis was more or less intimate, meeting them frequently at dinners and in general society. Irving himself, the starting-point of the Knickerbocker writers, was out of the country when Willis settled in New York, having gone as minister to Spain in 1842. He came back in 1846 and took up his residence at Sunnyside. Cooper was living at Cooperstown, where Willis made him a flying visit and renewed the acquaintance so pleasantly begun at Paris in 1832. This was in the summer of 1848, which Willis spent at Sharon Springs, recovering from an attack of rheumatism. Theodore Fay too was abroad, filling diplomatic posts in Germany and Switzerland. Years after, on his return to America, he visited Willis at Idlewild, and the latter found him greatly aged and saddened since the days when he wrote mild town satires and humorous sketches for the “New York Mirror.” Eastburn, Sands, and Drake were all dead, and Paulding had signalized the close of his literary career by publishing a collection of his works in numerous volumes. He too had been a contributor to the old “Mirror,” and so had another of the Knickerbockers, Charles Fenno Hoffman, who had once edited the paper for a month, before Willis had any connection with it. Hoffman, who died just the other day, is known to this generation almost solely by his still popular song, “Sparkling and Bright,” and his hardly less popular “Monterey.” The former is sung by collegians and the latter declaimed by school-boys. He was the first editor of the “Knickerbocker Magazine.” His “Winter in the West” and his novel, “Greyslaer,” founded on the famous Beauchamp tragedy in North Carolina, had wide currency in their time, and his amusing story, “The Man in the Reservoir,” may still be read with enjoyment. He was a man of many friends, greatly beloved for his frank and cordial nature. By 1846 he had already begun to show symptoms of the mental disease which issued in his chronic insanity. He kept on writing up to 1850, when it was found necessary to send him to an asylum, in which confinement he lived for over thirty years. Hoffman once said of Willis’s eyes that they “always seemed to have nothing but cold speculation in them,—to be two holes, looking out through a stone wall.” Then there were Verplanck, the editor of Shakespeare, and Duyckinck the compiler of the “CyclopÆdia of American Literature,” and many forgotten worthies, whose names may be read in such limbos of departed fame as Poe’s “Literati of New York.” Many of these literati used to meet each other informally at the weekly receptions given by Miss Anne Lynch (now Mrs. Botta) the poetess, and author of the “Handbook of Universal Literature,” whose hospitable parlors have been for forty years a rallying place for interesting and distinguished people. With this lady Mr. and Mrs. Willis formed a close and lasting friendship. Willis used to go often to Horace Greeley’s, where he got interested for a time in spirit rappings, and wrote some papers on the subject in the “Home Journal.” Greeley once urged him in a letter (November 18, 1854) to publish a volume of selections from his lifelong writings. “I want such a one,” he wrote, “for my boy, so that, should I live to see him sixteen, I may try ‘Unwritten Music’ on him and see if it impresses him as it did me at about that age, when it appeared.”

During the first winter and spring after their marriage, Willis and his wife lived in lodgings. In the autumn of 1847 they went to housekeeping at No. 19 Ludlow Place, where their eldest son, Grinnell, was born, April 28, 1848. In the fall of that year they bought the house No. 198 Fourth Street, where they remained till the fall of 1852. A daughter, Lilian, was born April 27, 1850.

For ten years Willis’s tall and elegantly dressed figure was a familiar sight on Broadway, and was often pointed out to strangers at public assemblages, or in private society, where his agreeable manners made him a general favorite. He was never what is called a brilliant conversationalist, but he was an easy talker and quick at an impromptu, many of his “good things” in which kind are remembered and quoted by his contemporaries. Thus, on one occasion, at a dinner party in Washington, a young lady who sat between Willis and a gentleman named Campbell was rather too partial in her attention to the former. Her mother sitting opposite, and considering Mr. Campbell a desirable parti, slipped her a note across the table, “Pay more attention to your other neighbor.” This being shown to Willis, he wrote on the back of it,—

When in Germany, he went with some gentlemen to visit a deaf and dumb asylum which had an inscription over the gate, Stiftung, etc. “Stifftongue,” said Willis, looking up; “very appropriate.”

