CHAPTER V.1834-1836.LIFE ABROAD (CONTINUED).

“At this time an American traveler passed through Tuscany and favored me with a visit at my country seat. He expressed a wish to reprint in America a large selection of my ‘Imaginary Conversations,’ omitting the political. He assured me they were the mostthumbedbooks on his table. With a smile at so energetic an expression of perhaps an undesirable distinction, I offered him unreservedly and unconditionally my only copy of the five printed volumes, interlined and interleaved in most places, togetherwith my MS. of the sixth, unpublished. He wrote to me on his arrival in England, telling me that they were already on their voyage to their destination.”

It seems from Willis’s public explanation in “Letters from under a Bridge,” that he received the volumes, which were in a dilapidated condition, at the moment of starting, and not knowing how to add them to his baggage he—rather carelessly, perhaps—“sent them with a note to Theodore Fay, who was then in Florence, requesting him to forward them to America by ship from Leghorn.” Fay accordingly committed them to a Mr. Miles, an American straw-bonnet-maker, who did send them to New York, where Willis expected to follow in the course of the summer and take charge of them. Instead of doing this, he spent the next two years in England, and meanwhile wrote to Landor that the package had been left with Miles, to forward it to America. Landor “called in consequence at the shop of this person, who denied any knowledge of the books.” These, however, after a brief stay in New York, were consigned to Willis at London, “and Fay and Mr. Landor both happening there together, the explanation was made, and the books and manuscripts restored unharmed to the author,” but not in time to keep Willis from going down “to posterity astride the finis of ‘Pericles and Aspasia.’ I trust,” hecontinues, “that his [Landor’s] biographer will either let me slip off at Lethe’s wharf, by expurgating the book of me, or do me justice in a note.” In spite of which trust the biographers have been a little hard on Willis in the matter. Sidney Colvin, heartened, probably, by the “Quarterly’s” onslaught, denounces him as “that most assiduous of flatterers and least delicate of gossips,” and says that he gave Landor occasion to repent of his hospitality by consigning his books to America and then basely lingering on in England “in obsequious enjoyment of the great company among whom he found himself invited:” while Forster, after declaring that Willis’s “fuss and fury of boundless hero-worship found in Landor an easy victim,” adds that “Landor will perhaps be thought not without excuse for the way in which he always afterwards spoke of Mr. N. P. Willis.” But whatever inconvenience the latter may have caused in this business, he certainly made theamende honorablein the letter to Landor from which Mr. Forster quotes:—

“I have to beg,” he writes, “that you will lay to the charge of England a part of the annoyance you will feel about your books and manuscripts. I was never more flattered by a commission and I have never fulfilled one so ill. They went to AmericaviaLeghorn, and I expected fully to have arrived in New York a month or two after them.”

Landor was a man of noble courtesy and most generous nature, although, to put it mildly, often unreasonable. The delay and uncertainty about his precious manuscripts were certainly vexatious and may, very likely, as his biographer implies, have influenced “the way in which he always afterwards spoke” of the man who, innocently enough, made him the trouble. But up to the time of this little misunderstanding, his feelings toward Willis, as expressed in their correspondence, were exceedingly cordial; as will sufficiently appear from the following letter, undated, but written, probably, during the winter of 1834-35:—

Mr dear Sir,—By a singular and strange coincidence, I wrote this morning and put into the post office a letter directed to you at New York. And now comes Mr. Macquay, bringing me one from you, delightful in all respects. I know not any man in whose fame and fortunes I feel a deeper interest than in yours. Pardon me if I am writing all this illegibly in some degree, for certainly I shall scarcely be in time for the post with all the agility both of hand and legs. For I am resolved to transcribe an ode to your President in spite of the resistance his [MS. illegible] has met with,—indeed, the more am I resolved for this very reason. I envy you the evenings you pass with the most accomplished and graceful of all our fashionable world, my excellent friend, Lady Blessington. Do not believe that I have writtenany paper in the magazine. Whatever I write I submit to Lady B. My “Examination of Shakespeare” I published for a particular and private purpose, which, however, it has not answered. I should not be surprised if it procured me a hundred pounds or more within seven years. Had I known of your being in England I should have ordered a copy to have been sent to you. Pray tell Lady Blessington I have at last received her Byron from Colonel Hughes. It came a week ago. I think better of him than I did, and thank her for it. Nevertheless, I suspect she has given him powers of ratiocination which he never attained. I must now try to recollect my verses. So adieu, and believe me,Ever yours most sincerely,W. S. Landor.Pray write to me when you find time.

