“June 30. Breakfasted with Samuel Rogers. Met Dr. Delancey, of Philadelphia, and Corbin,ditto. Talked of Mrs. Butler’s book, and Rogers gave us suppressed passages. Talked of critics, and said that ‘as long as you cast a shadow, you were sure you possessedsubstance.’ Coleridge said of Southey: ‘I never think of him but as mending a pen.’ Southey said of Coleridge: ‘Whenever anything presents itself to him in the shape of a duty, that moment he finds himself incapable of looking at it.’“Went to the opera with Hon. Mrs. Shaw and heard Grisi in ‘I Puritani,’ and saw Taglioni: both divine. Visited Lady Blessington’s box and Lady Vincent.“After to a party at Mrs. Leicester Stanhope’s. Saw Guiccioli, and was stuffed to the eyelids by Lady Mary Shepard about my shorter and scriptural poems.“July 1. Mrs. Skinner drove Jane Porter and myself to Harrow to hear the speeches.…“In the evening to a party at Lady Cork’s, and after to Lady Vincent’ssoirée.”
“June 30. Breakfasted with Samuel Rogers. Met Dr. Delancey, of Philadelphia, and Corbin,ditto. Talked of Mrs. Butler’s book, and Rogers gave us suppressed passages. Talked of critics, and said that ‘as long as you cast a shadow, you were sure you possessedsubstance.’ Coleridge said of Southey: ‘I never think of him but as mending a pen.’ Southey said of Coleridge: ‘Whenever anything presents itself to him in the shape of a duty, that moment he finds himself incapable of looking at it.’
“Went to the opera with Hon. Mrs. Shaw and heard Grisi in ‘I Puritani,’ and saw Taglioni: both divine. Visited Lady Blessington’s box and Lady Vincent.
“After to a party at Mrs. Leicester Stanhope’s. Saw Guiccioli, and was stuffed to the eyelids by Lady Mary Shepard about my shorter and scriptural poems.
“July 1. Mrs. Skinner drove Jane Porter and myself to Harrow to hear the speeches.…
“In the evening to a party at Lady Cork’s, and after to Lady Vincent’ssoirée.”
Lady Cork was the aged but still beautiful Dowager Countess of Cork and Derry; who in her youth, as Miss Moncton, had been a favorite of Dr. Johnson, and whosesoiréesin New Burlington Street, between 1820 and 1840, were crowded with talent and fashion.
“2. Sat to Rand for my picture. Went to Lady Dundonald’sfête champêtreat her beautiful villa in Regent’s Park. D’Orsay and all the world there.“3. Dined with Tyndale and Greenfield at the Wyndham Club. Took tea with Jane Porter and went to a ball at the Longmans’, Hampstead.“4. Went to Lee on a visit to Hon. Mrs. Shaw.“5. Drove to Lady Hislop’s to tea.“6. Duke de Regina, Vail, Gen. and Mrs. Talmadge dined with the Shaws.“7. Returned to town. Dined with Mrs. Channon. Lady D. Stuart, Counts Battaglia, Vodiski, De Grognon, and Miss Cockaine present. Came home ill.“8. Dined with Mrs. S., and went to Lady Dudley Stuart’ssoirée.“9. Dined with Dr. Beattie and met Thomas Campbell. Praised my poetry to the skies and quoted from ‘Melanie,’—‘She diedWith her last sunshine in her eyes.’Spoke of Scott’s slavishness to men of rank, and after said it did not interfere with his genius. Said it sanka man’s heart to think he and Byron were dead and there was nobody left to praise or approve. Why should he write now? Told story of the man at the deaf and dumb who did not know him as a poet. Abused the nobility bitterly. Said they were ungrateful, and thought they honored you by receiving a favor from you. Said he was sorry for his vindication of Lady Byron. Story of dining with Burns and a Bozzy friend who, when C. proposed the health ofMr.Burns, said, ‘Sir, you will always be known asMr.Campbell, but posterity will talk ofBurns.’ He was playful and amusing, and drank gin and water. Went after in uniform to the grand Coliseum ball. Seven thousand people present.“10. Grand review in Hyde Park. Went to adéjeunerat Mrs. Wyndham Lewis’s on the Park. Talked to Miss Caton and the Duchess of St. Albans. Music after the review. Malibran sang.“Received a congratulatory letter from Edward Everett.“Party at Mrs. F.’s, Lady Franklin’s sister. Stupid.“11. Went to the Duchess St. Albans’sfêteat Holly Lodge. The duke flew a falcon and killed a pigeon. Fireworks, dinner in a tent, dancing, singing, etc., etc., there. Mrs. Marjoribanks brought me home.”
“2. Sat to Rand for my picture. Went to Lady Dundonald’sfête champêtreat her beautiful villa in Regent’s Park. D’Orsay and all the world there.
“3. Dined with Tyndale and Greenfield at the Wyndham Club. Took tea with Jane Porter and went to a ball at the Longmans’, Hampstead.
“4. Went to Lee on a visit to Hon. Mrs. Shaw.
“5. Drove to Lady Hislop’s to tea.
“6. Duke de Regina, Vail, Gen. and Mrs. Talmadge dined with the Shaws.
“7. Returned to town. Dined with Mrs. Channon. Lady D. Stuart, Counts Battaglia, Vodiski, De Grognon, and Miss Cockaine present. Came home ill.
“8. Dined with Mrs. S., and went to Lady Dudley Stuart’ssoirée.
“9. Dined with Dr. Beattie and met Thomas Campbell. Praised my poetry to the skies and quoted from ‘Melanie,’—
‘She diedWith her last sunshine in her eyes.’
‘She diedWith her last sunshine in her eyes.’
‘She diedWith her last sunshine in her eyes.’
‘She died
With her last sunshine in her eyes.’
Spoke of Scott’s slavishness to men of rank, and after said it did not interfere with his genius. Said it sanka man’s heart to think he and Byron were dead and there was nobody left to praise or approve. Why should he write now? Told story of the man at the deaf and dumb who did not know him as a poet. Abused the nobility bitterly. Said they were ungrateful, and thought they honored you by receiving a favor from you. Said he was sorry for his vindication of Lady Byron. Story of dining with Burns and a Bozzy friend who, when C. proposed the health ofMr.Burns, said, ‘Sir, you will always be known asMr.Campbell, but posterity will talk ofBurns.’ He was playful and amusing, and drank gin and water. Went after in uniform to the grand Coliseum ball. Seven thousand people present.