Like most men who overwork their pens, he was impatient of private correspondence. When in England, he excused his brevity on the plea that he was paid a guinea a page for everything he wrote, and could not afford to waste manuscript. “Private Letters,” he declared in a note to Edgar Poe, “are the ‘last ounce that breaks the camel’s back’ of a literary man.” And he once answered a friend who proposed a correspondence, that to ask him 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. His letters to his family and friends have seldom any literary quality, though they contain, now and then, characteristically quaint or playful touches. “Kiss mother on her sad expression” is a message in one of them; and in another he refers to one of his little nieces as the most charming “copy of Willis” extant. Having been invited to sit on the stage, at the Commencement of Rutgers Female College, as “the author of ‘Absalom’ and ‘Hagar,’” he wrote, “I shall try to have the air of the Old Testament, but have my doubts as to success.”

The easy dÉgagÉ air of his writing was, as is usually the case with seemingly ready writers, the result of laborious care. It appears from the testimony of Poe, Parton, Phillips, and others who were his associates on the “Mirror” or “Home Journal” and knew his habits of composition, that his manuscript was full of erasures and interlineations. He blotted, on an average, one line out of every three, but his copy was so neatly and legibly prepared that the compositors preferred it to “reprint,” even his erasures having “a certain wavy elegance.” He was likewise very particular about having his articles printed just as he wrote them. “My copy must be followed,” he wrote to an offending foreman. “If I insert a comma in the middle of a word, do you place it there and ask no questions.” Once a slight alteration by Morris in the wording of a paragraph in Willis’s manuscript came near causing a quarrel between the two old friends, “probably the only misunderstanding or disagreement,” says Mr. Phillips, “which occurred during the whole of their literary life and business association.” “I would not stay one week a partner with a man who ventured to alter a word of my copy and send it to press without my knowledge,” wrote Willis in his angry note to Morris on this occasion. Mr. Phillips adds that “General Morris proved his love for Mr. Willis by not replying to this letter, but simply wrote on the back of it, ‘I would have received this from no other man living.’” From similar testimony it appears that Willis took no share in the business management of the paper, never examined the books, nor asked any questions as to the circulation. He felt or affected a horror of figures, and confided the matter of receipts and expenditures entirely to General Morris, between whom and himself, during the entire period of their partnership, no statement of account was ever rendered. In money matters Willis was liberal,—not to say reckless,—and his hospitality knew no limit. Nor was it only his roof and his table that were at his friends’ service; his literary latch-string was always out to every new-comer in the field of letters. It was an honorable trait in his character, and should never be forgotten in casting his account, that, whatever may have been his foibles, the jealousy which is the besetting sin of authors and artists was not among them. He was perpetually on the lookout for young writers of promise, and was the first to praise them, and to give circulation to their good things by copying them into his columns. He was the introducer and literary sponsor of many reputations now fallen silent, and of some which have survived. Among the last were Mr. T. B. Aldrich—who succeeded James Parton as assistant editor of the “Home Journal”—and Bayard Taylor. The latter was greatly in Willis’s debt. His desire for travel was first awakened by reading the “Pencillings by the Way” when he was a lad of sixteen. And afterwards when he came to New York to seek the means for foreign travel he applied at once to the author whose brilliant pictures of European life had roused his young enthusiasm. Willis befriended him in every way; gave him letters to wealthy gentlemen in New York, and bestirred himself to interest people in his adventure and raise the sum necessary to start him on his journey. On his departure he gave him a letter to his brother Richard, in Frankfort, with whom the young handwerksbursch tarried for a time, while he was picking up the German language. His “Views Afoot”—the fruits of this venture—were dedicated to Willis, who contributed the preface. This patronage was unkindly referred to in Duganne’s “Parnassus in Pillory,” a little Dunciad of the old downright “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers” variety, which made some noise in New York in the year 1851:—

In another part of his squib the lampooner returns to the charge against Willis as follows:—

Another young poet whose career Willis watched with interest was J. R. Lowell. There was a friendly correspondence between the two in 1843-44, the younger writer thanking the older for his encouragement, sending him his new volume of verse, and promising to contribute to the “Mirror,” but remonstrating with him upon his declared intention—in a very appreciative review of Lowell’s poems in the “Mirror”—to omit the James from his “musical surname” and call him simply Russell Lowell:—

