Chapter 8

“The Spring is here, the delicate-footed May,With its slight fingers full of leaves and flowers;And with it comes a thirst to be away,Wasting in wood-paths its voluptuous hours.”

“The Spring is here, the delicate-footed May,

With its slight fingers full of leaves and flowers;

And with it comes a thirst to be away,

Wasting in wood-paths its voluptuous hours.”

There are evidences in Willis’s private correspondence, about this time, of some coolness between himself and General Morris, which appears to have originated, or perhaps to have foundexpression in a series of three letters signed “Veritas,” written from London and printed in the “Mirror,” in the fall of 1838. These letters, after taking the “Mirror” to task for misleading the American public by the false pictures of London society given in the “Pencillings,” proceeded to set its readers right, in a series of the coarsest and most slanderous little biographies of English men and women of letters, retailing with unction all the gossip of the clubs about Lady Blessington, Count d’Orsay, the Bulwers, Disraeli, Mrs. Norton, Miss Landon, Fraser, and many others. Some of these had been Willis’s friends; others he had never met; but he wrote an indignant rejoinder to the “Mirror” of November 10th, denying, out and out, many of the lies in “Veritas’s” communication, and explaining away some of the misrepresentations and exaggerations. This letter Morris prefaced with an editorial note in which he said that he had been much censured on account of the “Pencillings,” and, therefore, “the object of these letters was to disabuse the public mind in this country of what seemed to the author a wrong and injurious impression with regard to the position in English society of certain distinguished but unworthy characters, whose example and many of whose writings are of a pernicious tendency. With one or two exceptions, we believe that our correspondenthas merely stated well attested facts.” One of these exceptions was the slander upon Miss Landon, for printing which Morris apologized. This partial indorsement of “Veritas” by the editor naturally displeased Willis; and naturally, too, he was pleased by an answer to it by Dr. Porter, in the “Spirit of the Times,” which was then edited by his brother, William T. Porter, “the tall son of York,” and with which Dr. Porter himself was editorially connected. “The Skylight letter,” Willis writes to the latter, “was capitally done, and the ‘Mirror’ was touched on all its sore places to a charm. My brother was in New York just after and called at the office, and the fury the General was in will amuse him for the next six months. Morris called you a gallipot, said it was a poor article, and will hurt your paper, and all that; but sits down and writesmea most affectionate letter of four foolscap pages, denying all possible thought of me in the London matter, and swearing he was my defender and best friend.” Elsewhere in his correspondence with Dr. Porter, Willis expresses some doubts as to the sincerity of Morris’s friendship, and seems to suspect that it was more than half policy and a desire to exploit him. It does not appear that this little misunderstanding ever came to a breach. The “Mirror” continued mostcourteous in its tone towards Willis, and its editor became and remained, till his death, one of his closest friends. But for a time Willis felt inclined to draw off, and to find some other avenue through which to address his public. This feeling took shape in December, 1838, in his acceptance of a proposal from Dr. Porter to join him in establishing a weekly paper. The “Corsair,” which was the outcome of this arrangement, was, like “Brother Jonathan” and the “New World,” one of the crop of weeklies which sprang up in the wake of the first transatlantic steamers. On May 19, 1838, the Great Western, the first steam vessel that had crossed the ocean, weighed anchor in New York harbor for her return trip. A company of gentlemen, among whom were Chevalier Wikoff and General Morris, were on board by invitation and accompanied the ship as far as Sandy Hook, where they were taken off by a pilot. It may perhaps have occurred to the general at the time, that here was what would work a change in the conditions of American journalism. It was now possible to get the freshest supply from the London literary market within a fortnight, and the news of Europe before it was cold. Willis and Porter proposed frankly to live on the plunder of this foreign harvest; and since there was no international copyright, to raise the black flag,and take reprisals wherever they could find them. In a letter to his intending partner, dated at Owego, Christmas eve, 1838, he proposed to call their venture the “Pirate,” and sent the following draft of a prospectus:—