“10. Grand review in Hyde Park. Went to adéjeunerat Mrs. Wyndham Lewis’s on the Park. Talked to Miss Caton and the Duchess of St. Albans. Music after the review. Malibran sang.
“Received a congratulatory letter from Edward Everett.
“Party at Mrs. F.’s, Lady Franklin’s sister. Stupid.
“11. Went to the Duchess St. Albans’sfêteat Holly Lodge. The duke flew a falcon and killed a pigeon. Fireworks, dinner in a tent, dancing, singing, etc., etc., there. Mrs. Marjoribanks brought me home.”
Thisfêtefurnished some items for Willis’s story of “Lady Ravelgold.”
“12. Dined with Mrs. Joanna Baillie at Hampstead. She gave me some of the wedding cake ofAda Byron. Said that her husband, Lord King, was hated by his own father and mother and often in want of money, but an excellent person and beloved by his own second brother, who had received from the father all that was not entailed. On the death of the father, Lord K. had nine thousand a year. Mrs. Baillie said that Lady Byron had given to the present Lord B. her whole jointure when he came to the title.“Went to Lady Blessington at ten, and had a long talk with Countess Guiccioli, who said she wished nevermore to be spoken of in good or ill. The evil was remembered and the good forgotten. She made a point of never reading the papers.“Thence to Charles Kemble’ssoirée. Countess d’Orsay there.”
“12. Dined with Mrs. Joanna Baillie at Hampstead. She gave me some of the wedding cake ofAda Byron. Said that her husband, Lord King, was hated by his own father and mother and often in want of money, but an excellent person and beloved by his own second brother, who had received from the father all that was not entailed. On the death of the father, Lord K. had nine thousand a year. Mrs. Baillie said that Lady Byron had given to the present Lord B. her whole jointure when he came to the title.
“Went to Lady Blessington at ten, and had a long talk with Countess Guiccioli, who said she wished nevermore to be spoken of in good or ill. The evil was remembered and the good forgotten. She made a point of never reading the papers.
“Thence to Charles Kemble’ssoirée. Countess d’Orsay there.”
And thus the journal proceeds with its daily count of dinners, balls,soirées, garden parties, and opera-going, the diarist finally recording himself as “fatigued to death with dinners and dissipations.” In fact the pace began to tell upon him. Following the last entry that I have copied here, for July 12th, comes the first draft of a poem, “Thoughts on the Balcony of Devonshire House at Sunrise after a Splendid Ball:”
“Morn in the East! How coldly fairIt breaks upon my fevered eye!How chides the calm and dewy air;How chides the pure and pearly sky!The stars melt in a brighter fire,—The dew in sunshine leaves the flowers,—They from their watch in light retire,While we in sadness pass from ours.”
“Morn in the East! How coldly fairIt breaks upon my fevered eye!How chides the calm and dewy air;How chides the pure and pearly sky!The stars melt in a brighter fire,—The dew in sunshine leaves the flowers,—They from their watch in light retire,While we in sadness pass from ours.”
“Morn in the East! How coldly fairIt breaks upon my fevered eye!How chides the calm and dewy air;How chides the pure and pearly sky!The stars melt in a brighter fire,—The dew in sunshine leaves the flowers,—They from their watch in light retire,While we in sadness pass from ours.”
“Morn in the East! How coldly fair
It breaks upon my fevered eye!
How chides the calm and dewy air;
How chides the pure and pearly sky!
The stars melt in a brighter fire,—
The dew in sunshine leaves the flowers,—
They from their watch in light retire,
While we in sadness pass from ours.”
This is one of Willis’s most genuine utterances. The same revulsion of feeling is expressed in “Better Moments” and “She was not There.” There were two men in him, the worldling and the poet; and when worn with fashionable dissipation he was sensitive to the rebuke of the midnight heaven or of that “awful rose of dawn” which God makes for himself in the “Vision of Sin.” But the mood, though sincere, was not lasting. “Recovered my spirits,” runs the entry for July 15th, “after a causeless depression for a week.”
Toward the end of July he escaped to the country and “passed a month at Shirley Park and the Manor, Lee, alternately reading and lying on the grass in delightful idleness, with the kindest friends and the greatest contentment.” At Shirley Park there were archeryfêtes, the Archbishopess of Canterbury, “lords and ladies in abundance, and poets and travelersad libitum. It is midsummer,” continues the letter from which I quote (August 5th), “in cool and breezy England, five o’clock in the afternoon, and a beautiful day. The house is in the middle of a park (nothing but grass and trees) as large as the Common in Boston, the soft velvet greensward closely shaven all around the house,and a lovely archery ground on the edge of the lake just beneath my window, with red and gold targets, and a dozen young girls and beaux with beautiful bows and quivers shooting with all the merriment conceivable. There is a beautiful daughter of Sir Henry Brydges beating everybody, and my friend Mrs. Shaw, and Lady Encombe, and quantities of nice people.”