In point of fact—if the item is not below the dignity of biography—this threat of Lowell’s to mind Willis’s P’s for him was without terror for the latter, who favored his middle initial at the expense of his scriptural and baptismal prÆnomen, and used to figure on the title-pages of his later books as N. Parker Willis. He disliked to be called Nathaniel; respecting which prejudice, his wife and brothers and sisters, as well as his intimate friends, were accustomed to address him simply as Willis. “Truly one’s sponsors,” said he, “have much to answer for.” In Lowell’s smart pasquinade, “A Fable for Critics,” published in 1848, which contains not only headlong fun, but good poetry and just criticism, there is a passage on Willis, from which I venture to quote a few lines,—in spite of its familiarity to many readers,—because its spirit is kindly and it is one of the best estimates of Willis ever written:—

One proof of popularity is parody. Until a statesman’s face is so familiar to the public that its caricature in the comic papers needs no label, and until an author’s style is so easily recognized that a travesty of it hits the sense of the reader, neither statesman nor author may consider himself as really popular. “Excelsior,” and “The Raven,” and “Abou ben Adhem” are by no means the best poems in the English tongue, but their currency is attested and doubtless kept up by the innumerable burlesque imitations of them that swarm the press. Willis had a share of these left-hand honors: his epistolary style in particular was often caricatured in the newspapers. In “Godey’s Lady’s Book” for December, 1849, he was selected together with Poe, Morris, Whittier, and John Neal for humorous imitation.

The requested poem is annexed—a scriptural poem, “The Fishwoman’s Son:”—

The fishwoman’s son sings a song, whose first stanza runs:—

Willis was forty when the “Home Journal” was begun—an age at which writers who have thought and studied deeply are often no more than ripe, and have their most productive years before them. But his best work was already done. After 1846 he wrote hardly any more stories or poems—none at all of any value. His pen was devoted more and more steadily to editorial duties, to ephemerÆ and paragraphs and fragments of all kinds, and his well-wishers lamented that wit and fancy which, if properly directed, might have produced something that would live and delight future generations, were wasted in dissertations upon the cut of a beard or the fashion of a coat. To all remonstrances of his friends over his literary trifling and their exhortations to write for posterity, his invariable answer, in and out of print, was that the public liked trifles, and that posterity would not pay his bills—that he must go on “buttering curiosity with the ooze of his brains.” That this answer satisfied himself, or that he was without those aspirations after a more enduring fame which are natural to all, cannot be believed. It is probable that he sadly acknowledged in his inner consciousness that the best part of his career was over. His talent, as has been said before, was the result of, or was closely dependent upon, his physical temperament. When health began to decay, and youth was over, and his animal spirits had effervesced, life commenced to have a flat taste. The bloom was off. His writing, too, as we have seen, was always closely related to his personal experiences; and as these grew tamer, he had less and less to report, and his writing grew tame in proportion. With some, mere study and contemplation supply, to a degree, the ravages which time makes upon the freshness of young impressions. But it had been Willis’s misfortune in youth that a premature success had deprived him of the discipline of early rebuffs, and had made a painful self-culture needless. He never drew much inspiration from books, and in later life he read very little. He said that he could not afford to read, partly for want of time, partly from a notion that much reading would be fatal to originality. Neither was it his privilege to command, at this or at any time, the stimulating and bracing association with men of high serious intellects and strenuous aims, such as he might, perhaps, have had if he had remained in Boston. The occasional hasty meetings with men of brains and literary tastes in general society did not at all take the place of that intimate communion with a circle of gifted spirits which has been so stimulating to others. Moreover it should be borne in mind, as accounting largely for the mediocrity of his later work, that for the last fifteen years of his life Willis was a chronic invalid. Indeed, he was never really a well man after his illness of 1845.