Ever yours most sincerely,

W. S. Landor.

Pray write to me when you find time.

The verses accompanying this letter were the rough draft of the ode “To Andrew Jackson,” numberedCCLXXXVIII.in Landor’s miscellaneous poems. On his side Willis could not thank Landor enough for his introduction to Lady Blessington. “She is my lode star and most valued friend,” he writes, “for whose acquaintance I am so much indebted to you that you will find it difficult in your lifetime to diminish my obligations.”

In England Willis fell at once upon his feet. While traveling on the Continent, his intimacies had been principally among Englishmen andAmericans, and though well received in the native society of Florence by virtue of his diplomatic credentials, he had remained, after all, a stranger and a looker-on. A foreign language imperfectly learned is a barrier to complete intercourse even in the most cosmopolitan society. In France and Italy he had made acquaintances; in England he made friends and formed domestic ties which bound him to the country as long as he lived. He did not fancy the French and Italians, though he found their cities interesting to visit; but he liked the English and they treated him well. No American author except Irving and Cooper had received from them a tithe of the attentions which they accorded to Willis; and Cooper, though personally well liked, had offended British prejudices by his pugnacious writings and was more popular in Paris than in London. The next two years of Willis’s life were perhaps the acme of his social and literary career, and he always looked back to them as the brightest spot in his memory. The experience was not altogether healthy for him, though it was stimulating at the time. He was not spoiled by success, but he was naturally a little intoxicated by it, and a little dazzled by the courtly splendors of the circles to which he was now admitted. When he went back to America, he did so reluctantly, and with thehope of returning soon to make his home in England. He found the change to the plainer conditions of American life a chilling one, and he had acquired habits and standards which did not fit in easily with the requirements of a journalist’s career in a new country.

As soon as he reached Dover he began to have that feeling of being at home once more which is familiar to American travelers who make their first entrance to England by way of the Channel. Everything was new, and yet nothing was strange. The blazing coal fires—it was June—the warm carpets, the quiet coffee-room with the London newspapers on the table, the subdued, respectful servants, the mother-tongue again, the plain richness of the furnishings, the snugness and comfort,—the Anglo-Saxon knows by these that he is once more in Anglo-Saxondom. Arrived at London, he lost no time in delivering his note of introduction from Landor to Lady Blessington, who immediately asked him to dinner and presented him to thebeaux espritswho frequented Seamore Place. For this charming woman her youngprotégéconceived at once the strongest admiration, tinctured, it may be, by a tenderer sentiment. Her wit and beauty, her cordiality and social graces, had drawn about her a court of statesmen, authors, and notabilities of all kinds, over whom she presided like the queenof a Parisiansalon. It was natural that Willis should have formed, or at least should have politely expressed, an exaggerated estimate of her literary gifts. To posterity, who have not the advantage of her personal acquaintance, Lady Blessington’s writings seem of very little importance, with the possible exception of her “Conversations with Lord Byron,” whose subject lends it a certain claim to remembrance. At her house Willis met Bulwer, Moore, Lord Durham, Disraeli, James Smith, Galt, Procter, Fonblanque of the “Examiner,” and many other distinguished men whose portraits he has given in the “Pencillings” with a sharpness of outline which makes them increasingly valuable as their figures recede into history. It is not at all strange that an enthusiastic and fanciful young American, without antecedents, ushered all at once into a roomful of people about whom all the world was talking, should have been a little imposed upon by these exalted personages. He was not in a critical mood, and it may be freely conceded that he had too high an opinion of Barry Cornwall’s poetry, and of the electroplated novels of the authors of “Pelham” and “Vivian Grey;” and that he exclaimed more than was necessary over the varied accomplishments of that gorgeous dandy—Byron’sCupidon déchainé—the Count d’Orsay.

Still he kept his head fairly well. Fortunate in his introductions, he was the man to make the most of his chances. His talent for society and his easy assurance put him quicklyde niveauwith his new acquaintances. He was not at all above owning that the English nobility, for example, impressed his imagination. He liked to stay at their houses; he enjoyed the wealth, the grandeur, the historic associations that surrounded them. His appetite for luxury was gratified by the perfection of all their appointments in the art of living. The fineness of their manners pleased his aristocratic tastes and he could not sufficiently admire the high-bred women and the simple, cordial, dignified gentlemen with whom he dined or drove through the cultivated landscapes. But Willis was no snob or vulgar tuft hunter. His enjoyment of his privileges was accompanied with an entire reserve of his self-respect. He liked the company of those whom Dr. Johnson was wont to call “the great.” But though he loved a lord, he preferred a commoner, if the commoner was preferable. The Duke of Richelieu, whom he had met at Lady Blessington’s, and previously at the French court, he described as “the inheritor of nothing but the name of his great ancestor, a dandy and a fool.”