At Shirley Park he had a letter from Jane Porter, inclosing an invitation to him from Sir Charles Throckmorton, a Catholic gentleman in Warwickshire, at whose country seat she was staying. Willis joined her there on September 10th, but meanwhile something else of great importance to him had happened. While visiting at the Skinners’ he had met his fate in the person of Miss Mary Stace, a daughter of General William Stace of Woolwich. He saw her first at a picnic on the grounds of Lord Londonderry, at North Cray, and “thought her the loveliest girl he had ever seen.” At Shirley Park—whither she came as a guest—he was thrown much in her company, and after a week’s acquaintance made her a proposal of marriage, and was accepted. On the 1st of September he went to Woolwich on a visit to the Staces, and in the course of a day or two asked the general for his daughter’s hand. It was agreed that the engagement should be short, like thecourtship, and that the wedding should come off on the 1st of October. Mary Stace, who became Mrs. Willis on the day fixed, was a girl of uncommon beauty and sweetness. In appearance she was of the purest Saxon type, a blonde, with bright color, blue eyes, light brown hair, and delicate, regular features. She had a gentle, clinging, affectionate disposition, adored her husband, had been religiously and carefully educated, and possessed the true Englishwoman’s sense of the importance of the male sex and the due subordination of woman. Her family were most worthy and substantial people, and strictly evangelical. General Stace was the Royal Ordnance Storekeeper at Woolwich Arsenal. He had been commissary to the British navy in Egypt, and commissary of ordnance at the battle of Waterloo, and had been rewarded for gallant service in that famous action. He gave Willis, as a souvenir, a military cloak and an eagle clasp taken from the body of a French officer after the battle, which are still preserved in the family. His son-in-law described him as honest, hearty, and plain-spoken, with the common soldierly weakness for telling post-prandial stories of his campaigns. Mrs. Stace was Irish, a great singer, and a friend of Tom Moore, who used to listen to her songs by the hour. There were five other children besides Mary. Two ofthe sons were in the army, and afterwards there were three Colonels Stace. The general agreed to give his daughter £300 a year, which, with the £300 or £400 which Willis counted upon making by literary work, would do, wrote the latter to Mrs. Skinner, for a poet. Having completed the arrangements for his marriage, he set out from London, September 10th, by the Tantivy coach for Sir Charles Throckmorton’s seat of Coughton Court. This was a fine old Elizabethan mansion near Alcester, and Willis spent ten days there very agreeably, visiting, in company with Miss Porter and his host, Warwick Castle, Kenilworth, Stratford, and other points of interest in the neighborhood. Of these jaunts an ample narrative is given in “Sketches of Travel,” originally communicated to the “Mirror.” Thence he returned to Woolwich, receiving on his departure an invitation from the hospitable baronet to bring his wife and stay a fortnight with him. At Woolwich he was again joined by Miss Porter, on the 25th, who came for a week’s visit to the Staces and to be present at the wedding. From Coughton Court the expectant groom had written to his friends announcing his engagement, and received in reply many expressions of good wishes. Among others, Lady Blessington wrote as follows:—
Anglesey-near-Gosport,September 19, 1835.My dear Mr. Willis,—Yours of the 16th has been forwarded to me here, and I lose not an hour in replying to it. I congratulate you with my whole heart on your approaching marriage, and wish you all the happiness you so well deserve, and which a marriage well assorted will alone bestow. I predict the happiness I wish you, for you would not, I am sure, make an unworthy choice, and the distaste which the scenes you have gone through during the last year must have engendered in your mind will have taught you still more highly to appreciate the society and affection of a pure-minded and amiable woman, on whom your future happiness will depend. I think you have acted most wisely, and am sure that the rational plans you have laid down will insure your felicity. A residencenearLondon, which gives you the opportunity of enjoying its numerous advantages, without weakening your mind by a too frequent contact with its dissipations, is, of all others, the one I would select for a literary man, and I shall look forward with pleasure to seeing you at Seamore Place in your new and more respectable character of a Domestic Man, which, be assured, will bestow more happiness on you than all the futile successes ever acquired in the heartless maze of fashion and folly, in whose vortex you have been whirled during so many months. A Man of Genius is out of his natural sphere in such a circle; he loses his identity and blunts the fine edge of his sensibility. You have retired in time, and will, I am persuaded, have reasonto bless the gentle and benign influence that has attracted you from it to the pure and healthy atmosphere of domestic life. Be assured, my dear Mr. Willis, that out of the circle of your immediate family you have no friend more truly interested in your welfare or more anxious to promote it than I am, of which no proof in my power shall ever be wanting. I shall be in London on the 22d, and shall have great pleasure in seeing you. Your secret shall be safe with me, you may be sure. I hope the little tale will be sent for your correction in a day or two. Pray have “Ion” left at my house. Mr. Talfourd requested that it might not leave my possession, so that in lending it to you I disobeyed his request.
Anglesey-near-Gosport,September 19, 1835.
My dear Mr. Willis,—Yours of the 16th has been forwarded to me here, and I lose not an hour in replying to it. I congratulate you with my whole heart on your approaching marriage, and wish you all the happiness you so well deserve, and which a marriage well assorted will alone bestow. I predict the happiness I wish you, for you would not, I am sure, make an unworthy choice, and the distaste which the scenes you have gone through during the last year must have engendered in your mind will have taught you still more highly to appreciate the society and affection of a pure-minded and amiable woman, on whom your future happiness will depend. I think you have acted most wisely, and am sure that the rational plans you have laid down will insure your felicity. A residencenearLondon, which gives you the opportunity of enjoying its numerous advantages, without weakening your mind by a too frequent contact with its dissipations, is, of all others, the one I would select for a literary man, and I shall look forward with pleasure to seeing you at Seamore Place in your new and more respectable character of a Domestic Man, which, be assured, will bestow more happiness on you than all the futile successes ever acquired in the heartless maze of fashion and folly, in whose vortex you have been whirled during so many months. A Man of Genius is out of his natural sphere in such a circle; he loses his identity and blunts the fine edge of his sensibility. You have retired in time, and will, I am persuaded, have reasonto bless the gentle and benign influence that has attracted you from it to the pure and healthy atmosphere of domestic life. Be assured, my dear Mr. Willis, that out of the circle of your immediate family you have no friend more truly interested in your welfare or more anxious to promote it than I am, of which no proof in my power shall ever be wanting. I shall be in London on the 22d, and shall have great pleasure in seeing you. Your secret shall be safe with me, you may be sure. I hope the little tale will be sent for your correction in a day or two. Pray have “Ion” left at my house. Mr. Talfourd requested that it might not leave my possession, so that in lending it to you I disobeyed his request.
The old Earl of Dalhousie wrote a letter of hearty congratulation.
“Wherever you go or sit down at last,” it said, “think of us as being with you in our minds’ eye at least, and if it shall please God that, in the course of time, we ever meet again, it will be truly a day of joy here, for from hence I move no more.”
“Wherever you go or sit down at last,” it said, “think of us as being with you in our minds’ eye at least, and if it shall please God that, in the course of time, we ever meet again, it will be truly a day of joy here, for from hence I move no more.”
His son, the young Lord Ramsay, had jestingly promised to be Willis’s groomsman some day at Niagara, and the former now reminded him of it, and asked him to stand up with him, and Ramsay sent the following excuses some three weeks after the wedding:—
Yester,October 23, 1835.I promised to play my part as best man, my dear Willis, atNiagara, and to have descended from thatto Woolwich would have been a sadbathos, so that it was perhaps as well that your notice was too short to allow of the possibility of my being with you before the 1st of October. Still I can congratulate you as well at a distance as with my own lips, and though the romance which we proposed for ourselves is gone, I am very happy to congratulate you on the prose reality.I had written all this to you three weeks ago, and directed my frank to the Athenæum Club, a place which I took it into my head you frequented, when, this morning, the letter was returned by the porter with a “non est inventus” written on it. This to save my character.Furthermore, your example was so good an one, and, fortunately, socontagious, that I have fallen a victim, and am going to be married, and as this isnota lady’s letter, it will be as well not to keep the most important part of the intelligence for the postscript, but to tell you at once that it is to Lady Susan Hay. If I were to dash out into a rhapsody you, whose experience of such a situation is of so recent a date, might easily forgive me, but I will take mercy even on you. I am happy,—happy now, and if I am not happy always in time to come, Heaven knows how utterly it will be my own fault.When next summer brings visiting time we shall meet, I trust, in Scotland, and exchange at once news, visits, and congratulations.May I beg, even though a stranger, my compliments to Mrs. Willis, and believe meEver yours sincerely,Ramsay.