THE PIRATE,A GAZETTE OF LITERATURE, FASHION, AND NOVELTY.T. O. Porter and N. P. Willis propose to issue weekly, in the city of New York, a paper of the above designation and character. It is their design, as editors, to present as amusing a paper as can be made from the current wit, humor, and literature of the world; to give dramatic criticisms without fear or favor; to hold up the age in its fashions, its eccentricities, and its amusements; to take advantage, in short, of the privilege assured to us by our piratical law of copyright; and in the name of American authors (for our own benefit) “convey” to our columns, for the amusement of our readers, the cream and spirit of everything that ventures to light in France, England, and Germany. As to original American productions, we shall, as the publishers do, take what we can get for nothing (that is good), holding, as the publishers do, that while we can get Boz and Bulwer for a thank-ye or less, it is not pocket-wise to pay much for Halleck and Irving.“If anybody says the name is undignified,” writes Willis, “tell them there are very few dignified people in the world, and stillfewer loversof dignity, and bythe Lord, we must live by themany. Then again we want a root, a reason, a rail, a runner to start upon, and this bloody copyright will answer the purpose. People will say, ‘Why, damme, Willis can’t get paid for his books because the law won’t protect him, so he has hauled his wind, and joined the people that robbed him.’”

THE PIRATE,A GAZETTE OF LITERATURE, FASHION, AND NOVELTY.

T. O. Porter and N. P. Willis propose to issue weekly, in the city of New York, a paper of the above designation and character. It is their design, as editors, to present as amusing a paper as can be made from the current wit, humor, and literature of the world; to give dramatic criticisms without fear or favor; to hold up the age in its fashions, its eccentricities, and its amusements; to take advantage, in short, of the privilege assured to us by our piratical law of copyright; and in the name of American authors (for our own benefit) “convey” to our columns, for the amusement of our readers, the cream and spirit of everything that ventures to light in France, England, and Germany. As to original American productions, we shall, as the publishers do, take what we can get for nothing (that is good), holding, as the publishers do, that while we can get Boz and Bulwer for a thank-ye or less, it is not pocket-wise to pay much for Halleck and Irving.

“If anybody says the name is undignified,” writes Willis, “tell them there are very few dignified people in the world, and stillfewer loversof dignity, and bythe Lord, we must live by themany. Then again we want a root, a reason, a rail, a runner to start upon, and this bloody copyright will answer the purpose. People will say, ‘Why, damme, Willis can’t get paid for his books because the law won’t protect him, so he has hauled his wind, and joined the people that robbed him.’”

Willis felt very bitterly the absence of an international copyright. By the act of 1838, the English Parliament, acting in self-defense, had refused to protect any longer the literary property of American authors, until America should have the decency to reciprocate. This cut double upon the American author. It deprived him of any gain from the circulation of his writings in England, and it discouraged native literature by flooding this country with cheap reprints of English books, for the copy of which the American publisher paid nothing. The former loss would not have been serious to many American writers at that date, possibly not to so very many even now. But England had been Willis’s best market, literary work in America was wretchedly paid, and he saw starvation staring him in the face.

The “Pirate” was finally toned down into the “Corsair,” and a prospectus which was a modification of the one drafted by Willis in the above letter was printed and circulated in January,1839. He sent one to Henry Clay, and begged him to mention the “Corsair” in his argument on the copyright, as a good comment on the state of the law. Mr. Clay replied in a very polite letter, giving his views upon the copyright question, and inclosing his subscription. The office of the “Corsair” was in the Astor House, No. 8 Barclay Street. The first number was published March 15, 1839, and the last (No. 52) March 7, 1840. At the head of the sheet was a rakish looking craft under full sail, and Willis led off with a truculent editorial, “The Quarter Deck” proclaiming the policy of the new paper. To the earlier numbers he contributed art notes and miscellaneous chat, “The Pencil,” “The Gallery,” “The Divan,” etc.; two papers on autographs; a “Letter from Under a Bridge,” a generic name that he gave to much correspondence about this time, not comprised in the original “Letters”; some reminiscences of Miss Landon as “The Departed Improvisatrice,” and a very harsh review, “Paulding the Author Disinterred.” This last was unlike Willis, who was almost always kind in his notices of brother authors, and it provoked much unfavorable comment, particularly a rejoinder in the “Courier and Enquirer,” by Colonel James Watson Webb, a gentleman who afterwards fell foul of Willis in various ways. Inthis article he held him up to scorn as a writer “who revels on the cut of a coat or the ottomans of a lady’s boudoir, and delights in the soft shades of a glen;” and whose works were only fit to “make the papillotes of ladies’ chambermaids.” Willis had an unaffected disrelish for Paulding’s writings, which he thought coarse and pointless. But the Secretary of the Navy was an old man, whose books belonged already to the past, and it was ungracious to disturb his age with taunts about their obsoleteness. One suspects, in reading this review, that its writer had some personal grudge against the author of “The Dutchman’s Fireside.”