Next to Cooper, Willis was the best abused man of letters in America. It is easy to understand how the former, who was pugnacious and struck hard, should have been always in hot water. But why a man of Willis’s urbanity should have been a target for the newspaper critics is more difficult of explanation. “Colonel” William L. Stone of the “Commercial Advertiser,” and “Colonel” James Watson Webb of the “Courier and Enquirer,” distinguished themselves especially by their stern condemnation of Willis’s literary affectations, and of what they were pleased to consider the weaknesses of his private character and life. It is suggestive, by the way, of the militant disposition of the New York press at that time, that so many editors were generals and colonels—or at least were breveted such by public consent, and graced with titular embellishments of a warlike character. Henry J. Raymond, who joined the “Courier and Enquirer” in 1842, proved his zealous adhesion to the traditions of the paper by an onslaught upon Willis, in which he asserted that the latter had snobbishly represented himself as received in the best circles abroad, “when in truth ’twas no such matter.” Willis replied to this in an editorial which Poe mentions as a clever specimen of skill at fence. An effort was afterwards made by friends of both to bring them together, at a time when Willis was living at Idlewild and Raymond was visiting in the neighborhood. The plan miscarried for some reason or other, though Willis, who seldom cherished a resentment, was quite ready for a reconciliation.

In 1850 Willis became unpleasantly involved in the famous divorce suit between Edwin Forrest and his wife. He had known Forrest as early as 1836, admired his acting, and praised it constantly in the “Mirror” and “Home Journal,” preferring it to the more studied performances of his English rival, Macready. He had seen little of Forrest for a number of years; but after his return to New York, in 1846, the two families grew quite intimate, exchanging visits and dinners. Mrs. Willis and Mrs. Forrest especially became fast friends, and on one occasion, when the former was seriously ill, she sent for Mrs. Forrest to come and stay with her. Mrs. Forrest was the daughter of Sinclair, the great English singer. She was a lady of refinement, beauty, and social accomplishments. Her sister Mrs. Voorhies, who lived with her for a time, had inherited her father’s musical talents, and Mrs. Forrest soon got about her a pleasant circle of friends, which included many persons of literary and artistic tastes, editors, authors, professors, clergymen, and their wives. The Bryants, the Godwins, Dr. Dewey, Henry Wikoff, and Samuel Raymond, the actor, were among the frequenters of the house. When Richard Willis returned from his musical studies in Germany in 1848, his brother introduced him there, and he found so much enthusiasm for his art, that he called repeatedly, to practice his compositions with Mrs. Voorhies.

Edwin Forrest was a tragedian of great natural force and genius, endowed with a wonderful voice and a magnificent physique. But he was a man of passionate and overbearing temper; his education was defective, his language and manners sometimes offensively coarse, and he had little relish for intellectual society. He does not appear, however, to have felt any objection to his wife’s hospitalities, or to have suspected any impropriety in her receiving her friends, during his frequent absences from home on professional engagements, until long after other causes of estrangement had arisen between them. At Cincinnati, in the spring of 1848, he thought that he had discovered evidence of a guilty intimacy between Mrs. Forrest and an actor named Jamieson; and although she solemnly protested her innocence and her husband agreed to accept her oath, his jealousy smouldered and occasionally broke out in scenes of violence. At length, in April, 1849, they agreed to separate. Mrs. Forrest made her home for a time with Mr. and Mrs. Parke Godwin, and Forrest took up his residence in Philadelphia, where in February, 1850, he made an application for divorce to the Pennsylvania legislature, based upon affidavits, charging his wife with adultery. This application was ultimately denied, but meanwhile the lady’s friends in New York had taken the matter up. She had the sympathy and moral support of such men as William C. Bryant and his son-in-law, Mr. Parke Godwin, and Dr. Orville Dewey, the eminent Unitarian divine. Up to this time Forrest had not implicated Willis in his charges, but hearing that he was among those who were taking sides with Mrs. Forrest, he had stopped him in the street one day in January, 1850, and warned him against intermeddling between him and his wife, denouncing her unfaithfulness in the strongest terms. Willis replied that he did not believe a word of the slanders against her. The next day Mrs. Willis received an anonymous letter, accusing her husband of criminal relations with Mrs. Forrest. On March 28th the “Herald” published extracts from the evidence on which Forrest had based his application to the Pennsylvania legislature, which compromised, among others, Mr. Richard Willis. This drew from his brother a letter of explanation, printed in the “Herald” of the following day.