“What a star is mine!” he wrote in a letter to his sister Julia, three days after his landing in England. “All the best society of London exclusives is now open to me—me!a sometime apprentice at setting types—me!without a sou in the world beyond what my pen brings me, and with not only no influence from friends at home, but a world of envy and slander at my back. Thank heaven, there is not a countryman of mine, except Washington Irving, who has even the standing in England which I have got inthree daysonly. I should not boast of it if I had not been wounded and stung to the quick by the calumnies and falsehoods of every description which come to me from America. But let it pass! It reconciles me to my exile at least, and may drive me to adopt the mother country for my own. In a literary way, I have had already offers from the ‘Court Magazine,’ the ‘Metropolitan Monthly,’ and the ‘New Monthly’ of the first price for my articles. I sent a short tale, written in one day, to the ‘Court Magazine’ yesterday, and the publishers gave me eight guineas for it at once. They all pay in this proportion, and you can easily see, with my present resources of matter, how well I can live. I lodge in Cavendish Square, the most fashionable part of the town, paying a guinea a week for my lodgings, and am as well off as if I had been the son of the President, with as much as I could spend in the year. Except my family now, I have forgotten everybody in America. [Here follows the passage about Mary Benjamin already quoted in chapter III.] I never can return, however, till I can pay my debts, and it willtake me long to lay up three thousand dollars. When I can do it, I shall, and make America a farewell visit for years.”

Willis followed up his advantages assiduously. He went constantly to Lady Blessington’s, exchanged calls with Moore, breakfasted with Procter and also with that entertaining diarist, Henry Crabb Robinson, to whom he brought a letter from Landor, and in whose rooms in the Temple he met Charles and Mary Lamb. His Parisian acquaintance, Dr. Bowring, was back in London and introduced him to a number of people. At an evening party at the Bulwers’ he met Sir Leicester Stanhope, who had been with Byron in Greece, and with whose beautiful wife Willis became quite a favorite, composing his verses “Upon the Portrait of the Hon. Mrs. Stanhope” to accompany an engraving of her in Lady Blessington’s “Book of Beauty.” At the Stanhopes’ he met that famous pair of beauties, “the Sheridan girls,” Mrs. Norton and her sister, Lady Dufferin, to the former of whom he had addressed a poem written at Paris in 1832 and printed in the “Mirror” of July 7, 1834.

It was the height of the London season, and the opera was in full blast, with Grisi singing and Fanny Elssler in the ballet. Willis was admitted to the Alfred Club, and invitations to dinners and parties began to pour in upon him.All these gayeties he described in his letters to Morris, which, losing somewhat, it may be, in picturesqueness, gained greatly in personal interest during his stay in England. It was in the course of this first summer in London that he got acquainted with Mary Russell Mitford, who invited him to spend a week at Reading, and with whom he maintained for some time a friendly correspondence. A letter to Miss Jephson, July 23, 1834, gives her first impression of him:—

“I also liked very much Mr. Willis, an American author, whose ‘Unwritten Poetry’ and ‘Unwritten Philosophy’ you may remember in my American book,[2]and who is now understood to be here to publish his account of England. He is a very elegant young man, and more like one of the best of our peers’ sons than a rough republican.”

The generally agreeable impression which Willis made in English society was not without its exceptions. During this same summer in London he had been taken by a friend to see Miss Harriet Martineau. She was then on the point of embarking for that trip in America, hervery outspoken narrative of which afterwards caused so many heart-burnings in this country. Her vinegary reminiscences of Willis, as recorded in her autobiography, though rather long, are perhaps worth reproducing here, not only for their liveliness, but because any contemporary impression, however unjust and mistaken, helps to fill out a complete picture of the man, and there were plenty of people who disliked Willis cordially.