Willis also contributed to the “Corsair” “A Story Writ for the Beautiful,” which he described as a “gay, off-hand tale,” and never reprinted. It is a rather nonsensical yarn, but has one pretty passage in it descriptive of the end of a ball,—perhaps at Devonshire House?—where the servants raise the balcony awnings to let in the dawn, and the ladies walk in the garden, “sprinkling their gloves with picking wet roses.”

On May 20, 1839, Willis sailed for England on the packet ship Gladiator. His wife accompanied him, and, on landing, they were met by the news that her father, General Stace, had died a week before their arrival. This madetheir stay in England, which was protracted to April, 1840, a sad one in many respects, and of course a quiet one. They passed most of the time with relatives of Mrs. Willis at Old Charlton, Kent, after a short visit to her sister Anne, who was married to the Rev. William Vincent, son of the vicar of Bolney Priory, in Sussex. Willis had his hands full of literary business which required his presence frequently in London, Ireland, and elsewhere. Among other things, he had contracted with Virtue to furnish the letterpress for an illustrated work on Canada, and another on Ireland, uniform with the “American Scenery.” He was to write 240 pages for each, and to be paid in all £950. By some five or six weeks of hard work he finished the Canadian book in August, and then started for a tour in Ireland preparatory to writing up its scenery. He left Mrs. Willis at Dublin, while he recrossed to Scotland, and took in the famous tournament at Eglintoun Castle, which filled the land for months with its noise of preparation, and ended in fizzle and rain-water. Of this he gave a capital description in his letter to the “Corsair,” “My Adventures at the Tournament.” Mrs. Willis remained with some kinsfolk of her mother, at Borrmount Lodge, near Enniscorthy, County Wexford, while her husband spent a fortnight in doing the Lakes of Killarneyand other show places in the south of the island. He wrote to her there from Tarbert-on-the-Shannon, September 13th:—

“The poverty on this side Ireland makes me sick at the stomach. Such a God-and-man-abandoned collection of disease and misery I never believed possible. Death and disease seem clutching their victims away in your very sight, and you see them struggle and go through their last agony in the streets—unpitied. How people can ride in carriages and wear white gloves and smile and look happy, in this great lazar-house, is beyond my conception. I keep my great cloak pocket full of pence, and shut my eyes while I give them into their skinny hands,—poor devils!”

Madden sings the wrath of Campbell over this literary undertaking of Willis: “What could he know of Ireland? How could any American know anything about it? Fourteen days! All the knowledge he possesses of Ireland might have been acquired in fourteen hours.” Willis might have retorted by asking what a Scotchman could know about the Valley of Wyoming. Or he might have pointed out that, even as early as 1839, Americans had fuller sources of information about Ireland than they found altogether comfortable. After three weeks more of touring in that ragged commonwealth, he returned with his wife to England.

Bolney was but twelve miles from Brighton, where the Wallacks were staying, and while visiting at the former place Willis had run across country and taken dinner with them. In November he spent a few days at Brighton, where he lodged at the Ship Hotel, found several old acquaintances,—Lady Stepney and Lady Georgiana Fane among them,—and made some new ones. At a dinner at Lady Macdonald’s he met Charles Kemble, the actor, and Horace Smith, of the “Rejected Addresses,” whose brother James he had known at Lady Blessington’s four years ago. One of Willis’s cherished plans had been to spend the winter in Spain, a country rich in matter for future pencillings, but this scheme he had to forego, Ireland proving a longer job than he had anticipated. The last day of 1839 found him still at Charlton, working four hours a day on the book, and in January and February he had to make another trip to Ireland, visiting the Giant’s Causeway and other celebrated bits of scenery in the north. Lady Georgiana Fane had procured him a letter from her father, the old Earl of Westmoreland, to Lord Ebrington, the lord lieutenant of Ireland, in which Willis was described as “a gentleman of fortune, likely to attain to the presidency”! He dined with Lord Ebrington at Dublin, and, happening to be there at the time of the ballgiven in honor of the queen’s wedding, he made a letter of it for the “Corsair,” afterwards included in “Sketches of Travel.”