And in the “Home Journal” for April 6th he published a severe review of the “Forrest testimony,” warmly defending Mrs. Forrest, expressing the belief that her husband’s chief motive in the late proceedings had been to rid himself of the expense of her support; that the real cause of their separation had been his jealousy of her intellectual superiority; and condemning indignantly his attempt to “enlist kitchen and brothel against her, and so sully her fair name by cheap and easy falsehood that he can throw her off like a mistress paid up to parting.” The article concluded as follows:—

These two articles, coupled with testimony elicited from Forrest’s household servants, decided him to drag Willis into the case. His bill filed in Philadelphia contained the names of nine co-respondents, among them a clergyman, Mrs. Forrest’s family doctor, and Forrest’s old friend and traveling companion, Chevalier Wikoff. The last three were afterwards dropped from the case. Mrs. Forrest, having been served with a copy of the application and the process issued by the Pennsylvania legislature, filed a bill in the New York Supreme Court in September, 1850, and obtained an injunction to restrain her husband from proceeding with his suit in Philadelphia. She then began suit against him in New York for a divorce on the ground of adultery, which he defended with cross-accusations; and in New York the case was finally tried and decided. Meanwhile Forrest was prowling about his wife’s lodgings in New York, threatening people who went in or out, and stopping others in the street to warn them against interference.

On the 17th of June, while Willis was walking in Washington Square, near his own residence in Fourth Street, Forrest came up to him quickly and knocked him down with a blow from his fist. He then stood over him, and, holding him down by the coat collar with one hand, beat him with a gutta-percha whip till the police came up and interfered. To the group of spectators which had rapidly assembled, he said, “That is the seducer of my wife.” Willis would at no time have been physically the equal of his antagonist, who was a man of powerful frame; but when this assault was made it was doubly safe from the fact that the victim of it had been ill for months with a rheumatic fever, and was in an unusually feeble condition of body. Two days after this heroic action, Forrest met Bryant and Godwin walking down Broadway and furiously demanded who had put the account of it into the “Evening Post,” in which he was represented as having struck Willis from behind.

Willis brought an action against Forrest for this assault, in the superior court of the city of New York, and secured a verdict in March, 1852, for $2,500 and costs. The case was appealed on exceptions, and, upon the new trial which was ordered, the damages were reduced to one dollar. Forrest sued Willis for libel in the “Home Journal” article, and got $500 damages. But in the mean time the suit for divorce had come to trial, in December, 1851, and had been decided in Mrs. Forrest’s favor. The jury found the defendant guilty of adultery, found the plaintiff innocent, and granted her the decree prayed for with $3,000 a year alimony. This was one of the causes cÉlÈbres of the last generation. The trial occupied the then extraordinarily long period of six weeks, and the printed testimony fills two large volumes. Charles O’Conor, who was Mrs. Forrest’s counsel, dated his great reputation as an advocate from his conduct of this case. For eighteen years he fought the battle for his fair client relentlessly and triumphantly. The case was appealed five times, and judgment affirmed every time with an increase of alimony. It was not till 1868 that the defendant tired of resistance, and paid over to the plaintiff the sum of $64,000. His costs and expenses of litigation, additional to this, were of course enormous. It is unnecessary to review the evidence given at the trial, by which it was sought to incriminate Willis in this affair, further than to say that it consisted almost solely of the testimony of servants, who were thoroughly discredited in their cross-examination. One of these witnesses was a man who had been discharged from Willis’s employ. Another was an ex-chambermaid in the Forrest household, who was brought all the way from Texas to testify, and who was shown to be a thief, and the mother of an illegitimate child by a friend of the defendant. Public opinion, it is needless to say, was divided about the verdict. Forrest was the idol of the Bowery, and the asserter of the American stage against the “dudes” and “Anglo-maniacs” of that day. “The boys,” who had stuck by him in his quarrel with Macready till its upshot in the bloody Astor Place riot of May 10, 1849, stuck by him now in his domestic tribulations, and gave him a rousing ovation on his first appearance at the Broadway Theatre, following the close of the trial. A number of people in society, too, of those who “demen gladly to the badder end,” made up their minds to Mrs. Forrest’s guilt. But it is not unfair to say that the great majority of the decent people and respectable newspapers greeted the verdict with acclamation. A large party maintained that Forrest was a selfish and licentious brute, who was tired of his wife and wanted to be rid of her; that, knowing he had no valid cause of action against her, he trumped up charges and suborned witnesses. It is not necessary to go so far as this in order to assert the innocence of Mrs. Forrest and of those who were made parties to the accusations against her. Alger, in his big “Life of Edwin Forrest,” after acknowledging that “the innocence of Mrs. Forrest is publicly accredited, and is not here impugned;” that she “was believed by her intimate and most honored friends to be innocent, was vindicated by a jury after a most searching trial, and is now living in modest and blameless retirement,” simply urges in Forrest’s behalf that he honestly believed himself a wronged man, and acted with his usual fury and unforgivingness upon that conviction. Willis and his brother were both among the witnesses for the plaintiff on the trial, and both, of course, denied peremptorily the charges against them. But the one circumstance which more than all else influenced the decision of the jury was the constant presence in court of Mrs. N. P. Willis, side by side with Mrs. Forrest, and the brave, clear, and simple way in which she testified in her friend’s behalf. No one could believe that a spirited and refined lady, like Mrs. Willis, would have consented, for an instant, to put herself into such a position, without a full assurance of her husband’s innocence; and no one who listened to her testimony could have thought her a woman likely to be deceived. John Van Buren, who was Forrest’s lawyer in all these cases, was quite generally censured for the needlessly abusive way in which he handled the witnesses for the other side. In the trial of the assault and battery case, “Willis v. Forrest,” his personalities went so far beyond the limits usually set to the licensed insolence of the bar, that on the termination of the suit Willis, who was about starting on a trip to the South, and had learned from an item in the “Herald” that Van Buren was going South too, sent him a letter demanding an apology. In case he should decline to make such apology, the letter proposed a hostile meeting at Charleston or any other convenient point in the Southern States. This note the recipient returned (after carefully making a copy of it) with a short reply, describing it as a “silly and scurrilous communication.” This it certainly was not, but, on the other hand, a very dignified and gentlemanly letter; rather too long, it must be owned, for on these occasions Willis’s pen generally ran away with him. However, on the receipt of this answer to it, which was forwarded to him at the South, he replied with sufficient brevity: “I now pronounce you a coward, as well as a proper companion for the blackguards whose attorneyship constitutes your career.”