Yester,October 23, 1835.
I promised to play my part as best man, my dear Willis, atNiagara, and to have descended from thatto Woolwich would have been a sadbathos, so that it was perhaps as well that your notice was too short to allow of the possibility of my being with you before the 1st of October. Still I can congratulate you as well at a distance as with my own lips, and though the romance which we proposed for ourselves is gone, I am very happy to congratulate you on the prose reality.
I had written all this to you three weeks ago, and directed my frank to the Athenæum Club, a place which I took it into my head you frequented, when, this morning, the letter was returned by the porter with a “non est inventus” written on it. This to save my character.
Furthermore, your example was so good an one, and, fortunately, socontagious, that I have fallen a victim, and am going to be married, and as this isnota lady’s letter, it will be as well not to keep the most important part of the intelligence for the postscript, but to tell you at once that it is to Lady Susan Hay. If I were to dash out into a rhapsody you, whose experience of such a situation is of so recent a date, might easily forgive me, but I will take mercy even on you. I am happy,—happy now, and if I am not happy always in time to come, Heaven knows how utterly it will be my own fault.
When next summer brings visiting time we shall meet, I trust, in Scotland, and exchange at once news, visits, and congratulations.
May I beg, even though a stranger, my compliments to Mrs. Willis, and believe me
Ever yours sincerely,
Ramsay.
Mrs. Skinner wrote, in a letter to Jane Porter:—
“Mary Stace is a sweet, gentle, affectionate, lively girl,—natural, so that you may see at once there is no deceit in her and no guile. She is religious, accomplished, sings sweetly, is pretty, and will make Willis more happy than any other woman I know. He will have no heart-burnings, no misgivings with her, for she is true and sincere. You will love her. She was so religious, good, and depend-on-able that I told her she should be my daughter-in-law.”
“Mary Stace is a sweet, gentle, affectionate, lively girl,—natural, so that you may see at once there is no deceit in her and no guile. She is religious, accomplished, sings sweetly, is pretty, and will make Willis more happy than any other woman I know. He will have no heart-burnings, no misgivings with her, for she is true and sincere. You will love her. She was so religious, good, and depend-on-able that I told her she should be my daughter-in-law.”
In his letters to his folks at home announcing his betrothal, Willis insisted a good deal on this point of hisfiancée’sreligiousness, and he evidently shared the belief commonly held and proclaimed among men of the world, that religion, like a low voice, is an excellent thing—in woman; a theory which some women resent as a covert insult to their understandings, and some men as an open insult to their religion, and which may be described as the converse of the proposition that a reformed rake makes the best husband.
“I should never have wished to marry you,” he wrote to his betrothed, about a fortnight before the wedding, “if you had not been religious, for I have confidence in no woman who is not so. I only think there is sometimes an excess in the ostentation of religious sanctity, and of that I have a dread, as youhave yourself, no doubt. Miss Porter,” he adds, “is sincere andrefinedas few professedly religious people are.”
“I should never have wished to marry you,” he wrote to his betrothed, about a fortnight before the wedding, “if you had not been religious, for I have confidence in no woman who is not so. I only think there is sometimes an excess in the ostentation of religious sanctity, and of that I have a dread, as youhave yourself, no doubt. Miss Porter,” he adds, “is sincere andrefinedas few professedly religious people are.”
In another letter he says:—
“Mine is not a love such as I have fancied and written about. It is more sober, more mingled with esteem and respect, and more fitted for every-day life. It had well need be, indeed, for I have taken it in lieu of what has hitherto been the principal occupation of my life. I am to live for you, dear Mary, and you for me,—if you like! That is to say, henceforth dissipation (if we indulge in it) will beyourpleasure, not mine. I have lived the last ten years in gay society, and I am sick at heart of it. I want an apology to try something else. I am made for something better, and I feel sincerely that this is the turning-point of both mind and heart, both of which are injured in their best qualities with the kind of life I have been leading. Do not understand me that I am to make a hermit of myself, however, or a prisoner of you. You will have always friends enough, and society enough, and change of place and scene enough. In short, I shall exact but one thing,—four or five hours in my study in the morning, and you may do what you like with the rest.”
“Mine is not a love such as I have fancied and written about. It is more sober, more mingled with esteem and respect, and more fitted for every-day life. It had well need be, indeed, for I have taken it in lieu of what has hitherto been the principal occupation of my life. I am to live for you, dear Mary, and you for me,—if you like! That is to say, henceforth dissipation (if we indulge in it) will beyourpleasure, not mine. I have lived the last ten years in gay society, and I am sick at heart of it. I want an apology to try something else. I am made for something better, and I feel sincerely that this is the turning-point of both mind and heart, both of which are injured in their best qualities with the kind of life I have been leading. Do not understand me that I am to make a hermit of myself, however, or a prisoner of you. You will have always friends enough, and society enough, and change of place and scene enough. In short, I shall exact but one thing,—four or five hours in my study in the morning, and you may do what you like with the rest.”
They were married in Plumstead Church, by the Rev. Mr. Shackleton, on the 1st of October. “It was a kind of April day,” writes Willis, “half sunshine, half rain,”—recalling, somehow, the coincidence in Julia Mills’s diary betweenthe checker-board tavern-sign and checkered human existence on a similar occasion in David Copperfield’s life,—“but everybody was kind, the villagers strewed flowers in the way, the church was half full of people, and my heart and eyes were more than full of tears.” The bridal pair were driven in Mr. Stace’s carriage to Rochester, posted next day to Dover, and crossed the Channel on the 3d. They passed a fortnight at the Hôtel Castiglione in Paris, and then returned to England, where they spent the winter, partly in London and partly at Woolwich, and in visits to the Shaws, Skinners, and other friends. Willis was busy in getting out the first and second English editions of “Pencillings” and the “Inklings of Adventure.” He presented his bride to his “swell” acquaintances in London, and was himself introduced by his brothers-in-law to numbers of military people, dined at the Artillery Mess, and was given the freedom of the Army and Navy Club. He set up an “establishment,” a cabriolet and a gray cab-horse, “tall, showy, and magnificent.” He had taken into service a young fellow named William Michell, the son of his landlady, a bright and handsome lad, who now made a very presentable tiger. William went to America with his master in the spring, remained in his service during his residence at Glenmary, andcame back with him, in 1839, to England, where he ultimately got employment as a machinist, having a good education and a knack at mechanics.