The three books on American, Canadian, and Irish scenery were hack work, and there is, of course, little of personal or purely literary interest in them. They were written, however, with more taste and animation than the run of subscription books of the kind. Willis was a natural traveler, with a good eye for landscape effects, and the best chapters are those descriptive of spots with which he was already familiar, Niagara, the Hudson, Trenton Falls, Saratoga, and the like. Here he occasionally drew on his “Inklings.” For places that he had not visited he trusted to the narratives of former travelers, such as President Dwight, John Bartram, and Peter Kalm. The description of the White Mountains was taken mainly from a friend’s manuscript diary; and for statistics and local legends he went to the authorities. The American book contained, among its two hundred and forty-two engravings, a view from Glenmary lawn and another of Undercliff, General Morris’s place on the Hudson. The last gave Willis opportunity for a eulogy on his former partner, and quotations from his songs. “Canadian Scenery” was “lifted,” almost entire, from the narratives of Charlevoix, Adair,Heriot, Hodgson, Murray, Talbot, Cockburn, and other travelers and historians—of course with ample acknowledgments. It was not so purely descriptive as the American book, but contained chapters on the native Indians, the history of the settlement of the country, the present condition of the inhabitants, sporting, immigration, etc. In fact, there is very little of Willis in the book. In “The Scenery and Antiquities of Ireland” he had the assistance of Mr. J. Sterling Coyne, who prepared the whole of the second volume and a part of the first, Willis’s share consisting only of descriptions of the North of Ireland, a portion of Connemara, the Shannon, Limerick, and Waterford.

Before leaving America he had arranged with Colman for the publication of “The Tent Pitched” (“À l’Abri”), “Tales of Five Lands” (“Romance of Travel”), and “The Usurer Matched.” He was to have twenty per cent. on sales, and received $2,000 on account in advance. Meanwhile the Longmans offered him £200 for “Romance of Travel,” if published in advance of the American edition. Willis wrote to Dr. Porter, July 26, 1839, to delay the Colman publication. “If it is printed in America before I get the sheets here, I lose exactly $1,000. I trust in Heaven you have not forgottenmy earnest injunctions on this subject. A London publisher will buy it if a published copy has not come over, else he may have it for nothing.” The book was accordingly published first in London, in January, 1840, in three volumes, with the title “Loiterings of Travel,” and, later in the same year, in America, as “Romance of Travel,” in a single volume, very shabbily printed. Virtue also paid him £50 for an English edition of “À l’Abri,” with illustrations by Bartlett. A fourth London edition of “Pencillings,” with four illustrations, was coming out, and, finally, Cunningham, Macrone’s successor, printed an English edition of “Bianca Visconti” and “Tortesa” as “Two Ways of Dying for a Husband.” This was published on half profits, and Willis expected to make about £50 from it. Serjeant Talfourd, the author of “Ion,” wrote him a complimentary letter on its appearance. “My literary receipts in England this year,” wrote Willis to Dr. Porter, on the last day of 1839, “will amount to $7,500, all gone for expenses, back debts, etc.”