This challenge was something of a flourish on Willis’s part, and his experience with Marryat might have taught him the folly of such attempts to get “the satisfaction of a gentleman” from railing editors and attorneys. He took little by his motion, which simply gave Van Buren an opportunity to publish the correspondence in a New York morning paper with comments of his own, characteristically ugly and characteristically smart. The fact remained, however, that Van Buren had been challenged to fight and had declined, and the general note made upon the affair by a venal press was to the effect that “Prince John had shown the white feather.” Of the many letters of sympathy and congratulation received by Mr. and Mrs. Willis after the Forrest verdict, the following, from Mr. J. P. Kennedy, the author of “Swallow Barn,” will serve as an example:—

The result of the Forrest trial was, in a sense, a triumph for Willis. Yet in all affairs of the kind, although the charges are disproved, the very fact that they have been made leaves, illogically and unfairly, perhaps, but still inevitably, a sediment of prejudice in the public mind. It is in the nature of such cases that the inmost truth about them can seldom be known to more than two persons. To all others there remains nothing beyond inference and suspicion. Hence the uncertainty which survives the judicial decision of the cause and works injustice to the innocent who have been unlucky enough to be drawn into compromising situations. An impression has always obtained in many quarters that Willis was profligate in his relations with women. Rumors to this effect were industriously circulated by his ill-wishers, and, in one instance, they got into print in the shape of an accusation publicly brought against him by his ancient foe, Colonel James Watson Webb of the “Courier and Enquirer.” It is needless to revive this venerable scandal or any of the less tangible, miscellaneous gossip once afloat on the current of New York society. It is no part of a biographer’s duty to “vindicate” his subject from any and all charges of the kind. I have read the published documents in the Webb-Willis affair with a sincere effort to be impartial, and they left upon my mind no impression of anything worse on Willis’s part than vanity and indiscretion in permitting himself to be drawn into a half literary, half sentimental correspondence with a very romantic young woman, without her parents’ knowledge. He was easily flattered by attentions from female worshipers of genius. He maintained in print and in person a constant attitude of gallantry toward the sex, which doubtless stimulated the rumor of his immoralities, and led the reader to identify him with the Lotharios of his tales. Moreover, it is not to be denied that when a young man in Italy, and in the fast set of his London acquaintances, he was exposed to temptations which he did not always resist, and probably had his share of those adventures which the French indulgently call bonnes fortunes, but less liberal shepherds of Anglo-Saxon race give a grosser name; and which always turn out the reverse of good fortunes for everybody concerned. As to his later life, one who knew him well but had quarreled with him and had small cause to like him, writes: “My belief is that N. P. Willis was, as he said, perfectly free from fault in that business [the Forrest affair], and had no intrigues with women after his marriage.”