In May, 1836, after many leave-takings, Willis sailed with his wife for America. His “Lines on Leaving Europe,”—
“Bright flag at yonder tapering mast,”—
“Bright flag at yonder tapering mast,”—
“Bright flag at yonder tapering mast,”—
“Bright flag at yonder tapering mast,”—
dated in the English Channel, express the feelings at once of regret and of hope with which he set his face homeward after an absence of four years and a half. These spirited lines are among the very few poems of Willis which seem destined to last. They have the real lyrical impulse, and it is not easy to read them without emotion. Emerson, who gives part of the poem in “Parnassus,” omits the closing stanza, in which the poet touchingly bespeaks a welcome for his English bride.
“Room in thy heart! The hearth she leftIs darkened to lend light to ours.There are bright flowers of care bereft,And hearts—that languish more than flowers.She was their light—their very air;Room, mother, in thy heart! place for her in thy prayer!”
“Room in thy heart! The hearth she leftIs darkened to lend light to ours.There are bright flowers of care bereft,And hearts—that languish more than flowers.She was their light—their very air;Room, mother, in thy heart! place for her in thy prayer!”
“Room in thy heart! The hearth she leftIs darkened to lend light to ours.There are bright flowers of care bereft,And hearts—that languish more than flowers.She was their light—their very air;Room, mother, in thy heart! place for her in thy prayer!”
“Room in thy heart! The hearth she left
Is darkened to lend light to ours.
There are bright flowers of care bereft,
And hearts—that languish more than flowers.
She was their light—their very air;
Room, mother, in thy heart! place for her in thy prayer!”
Willis published three books while in England. “Melanie and Other Poems” appeared March 31, 1835. It was divided into three parts and included a selection from the threevolumes of verse published in America, but unfamiliar to the British public, besides some half dozen new poems, dated, said the author, in his prefatory note, from “the corner of a club [the Travellers’] in the ungenial month of January.” It was introduced by Barry Cornwall, who speaks of the poet as “a man of high talent and sensibility,” and then goes on with some reflections of a friendly nature on American literature and the desirableness of cultivating kinder feelings between England and America. Wilson, who reviewed “Melanie” very favorably in “Blackwood’s,” made Procter’s introduction to it the theme of much elaborate ridicule, in the well-known style of “Maga,” when rending a cockney author. He affected to have gathered an impression from the title-page,—which described the poems as “edited” by Barry Cornwall,—that Willis was dead, and that Procter was performing the office of literary undertaker for “poor Willis’s remains.” “Alas! thought we, on reading this title-page; is Willis dead? Then America has lost one of the most promising of her young poets. We had seen him not many months before in high health and spirits and had much enjoyed his various and vivacious conversation.… But why weep for him, the accomplished acquaintance of an hour?” He goes out on the street and tells the first friendhe meets that Willis is dead. “Impossible,” answers the friend; “day before yesterday he was sitting very much alive in the Athenæum Club: here is a letter from him franked Mahon,” etc. Another Scotch professor—Aytoun—who belonged, like Wilson, to the Tory light artillery, was moved to write a parody of “Melanie.” The same humorist also paid his respects to Willis in one of his “Ballads of Bon Gaultier,”—a strenuous piece of North British playfulness, in which Willis and Bryant are represented as sallying forth like knights errant on the Quest of the Snapping Turtle:—
“Have you heard of Philip Slingsby—Slingsby of the manly chest?How he slew the snapping turtleIn the regions of the west?”
“Have you heard of Philip Slingsby—Slingsby of the manly chest?How he slew the snapping turtleIn the regions of the west?”
“Have you heard of Philip Slingsby—Slingsby of the manly chest?How he slew the snapping turtleIn the regions of the west?”
“Have you heard of Philip Slingsby—
Slingsby of the manly chest?
How he slew the snapping turtle
In the regions of the west?”
The two longest and most ambitious poems in this volume were “Melanie” and “Lord Ivon and his Daughter.” The first is the story “told during a walk around the cascatelles of Tivoli,” of an English girl, “the last of the De Brevern race,” who betroths herself in Italy to a young painter of unknown parentage; but at their bridal at St. Mona’s altar a nun shrieks through the lattice of the chapel:—
“The bridegroom is thy blood—thy brother!Rudolph de Brevern wronged his mother,”
“The bridegroom is thy blood—thy brother!Rudolph de Brevern wronged his mother,”
“The bridegroom is thy blood—thy brother!Rudolph de Brevern wronged his mother,”
“The bridegroom is thy blood—thy brother!