“Romance of Travel” was a collection of seven stories contributed to the “Mirror,” the “New Monthly,” and the “Corsair.” They were crowded with duels, intrigues, disguises, escapades, assassinations, masked balls, lost heirs, and all the stock properties of the romancer’sart. The view of life which they presented was unreal to the verge of the fantastic, but they abounded in descriptions of great elegance and even beauty, and the narrative went trippingly along. Willis had many of the gifts of the bornraconteur. He lacked a large constructiveness, but in the minor graces of the story-teller he was always happy. He was skillful in managing thecallida junctura, good at a start, a transition, or a finish. One must not look in these artificial fictions for truthful delineation of character, or expect to have his emotions deeply stirred. The tragic incidents, especially, fail in the time-honored Aristotelian requirement. They are exciting enough, in a way, but move neither pity nor terror. The high spirits of the narrator carry his readers buoyantly along over the bloodiest passages with scarcely an abatement of their cheerfulness. Willis did not take room enough to develop character and motive to the extent required in order to give his thick-coming events an air ofvraisemblance. “This tale of many tails,” he said of “Violanta Cesarini,” “should have been a novel. You have in brief what should have been well elaborated, embarrassed with difficulties, relieved by digressions, tipped with a moral, and bound in two volumes, with a portrait of the author.” From this defect and from theauthor’s light way of telling his stories, it followed that the more serious of these carried no conviction of reality to the reader’s mind. “Violanta Cesarini” is the history of a humpbacked artist, who turns out to be the heir to the estates of a Roman noble, thereby supplanting his sister, but enabling her to marry his chum, a poor artist, with whom she was secretly in love. The outlines of the plot were from a true story told him by Lady Blessington, but he added the love passages and, of course, all the particulars in the development of the tale. “Paletto’s Bride” was the legend of a Venetian gondolier, who made—and as suddenly lost—a fortune in a single night’s play, figured as a mysterious unknown in the high society of Florence, and carried off a titled beauty to share his home among the lagoons. “The Bandit of Austria” was a modification of a story related to Willis by D’Orsay. The heroine was a Hungarian countess, who had run off with a famous outlaw. The latter having been killed by the Austrian police, the lady, without wasting much time in unavailing regrets, falls in love with the narrator’s handsome English page (a glorified William Michell?), and is wedded to him after a series of extraordinary adventures. Willis worked in here a striking description of the grotto of Adelsberg, in which the most effective scene ofthe story takes place. “Lady Ravelgold” is a tale of English high life. The hero is a young London banker, who proves in the end to be a count of the Russian Empire, and the inheritor of vast possessions in that conveniently indefinite country. Three high-born beauties are desperately enamored of him, among them a mother and daughter, the latter of whom ultimately gets him. As in “Ernest Clay,” and, in fact, in nearly all Willis’s stories of high life, it is the women who make love to the men. The scene of the garden party at “Rose Eden” was suggested by afête champêtreat Gore House, and the delicious picture of Lady Ravelgold’s boudoir was doubtless borrowed from the same mansion. The high-piled luxuriance of the upholstery in these “Romances of Travel,” theirnonchalantyoung heroes, their jeweled and embroidered heroines, with Aladdin-like resources in the way of palaces, gardens, retainers, and stalactite caverns, point to “Vivian Grey” and the other expensive fictions of the youthful Disraeli as Willis’s nearest models. Upon the whole, the best story in the book is “Pasquali, the Tailor of Venice,” which was more within the natural compass of Willis’s talent. It has a malicious irony that reminds one of “Beppo” and the “Decameron,” and it is not without an undercurrent of pathos.

In spite of his other literary preoccupations he found time to write a series of weekly or fortnightly letters to the “Corsair,”—“Jottings down in London,”—a portion of which stand in his collected writings as “Passages from an Epistolary Journal.” They are naturally not as fresh as the earlier “Pencillings,” though very good foreign correspondence of an ephemeral sort. In search of matter for these letters, Willis went about a good deal in London. He visited the theatres and the House of Commons, looked up his old acquaintances of 1835, was present at a reception to the Persian ambassadors at Lady Morgan’s,—where he saw Mrs. Norton again,—dined with the Nawaub of Oude, went to a public dinner given to Macready at the Freemasons’ Tavern,—where he sat next Samuel Lover,—to a ball at Almack’s, and a tournament in St. John’s Wood. Disraeli walked home with him from a ball and said he was going to Niagara on his wedding trip. Willis noted some changes in England since his first visit. Among other things William IV. was dead and Victoria on the throne, and the London shops had increased greatly in splendor.

One of the most interesting results of this second stay in England was his meeting with Thackeray—then a young and comparatively unknown writer—and his engaging him as acontributor to the “Corsair,” a stroke of journalistic enterprise which ought to have prolonged the life of that piratical journal, but did not. In a private letter to Dr. Porter, dated July 26th, Willis wrote:—

“I have engaged a contributor to the ‘Corsair.’ Who do you think? The author of ‘Yellowplush’ and ‘Major Gahagan.’ I have mentioned it in my jottings, that our readers may know all about it. He has gone to Paris, and will write letters from there, and afterwards from London, for a guinea aclose columnof the ‘Corsair’—cheaper than I ever did anything in my life. I will see that he is paid for a while to see how you like him. For myself, I think him the very best periodical writer alive. He is a royal, daring, fine creature, too. I take the responsibility of it. You will hear from him soon.”