The spring of 1852 found him much broken in health. He had a wearing cough, and it was thought that his lungs were diseased. He waited only the termination of his assault and battery case in March, to start on a journey to the South with his father-in-law, Mr. Grinnell. The trip included a cruise to Bermuda and the West Indies, a short stay in Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans, a visit to the Mammoth Cave, and a sojourn at the neighboring watering-place of Harrodsburg Springs. His letters to the “Home Journal” from these and other points in the South were reissued in book form as “A Health Trip to the Tropics.” During the years covered by this chapter he published a number of volumes similarly made up of periodical correspondence and miscellaneous contributions to his paper. “Rural Letters” contained his “Invalid Letters from Germany;” a reprint of “Letters from under a Bridge,” with two additional to those in the earlier editions; “Open Air Musings in the City;” letters from Sharon Springs and Trenton Falls in the summer of 1848; and one story, “A Plain Man’s Love.” “Hurrygraphs” comprised a series of letters from Plymouth, New Bedford, Cape Cod, and places on the Delaware and Hudson rivers; besides sketches—often very acute pieces of mental portraiture—of public men, authors, and other celebrities, and a good deal of chit-chat about society, the opera, etc., from the columns of the “Home Journal.”

All that can be said of these traveler’s letters is that they are fairly good reporting. They hardly attain the rank of literature, and were as a whole not worth putting between covers. But Willis sold well and, therefore, found his account in continued book-making, bringing out, usually, simultaneous editions in London and New York. It is instructive to compare his letters from Cape Cod—a journey on which Mr. Grinnell was again his companion—with Thoreau’s book on the same piece of geography. Both men had quick eyes, and had taught themselves the art of observation. But Willis’s letters were the notes of an “amateur casual,” or “here-and-thereian,” on a flying trip over a sand-spit inhabited by queer people, who was always on the lookout for points which would interest the lady readers of a metropolitan journal. Thoreau, on the contrary, was like a palmer on a solemn pilgrimage to one of nature’s peculiar shrines, with loins girt up and staff in hand, tramping along the heavy sands, with the eternal thunder of “The Reverend Poluphloisboio Thalasses” in his ear; in serious and vigilant mood, watching every least token of the ways of the sea, but careless of men and reading publics.

Now and then there is a quaint or poetic fancy in these itineraries of Willis which recalls his youthful manner; as where, speaking of the absence of an atmosphere in the tropic seas, he says: “As to the horizon, it seems so near that, if you were washing your hands on deck, you might try to throw the slops over it, as you would over the ship’s side. The sun goes down, as it were, next door.” In the letters from Trenton Falls—which he had visited twenty years before and described in “Edith Linsey”—occurs a startling anticipation of the most admired figure in Tennyson’s “Queen Mary:”—

Willis was induced by Mr. Moore, the proprietor and landlord, to edit a small illustrated guide-book to Trenton Falls; his own contributions to which consisted of descriptions reproduced from these letters and from “Edith Linsey,” and a short biography of the Rev. John Sherman, the first settler and a grandson of Roger Sherman. In the same way and in the same year (1851) he put together a little “Life of Jenny Lind,” for whom he had an ardent admiration, and whom he had been privileged to meet often and familiarly during her first visit to America. This was, of course, not a formal biography, but was made up from articles that he had written about her from time to time for the “Home Journal,” and extracts from the English papers. He also issued selections from his former volumes under new names. Such were “People I have Met,” and “Life Here and There,” which were stories from “Dashes at Life,” and contained little or nothing new, and “A Summer Cruise in the Mediterranean,” which was a mere reprint of a part of “Pencillings by the Way.”