Rudolph de Brevern wronged his mother,”
and the bride thereupon “sunk and died, withouta sign or word.” The stanza and style are taken from Byron’s and Scott’s metrical romances. The very first line—
“I stood on yonder rocky brow”—
“I stood on yonder rocky brow”—
“I stood on yonder rocky brow”—
“I stood on yonder rocky brow”—
is a reminiscence of “The Isles of Greece.” The second poem, which is equally melodramatic in its catastrophe, is in blank verse and in the form of a dialogue between the Lady Isidore and her father, Lord Ivon. He tells his daughter (with a few interruptions from her, such as “Impossible!” and “Nay, dear father! Was’t so indeed?”) how he had in vain wooed her grandmother with minstrelsy and feats of arms, and then her mother more successfully with gold: marrying whom, he had begotten Isidore, and afterwards, in remorse for having dragged his young bride to the altar, had been on the point of draining a poisoned chalice, when she had anticipated him by running away with a younger lover, leaving to his care the babe, now grown to a woman, who dutifully concludes the dialogue with, “Thank God! Thank God!” Both of these poems were imitative and artificial, and the last not a little absurd. Willis had no genius for narrative or dramatic poetry, and when he tried to be impersonal and “objective,” he wrought against the grain. The lyrical pieces in the book were almost all of them graceful and sweet. He himself thoughtthat the best thing in the volume was “Birth-Day Verses,” addressed to his mother on January 20, 1835. Similar in theme were the lines, “To my Mother, from the Apennines,” written at anaubergeon the mountains, August 3, 1832. The verses to Mary Benjamin, written in Scotland in September, 1834, have been already mentioned. They stand in his collected poems as “To M——, from Abroad,” and were also incorporated in “Edith Linsey,” under the title “To Edith, from the North.” “The Confessional,” dated Hellespont, October 1, 1833, was also meant for Mary Benjamin. This and “Florence Gray” had the note of travel. But a Boston poem, “The Belfry Pigeon,” was the most popular of anything in the book and has retained a place in readers and collections to the present day. These shorter pieces, like all of Willis’s truest poetry, were purely poems of sentiment. His description, in “Edith Linsey,” of Job Smith’s verses as “the mixed product of feeling and courtesy” applies consciously to his own. They were “the delicate offspring of tenderness and chivalry,” airy, facile, smooth, but thin in content: not rich, full, concrete, but buoyed up by light currents of emotion in a region, to quote his own words again, of “floating and colorless sentiments.” This disembodied character is a mark of almost all the Americanpoetry of the Annual orGemmiferousperiod, and is seen at its extreme in the unsubstantial prolixity of Percival and the drab diffuseness of Mrs. Sigourney. It was the reflection on this side the water from Shelley, from Byron’s earlier manner, from Wordsworth’s most didactic passages, and from the imitations of all these by secondary poets, like Mrs. Norton and L. E. L. Willis’s verses were much better than Percival’s or Mrs. Sigourney’s—defter, briefer, more pointed. But they had a certain poverty of imagery and allusion which belonged to the school, a recurrence of stock properties, such as roses, stars, and bells. He was ridiculed by the critics, in particular, for his constancy to the Pleiades, which would almost seem to have been the only constellation in his horizon.
Toward the last of November, 1835, the first edition of “Pencillings by the Way” was published. It was an imperfect one, made up hastily for the London market from a broken set of the “Mirror,” and gave only seventy-nine out of the one hundred and thirty-nine letters since printed in the complete editions. From this imperfect copy the first American impression (1836) was taken, and all in fact down to 1844. The book reached a second English edition in March, 1836, and a seventh in 1863. For this first edition Willis received £250. He afterwardstestified, that from the republication of the original “Pencillings,” for which Morris had paid him $500 a year, he had made, all told, about $5,000. Their appearance in book form had been anticipated by a severe criticism of the original “Mirror” letters, written by Lockhart for the “London Quarterly” of September, 1835. This was echoed by the Tory press generally, and it was their attacks which led to the issue of the London edition and greatly stimulated its sale. There were several reasons why the Tory papers were “down on” Willis. In the first place he was an American. In the next place he had been admitted and made much of in English social circles, where English men of letters, who were merely men of letters, did not often go. And, finally, he had spoken disrespectfully in these letters of the editor of the “Quarterly” himself. “Do you know Lockhart?” Wilson is made to ask in Willis’s report of their conversation at Edinburgh. “No, I do not,” replies his interlocutor. “He is almost the only literary man in London I have not met; and I must say, as the editor of the ‘Quarterly,’ and the most unfair and unprincipled critic of the day, I have no wish to know him. I never heard him well spoken of. I probably have met a hundred of his acquaintances, but I have not yet seen one who pretended to be his friend.”
This paragraph was enough to account for the “Quarterly” article; but the personal grievance was kept well out of sight, and Willis was taken to task for his alleged abuse of the rights of hospitality in reporting for a public journal private conversations at gentlemen’s tables. The article was a very offensive one, written with ability and with that air of cold contempt of which Lockhart was master. It sneered at Willis as a “Yankee poetaster,” and a “sonneteer of the most ultra-sentimental delicacy;” intimated that his surprise and delight at the manners of the English aristocracy came from his not having been familiar with the usages of the best society at home, and accused him of “conceited vulgarity” and “cockneyism” (an awful word, under which the Scotch Tories connoted all possible offenses against sound politics and good literature). The passages that seem to have given most offense to the critic were the report of the conversation with Lord Aberdeen at Gordon Castle and the remarks of Moore about O’Connell at Lady Blessington’s. “It is fortunate in this particular case,” wrote Lockhart, “that what Lord Aberdeen said to Mr. Willis might be repeated in print without paining any of the persons his lordship talked of; but what he did say, he said under the impression that the guest of the Duke of Gordon was a gentleman,and there are abundance of passages in Mr. Willis’s book which can leave no doubt that, had the noble earl spoken in a different sense, it would not, at all events, have been from any feeling of what was due to his lordship, or to himself, that Mr. Willis would have hesitated to report the conversation with equal freedom.” The article concludes as follows: “This is the first example of a man creeping into your home and forthwith printing,—accurately or inaccurately, no matter which,—before your claret is dry on his lips,—unrestrainedtable-talk on delicate subjects, and capable of compromising individuals.” Lockhart, as usual, contrived to insult Willis’s country, through her representative. “We can well believe,” he said, “that Mr. Willis has been depicting the sort of society that most interests his countrymen.
‘Born to be slaves and struggling to be lords,’
‘Born to be slaves and struggling to be lords,’
‘Born to be slaves and struggling to be lords,’
‘Born to be slaves and struggling to be lords,’
their servile adulation of rank and title, their stupid admiration of processions andlevées, and so forth, are leading features in almost all the American books of travels that we have met with.”