“I encountered,” she says, “one specimen of American oddity before I left home, which should certainly have lessened my surprise at any that I met afterwards. While I was preparing for my travels, an acquaintance one day brought a buxom gentleman, whom he introduced to me under the name of Willis. There was something rather engaging in the round face, brisk air, andenjouementof the young man; but his conscious dandyism and unparalleled self-complacency spoiled the satisfaction, though they increased the inclination to laugh. Mr. N. P. Willis’s plea for coming to see me was his gratification that I was going to America, and his real reason was presently apparent: a desire to increase his consequence in London society by giving apparent proof that he was on intimate terms with every eminent person in America. He placed himself in an attitude of infinite ease, and whipped his little bright boot with a little bright cane, while he ran over the names of all his distinguished countrymenand countrywomen, and declared he should send me letters to them all. This offer of intervention went so very far that I said (what I have ever since said in the case of introductions offered by strangers), while thanking him for his intended good offices, that I was sufficiently uncertain in my plans to beg for excuse beforehand, in case I should find myself unable to use the letters. It appeared afterwards that to supply them and not to have them used suited Mr. Willis’s convenience exactly. It made him appear to have the friendships he boasted of without putting the boast to the proof. It was immediately before a late dinner that the gentleman called; and I found on the breakfast-table next morning a great parcel of Mr. Willis’s letters, inclosed in a prodigious one to myself, in which he offered advice. Among other things, he desired me not to use his letter to Dr. Channing if I had others from persons more intimate with him; and he proceeded to warn me against two friends of Dr. and Mrs. Channing’s, whose names I had never heard and whom Mr. Willis represented as bad and dangerous people. This gratuitous defamation of strangers whom I was likely to meet confirmed the suspicions my mother and I had confided to each other about the quality of Mr. Willis’s introductions. It seemed ungrateful to be so suspicious: but we could not see any good reason for such prodigious efforts on my behalf, nor for his naming any countrywomen of his to me in a way so spontaneously slanderous. So I resolved to use that packet of letters very cautiously, and to begin with one whichshould be well accompanied. In New York harbor newspapers were brought on board, in one of which was an extract from an article transmitted by Mr. Willis to the ‘New York Mirror,’ containing a most audacious account of me as an intimate friend of the writer. The friendship was not stated as a matter of fact, but so conveyed that it cost me much trouble to make it understood and believed, even by Mr. Willis’s own family, that I had never seen him but once, and then without having previously heard so much as his name. On my return the acquaintance who brought him was anxious to ask pardon if he had done mischief, events having by that time made Mr. Willis’s ways pretty well known. His partner in the property and editorship of the ‘New York Mirror’ called on me at West Point, and offered and rendered such extraordinary courtesy that I was at first almost as much perplexed as he and his wife were when they learned that I had never seen Mr. Willis but once. They pondered, they consulted, they cross-questioned me, they inquired whetherIhad any notion what Mr. Willis could have meant by writing of me as in a state of close intimacy with him. In like manner, when, some time after, I was in a carriage with some members of a picnic party to Monument Mountain, a little girl seated at my feet clasped my knees fondly, looked up in my face, and said, ‘O Miss Martineau! You aresucha friend of my Uncle Nathaniel’s!’ Her father was present; and I tried to get off without explanation. But it was impossible,—they all knew how very intimate I waswith Nathaniel; and there was a renewal of the amazement at my having seen him only once. I tried three of his letters; and the reception was in each case much the same,—a throwing down of the letter with an air not to be mistaken. In each case the reply was the same, when I subsequently found myself at liberty to ask what this might mean. ‘Mr. Willis is not entitled to write to me: he is no acquaintance of mine.’ As for the two ladies of whom I was especially to beware, I became exceedingly well acquainted with them, to my own advantage and pleasure; and, as a natural consequence, I discovered Mr. Willis’s reasons for desiring to keep us apart. I hardly need add that I burned the rest of his letters. He had better have spared himself the trouble of so much manœuvring, by which he lost a good deal, and could hardly have gained anything. I have simply stated the facts, because, in the first place, I do not wish to be considered one of Mr. Willis’s friends; and, in the next, it may be useful, and conducive to justice, to show, by a practical instance, what Mr. Willis’s pretensions to intimacy are worth. His countrymen and countrywomen accept, in simplicity, his accounts of our aristocracy as from the pen of one of their own coterie; and they may as well have the opportunity of judging for themselves whether their notorious ‘Penciller’ is qualified to write of Scotch dukes and English marquises and European celebrities of all kinds in the way he has done.”

The simple American reader will have achance to make up his mind, on independent evidence, of how far Willis was qualified to write of Scotch dukes, etc.; but meanwhile it is not true that the audacious article in the “Mirror” of September 6, 1834 (which was not an “article,” by the way, but an extract from a private letter to Morris), conveyed any implication of an intimacy between Willis and Miss Martineau. On the contrary, it expressly says that his acquaintance with the lady was of only one day’s standing.

“I was taken yesterday,” it begins, “by the clever translator of ‘Faust’ to see the celebrated Miss Martineau. She has perhaps at this moment the most general and enviable reputation in England, and is the only one of the literarycliquewhose name is mentioned without some envious qualification.”

After some entirely respectful mention of her manner and appearance, the letter then goes on to say:—

“There is no necessity of bespeaking for so distinguished a visitor as Miss Martineau the warmest attentions of our country. She goes with high anticipations, and whatever she may find to object to in our society and institutions, it will be done, there cannot be a doubt, in a spirit of womanly and simple candor. She is sped on her way by the best wishes of the best hearts in England. I trust she will be met over there by wishes and welcomes as warm and as many.”

Any one who knew Willis would have felt sure that his “prodigious efforts” on Miss Martineau’s behalf sprang from his always good-natured and sometimes even officious eagerness to be of service. And most who knew him would probably have admitted that there was some mixture of a “desire to increase his consequence” in his offer of introductions. Motives are usually mixed in this bad world and Willis was seldom indifferent to opportunities for ingratiating himself with people worth knowing. But even so, it would have been more gracious in the lady if, after accepting his offers and the attentions of his partner at West Point, she had taken his professions for what they were worth, and omitted this spiteful mention of him in her book. Had he lived to read the passage, he would probably have consoled himself with the reflection that it was better to win smiles from beauty than approbation from a strong-minded Unitarian female with an ear-trumpet, or, as he politely paraphrased it in his letter to Morris, a “pliable, acoustic tube.”

The last fortnight in August he was ill of a bilious fever, during which his new friends proved very kind. Lady Blessington called daily in her carriage at his lodgings (over the shop of a baker, who gratified Willis by being overwhelmed at her ladyship’s condescension), and Dr. WilliamBeattie, the king’s physician, attended his interesting patient devotedly and refused to take any fee. This excellent gentleman, who was the anonymous author of “Heliotrope” and a prolific contributor to the Annuals, became a firm friend of Willis and his correspondent for many years after his return to America. He was an intimate of Samuel Rogers and of Thomas Campbell, whose life he afterwards wrote, and he introduced Willis to both of them.

By September the latter was sufficiently convalescent to be ordered into the country. He had received an invitation from the Earl of Dalhousie, whom he had met in Italy, to make him a visit at Dalhousie Castle, near Edinburgh, and accordingly he set out for Scotland on the second of the month. Lady Charlotte Bury, a “scribbling woman,” had given him a letter to her brother, the Duke of Argyle, and he carried a score beside to other people in Scotland. At Dalhousie, the feudal castle of the Ramsays, nobly situated on a branch of the Esk, Willis was heartily welcomed, and passed a most agreeable fortnight. The earl had been governor of the Canadas in 1831; Lady Dalhousie was an invalid, and both of them were quiet, domestic people, kindly and simple, living with the profuse and even splendid hospitality proper to their rank, but without ostentation of fashion or gayety.The house was full of guests, among them the countess’s niece, Lady Moncrieff, a lovely widow of twenty-five, who was very polite to Willis during his next winter in London. The earl’s son, Lord Ramsay, was home from Oxford and initiated Willis into the mysteries of shooting over the stubble. This young gentleman succeeded to his father’s title in 1838, was a member of Sir Robert Peel’s ministry from 1843 to 1847, and in the latter year was made Governor-General of India. It was during his viceroyalty that the Burmese war was fought, the Punjaub annexed, and the railway begun from Calcutta to Bombay.