To this censure Willis replied, in substance, in the preface to the first London edition of “Pencillings,” first, that from “the distance of America, and the ephemeral nature and usualobscurity of periodical correspondence,” he had never expected that the “Mirror” letters would reach England; nor would they have done so, had not the “Quarterly” “made a long arm over the water,” and reprinted all the offending portions; thereby forcing the author’s hand and compelling him to publish the entire collection in justification of himself. Secondly, that his sketches of distinguished people were neither ill-natured nor untrue; that he had said nothing in them which could injure the feelings of those who had admitted him to their confidence or hospitality. “Therearepassages,” he allows, “I would not rewrite, and some remarks on individuals which I would recall at some cost,” but “I may state as a fact that the only instance in which a quotation by me from the conversation of distinguished men gave the least offense in England was the one remark made by Moore, the poet, at a dinner party, on the subject of O’Connell. It would have been harmless, as it was designed to be, but for the unexpected celebrity of my ‘Pencillings;’ yet with all my heart I wish it unwritten.” And finally, that whatever violations of delicacy and good taste might have been committed in the “Pencillings,” the author of “Peter’s Letters to his Kinsfolk” was not the one to throw a stone at them. The first plea in this defense was sincerely made, asmight be easily proved from Willis’s private letters. Itwasa disagreeable surprise to him when the “Quarterly” reprinted passages from the “Mirror” letters. And it is true that America was much farther away from England than England was from America. Still, if Willis had published anything that he should not have published, it was not a perfect excuse to say that he had done it in a corner. As the event showed, foreign correspondence in an American newspaper might reach England. But this apology was not needed, for his second plea covered the ground. There was, in truth, nothing malicious or slanderous in “Pencillings;” almost nothing that could give pain even to the most sensitive. The people described were, nearly all of them, in a sense, public characters, accustomed to seeing themselves gossiped about in print. In one or two instances Willis had been indiscreet, as he freely admitted. But it is hard for one living in these times of society journals and “interviewers” to understand why the papers should have made such a pother over a comparatively trifling trespass upon the reserves of private life. The best proof of Willis’s innocence in the matter is that the people whose hospitality and confidence he was charged with abusing took no kind of umbrage at the liberty. On the contrary, Lord Aberdeen, Wilson, Dalhousie, andothers wrote to him in warm approval of his book. “With what feelings,” said the “Quarterly” article, apropos of the description of Gordon Castle, “the whole may have been perused by the generous lord and lady of the castle themselves, it is no business of ours to conjecture.” This point, however, need not be left to conjecture, as it is amply answered in the following letter to Willis from the Earl of Dalhousie, dated February 25, 1836:—
… In the long evenings of winter we have beguiled the time with “Pencillings by the Way,” and whatever critics and reviewers may say, I take pleasure in assuring you that we all agree in one sentiment, that a more amusing or more delightful production was never issued by the press. In what we know of it, it is true and graphic, and therefore in what is foreign to us, we think, must be so also.The Duke and Duchess of Gordon were here lately and expressed themselves in similar terms.Lady D—— desires me to say that the reviews could not have done more for its success by their amplest praises, for it is now in every hand.Our family has been much occupied by Ramsay’s marriage this winter, he following your steps so closely. He has added greatly to his parents’ happiness, and, I hope, to his own in life. Lady Susan Hay is a handsome woman, and an amiable, pretty creature. They have settled themselves at Coalstown, until called into a more active life, which Ihope he looks forward to, and you have thought him fitted for. It is not unlikely that he will be chosen member for the East Lothian, in which he has made his residence, triangular between me and his father-in-law, Lord Tweeddale, about sixteen miles from me.Pray let me hear from you, as your sincere attached friend,Dalhousie.
… In the long evenings of winter we have beguiled the time with “Pencillings by the Way,” and whatever critics and reviewers may say, I take pleasure in assuring you that we all agree in one sentiment, that a more amusing or more delightful production was never issued by the press. In what we know of it, it is true and graphic, and therefore in what is foreign to us, we think, must be so also.The Duke and Duchess of Gordon were here lately and expressed themselves in similar terms.
Lady D—— desires me to say that the reviews could not have done more for its success by their amplest praises, for it is now in every hand.
Our family has been much occupied by Ramsay’s marriage this winter, he following your steps so closely. He has added greatly to his parents’ happiness, and, I hope, to his own in life. Lady Susan Hay is a handsome woman, and an amiable, pretty creature. They have settled themselves at Coalstown, until called into a more active life, which Ihope he looks forward to, and you have thought him fitted for. It is not unlikely that he will be chosen member for the East Lothian, in which he has made his residence, triangular between me and his father-in-law, Lord Tweeddale, about sixteen miles from me.
Pray let me hear from you, as your sincere attached friend,
Dalhousie.
Lady Dalhousie had written some two mouths before:—
I feel that it is positive ingratitude not to offer our united thanks for your book, which we received in safety, and Miss Hathorne and I are now reading it aloud to Lord Dalhousie in the evening, with very great pleasure and amusement. Your descriptions recall to my mind admirably what I have seen, and paint to my mind’s eye what I wish to see, and the happy sunshine which your own mind has shed over every person and thing you have met is refreshing and enlivening to us, living now much alone in this dark and gloomy December. The “Quarterly” we read with extreme wrath and indignation, and, believe me, it will afford us the most sincere pleasure if you will take, if you find them worthy of it, a few more of your spirited pencillings from D. Castle.… Believe me always very sincerely yours.C. B. Dalhousie.
I feel that it is positive ingratitude not to offer our united thanks for your book, which we received in safety, and Miss Hathorne and I are now reading it aloud to Lord Dalhousie in the evening, with very great pleasure and amusement. Your descriptions recall to my mind admirably what I have seen, and paint to my mind’s eye what I wish to see, and the happy sunshine which your own mind has shed over every person and thing you have met is refreshing and enlivening to us, living now much alone in this dark and gloomy December. The “Quarterly” we read with extreme wrath and indignation, and, believe me, it will afford us the most sincere pleasure if you will take, if you find them worthy of it, a few more of your spirited pencillings from D. Castle.… Believe me always very sincerely yours.
C. B. Dalhousie.
It has been said above that there was almost nothing in “Pencillings” that could give pain to any one; but to this statement there are one or two exceptions. The first was the instance ofMoore and O’Connell, in which Willis acknowledged and regretted his imprudence. “This publication, to my knowledge,” says Madden in his “Life of the Countess of Blessington,” “was attended with results which I cannot think Mr. Willis contemplated when he transmitted his hasty notes to America,—to estrangements of persons who, previously to the printed reports of their private conversations, had been on terms of intimate acquaintance. This was the case with respect to O’Connell and Moore. Moore’s reported remarks on O’Connell gave offense to the latter, and aroused bad feelings between them which had never previously existed, and which, I believe, never ceased to exist.”
It also appears from a letter from Willis to Lady Blessington, and an unsigned note from a friend of hers to Willis, both of which are printed in Madden’s “Life,” that Fonblanque resented the description of himself in “Pencillings,” and had written the author a note in terms which the latter thought “very unjustifiable.” Fonblanque was an able and estimable man, and Willis’s portrait, or caricature, of him, though not unkindly meant and applying merely to his personal appearance, was certainly not pleasant for the subject of it to see in print.