After leaving Dalhousie, Willis spent a few days in Edinburgh, where he breakfasted with Professor Wilson, dined with Jeffrey, and danced till three o’clock in the morning at the Whig ball given in honor of Lord Grey. An attack of scrofula in his left leg, which he chose to describe in his correspondence with his English friends as “gout,” was aggravated by this last dissipation, and after two or three days more of poultices and plasters at Edinburgh, he took steamer to Aberdeen. “The loss of a wedding in Perthshire, by the way, a week’s deer-shooting in the forest of Athol, and a week’s fishing with a noble friend at Kinvara (long standing engagements all), I lay at the door of theWhigs.” He was laid up four days at Aberdeen, but finally recovered so far as to take coach seventy miles across country to Lochabers, a small town on the estates of the Duke of Gordon, to whom he brought a letter from Dalhousie. At Gordon Castle he found a distinguished company and passed ten days of unmixed enjoyment. There were thirty guests, among whom were Lord Aberdeen, who had been foreign secretary under Wellington; his son, Lord Claude Hamilton, a handsome young Cantab, who invited Willis to visit him at the university for a day’s hunt; Lord Aberdeen’s daughter, Lady Harriet Hamilton, “eighteen and brilliantly beautiful;” Lord and Lady Stormont, Lord Mandeville, Lord and Lady Morton, the Duchess of Richmond and her daughter, Lady Sophia Lennox, “the palest, proudest, and most high-born looking woman I ever saw.” This Lady Sophia Lennox was probably the original of Mildred Ashly, the disdainful beauty in “Paul Fane.” She seems to have impressed Willis as the type and embodiment of English aristocracy. In a letter to Lady Blessington, written from Gordon Castle and printed in Madden’s “Life of Lady Blessington,” he says, “There is a Lady Something, very pale, tall and haughty, twenty-three and sarcastic, whom I sat next at dinner yesterday,—a woman I came as near an antipathyfor as is possible, with a very handsome face for an apology.” The same letter gives his opinion of his host and hostess more unreservedly than he could venture to do in “Pencillings.” The duke he describes as “a delightful, hearty old fellow full of fun and conversation.” Willis’s letters from Gordon Castle were perhaps more criticised than any other part of his “Pencillings” for their alleged violation of the sanctities of private life. They are, nevertheless, among the very best passages in his correspondence and, taken together, they present a brilliant picture of what is, doubtless, so far as material conditions go, the most perfect life lived by man; the life, namely, of a chosen party of guests, in late September, at the country seat of a great British noble.

From this pleasant province in the land of Cockayne, Willis departed toward the last of the month and, after a tour of the Highlands, returned October 6th to Dalhousie, where he passed a few days more and then set out for England. He had meant, on his way back to London, to call upon Wordsworth and Surrey, having letters to both of them, and to pass some days by appointment with Miss Mitford at Reading. But continued trouble with his ankle altered his plans, and, after spending a few weeks at the country house of a friend in Lancashire—whoseacquaintance he had made in Italy—and of another in Cheshire, he returned hastily to London by way of Liverpool and Manchester, and on the 1st of November took up his quarters there for the winter. At this stage of his journeyings “Pencilling by the Way” come to an end. A number of supplementary letters descriptive of London life, of the Isle of Wight, of Stratford-upon-Avon, Charlecote, Kenilworth, Warwick Castle, etc., were published at irregular intervals in the “Mirror” under the general heading “Loiterings of Travel.” With letters from Washington and the paper on “The Four Rivers,” they make up the “Sketches of Travel” in their author’s collected works.

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 dandyattachéwere surprised to learn that “that nice, agreeable Mr. Willis” was identical with “Slingsby,” the brilliant Americanraconteurof 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 “TheMad Senior” in “Scenes of Fear”). Thenom de plumeof 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 rivalsalonsto 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 madein the rather too celebrated ‘Pencillings by the Way,’ and also at thesoiréesof the late Lady Charleville in Cavendish Square. Mr. Willis was an extremely agreeable young man in society, somewhat overdressed and a little toodemonstratif, but abounding in good spirits, pleasing reminiscences of Eastern and Continental travel and of his residence there for some time asattachéto 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,dégagéin his manner, and on exceedingly good terms with himself and with theéliteof 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. Anotherintimate 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 andmore 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 youhadone I certainly would take you at your word, provided thisexposéof my poverty did not change your fancy. I should like to marry in England, and I feel every day (more andmore) that my best years and best affections are running to waste. I am proud tobean American, but as a literary man, I would rather live in England. So if you know any affectionate andgoodgirl 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,providedshe hasfive hundreda 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 amnotpoor, 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 anattachéto 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! sogardez 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 ofunhappiness,’ she says, ‘loveandmoney. If it is money, Mr. Shaw wishes me to say, you shall have as much as you want; if it islove, 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 comehas come of its own accord.”

“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 ofunhappiness,’ she says, ‘loveandmoney. If it is money, Mr. Shaw wishes me to say, you shall have as much as you want; if it islove, 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 comehas 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 JoannaBaillie 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:—

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