“I never saw,” it runs, “a much worse face; sallow, seamed, and hollow, his teeth irregular, his skin livid,his straight black hair uncombed and straggling over his forehead; he looked as if he might be the gentleman ‘whose coat was red and whose breeches were blue.’ A hollow, croaking voice, and a small, fiery black eye, with a smile like a skeleton’s, certainly did not improve his physiognomy. He sat upon his chair very awkwardly, and was very ill dressed, but every word he uttered showed him to be a man of claims very superior to exterior attraction.”
“I never saw,” it runs, “a much worse face; sallow, seamed, and hollow, his teeth irregular, his skin livid,his straight black hair uncombed and straggling over his forehead; he looked as if he might be the gentleman ‘whose coat was red and whose breeches were blue.’ A hollow, croaking voice, and a small, fiery black eye, with a smile like a skeleton’s, certainly did not improve his physiognomy. He sat upon his chair very awkwardly, and was very ill dressed, but every word he uttered showed him to be a man of claims very superior to exterior attraction.”
With the exception of Lockhart, Moore, Fonblanque, and Captain Marryat, whose case will be mentioned presently, it does not appear that anyone took offense at anything in “Pencillings.” As to Lady Blessington, Lockhart’s misgiving as to whether she would ever “again admit to her table the animal who has printed what ensues” was needless. It was she who saw the book through the press while Willis was in France on his wedding journey. He went to see her frequently during the remainder of his stay in London, and called upon her on his two subsequent visits to England; and their friendship and correspondence continued unbroken till her death in 1849. His poem, “To a Face Beloved,” originally printed in the “Mirror” of November 14, 1835, was addressed to her. It may well have been, however, that the noise made about the book, and the cause for complaint given to a few of thehabituésof Gore House, put acertain constraint upon his visits there, and he probably absented himself from the dinners and receptions given by the mistress of the mansion, and which it had formerly been his chief pleasure to attend. In a letter to her from Dublin, January 25, 1840, he says: “I have, I assure you, no deeper regret than that my indiscretion (in ‘Pencillings’) should have checked the freedom of my approach to you. Still my attachment and admiration (so unhappily recorded) are always on the alert for some trace that I am still remembered by you.… My first pleasure when I return to town will be to avail myself of your kind invitation, and call at Gore House.”
In spite of the “Quarterly’s” attack—partly no doubt in consequence of it—“Pencillings by the Way” met, on the whole, with a generous reception from the English public, and even from the English press. Literary criticism in those days was largely influenced by political prejudice. It was useless for a Whig, a “Cockney,” or an American, to hope for justice from the Tory reviews. The “Westminster” (Radical) was edited by Willis’s friend, Dr. Bowring; the “Edinburgh” (Whig), by his acquaintance, Lord Jeffrey. The former accordingly greeted his book with warm approval, and the latter praised it with faint damns. On the other hand, “Fraser’s,” the lightest and brightest of theTory organs, received it with uproarious contempt. The notice of “Pencillings” in the February number of the magazine for 1836 was by Maginn,—the “Odoherty” of the “Noctes,”—a witty Irish blackguard, the hired bravo of the Tory press, who spent his time, except when drunk or in jail for debt, in writing lampoons and rollicking songs for “Blackwood” and “Fraser,” expressive chiefly of convivial joys and of boisterous scorn of the Whigs. There was a flavor of whiskey and Donnybrook about whatever Maginn wrote, and he wielded his blackthorn with such droll abandon that his victims could hardly help laughing, while rubbing their heads. His onslaught on “Pencillings” began, “This is really a goose of a book, or if anybody wishes the idiom to be changed, a book of a goose. There is not a single idea in it, from the first page to the last, beyond what might germinate in the brain of a washerwoman.” He then goes on to call the author a lickspittle, a “beggarly skittler,” a jackass, a ninny, a haberdasher, a “namby-pamby writer in twaddling albums, kept by the moustachioed and strong-smelling widows or bony matrons of Portland Place;” a “fifty-fifth rate scribbler of gripe-visited sonnets,” a “windy-gutted visitor,” and a “sumph,” whatever that mystic monosyllable may import.[3]Hiswriting is characterized as “chamber-maid gabble,” “small beer,” “penny-trumpet eloquence,” “Willis’s bray,” and “Niagara in a jordan.” President Jackson, whom Maginn supposes to have appointed Willisattachéto the French embassy, is “that most open-throated of flummery-gulpers, Old Hickory.” Alluding to a passage in Willis’s “slimy preface,” the reviewer says, “that Willis should literally set his foot on Lockhart’s head is what we think no one imagines the silly man to have meant. The probabilities are that if the imposition of feet should take place between them, the toe of Lockhart would find itself in disgusting contact with a part of Willis which is considerably removed from his head, and deemed to be the quarter in which the honor of such persons is most peculiarly called into action.” Such were the amenities of criticism half a century ago. Of course this animated billingsgate could not hurt Willis in anybody’s esteem, and called for no reply. Maginn was a wretched creature and no one minded what he said; though, to be sure, the Hon. Grantley Berkeley thought it necessary, in this same year, 1836, to call him out for a scurrilous attack upon himself and his cousin, Lady Euston, in a notice of Berkeley’snovel, “Castle Berkeley.” The latter, in his very diverting “Life and Recollections,” gives a circumstantial history of this duel and of the flogging which he administered to Fraser for publishing the article, and of Maginn’s shameful treatment of poor Miss Landon.
But one of the notices provoked by “Pencillings” came near having serious consequences for Willis. In a letter in the “Mirror” of April 18, 1835, he had inserted a postscript, after his signature, as he claimed, and meant only for Morris’s private eye, giving some information about the sales of books in London. In this occurred, among other things, the sentence following: “Captain Marryat’s gross trash sells immensely about Wapping and Portsmouth, and brings him five or six hundred the book, but that can scarce be called literature.” Morris printed it with the rest of the letter, and when it reached England the gallant captain was naturally displeased by it. His revenge was to publish in his magazine, the “Metropolitan” for January, 1836, a review of “Pencillings,” or rather a grossly personal review of the author of “Pencillings.” The article was less telling than the “Quarterly’s,” simply because Marryat did not drive so sharp a quill as the editor of the “Quarterly.” But the latter knew his business as a reviewer and confined himself to the bookin hand. Marryat, on the contrary, traveled outside the record and helplessly allowed his private grievance to appear. He declared that Willis was a “spuriousattaché,” who had made his way into English society under false colors.