The mention in the jottings here referred to appeared in the “Corsair” of August 24th.

“One of my first inquiries in London was touching the authorship of ‘The Yellowplush Papers’ and the ‘Reminiscences of Major Gahagan,’—the only things in periodical literature, except the ‘Pickwick Papers,’ for which I looked with any interest or eagerness. The author, Mr. Thackeray, breakfasted with me yesterday, and the ‘Corsair’ will be delighted, I am sure, to hear that I have engaged this cleverest and most gifted of the magazine-writers of London to becomea regular correspondentof the ‘Corsair.’He left London for Paris the day after, and having resided in that city for many years, his letters thence will be pictures of life in France, done with a bolder and more trenchant pen than has yet attempted the subject. He will present a long letter every week, and you will agree with me that he is no common acquisition. Thackeray is a tall, athletic man of about thirty-five, with a look of talent that could never be mistaken. He has taken to literature after having spent a very large inheritance; but in throwing away the gifts of fortune, he has cultivated his natural talents very highly, and is one of the most accomplished draftsmen in England, as well as the cleverest and most brilliant of periodical writers. He has been the principal critic for the ‘Times,’ and writes for ‘Fraser’ and ‘Blackwood.’ You will hear from him by the first steamer after his arrival in Paris, and thenceforward regularly.”

The same number contained Thackeray’s first letter, dated at Paris, Hôtel Mirabeau, July 25, 1839, and concluding with a characteristic little address to the editor, in which he speaks of his feelings “in finding good friends and listeners among strangers far, far away—in receiving from beyond seas kind crumbs of comfort for our hungry vanities.” These letters were signed T. T. (Timothy Titcomb), and eight of them in all were published in the “Corsair.” A few appear in Thackeray’s collected works in a volume entitled “The Paris Sketch Book,” and allof them, with a few changes, in “The Student’s Quarter; or Paris Five and Thirty Years since,” published by Hotten after Thackeray’s death. Thackeray humorously alludes to this episode in his early literary struggles in his novel of “Philip,” the hero of which contributes a weekly letter, signed “Philalethes,” to a fashionable New York journal entitled “The Gazette of the Upper Ten Thousand.” “Political treatises,” writes the excellent Dr. Firmin to his son, “are not so much wanted as personal news, regarding the notabilities of London.” This description of the “Mirror” pointed, of course, at Willis’s authorship of the phrase, “The Upper Ten Thousand.”

It may be not uninteresting to compare Thackeray’s opinion of Willis with Willis’s impressions of Thackeray. The author of the “Book of Snobs” paid his respects twice, at least, in print to the author of “Pencillings by the Way:” once in a review of “Dashes at Life” in the “Edinburgh” for October, 1845, and again in an article “On an American Traveler,” being the sixth number of “The Proser,” contributed to the nineteenth volume of “Punch” (1850), and occasioned by Willis’s “People I have Met.” In both of these papers he quizzes Willis, though not unkindly. He laughs especially at his fashion in “ErnestClay,” of representing the aristocratic English dames as all throwing themselves at the head of the conquering young genius who writes for the magazines.

“The great characteristic of high society in England, Mr. Willis assures us, is admiration of literary talent. As some captain of free lancers of former days elbowed his way through royal palaces with the eyes of all womankind after him, so in the present time, a man by being a famousFree Pencilmay achieve a similar distinction. This truly surprising truth forms the text of almost every one of Mr. Willis’s ‘Dashes’ at English and Continental life.”“That famous and clever N. P. Willis of former days, whose reminiscences have delighted so many of us, and in whose company one is always sure to find amusement of one sort or the other. Sometimes it is amusement at the writer’s wit and smartness, his brilliant descriptions and wondrous flow and rattle of spirits, and sometimes it is wicked amusement, and, it must be confessed, at Willis’s own expense.… To know a duchess, for instance, is given to very few of us. He sees things that are not given to us to see. We see the duchess pass by in her carriage and gaze with much reverence on the strawberry leaves on the panels and her Grace within; whereas the odds are that the lovely duchess has had, at one time or the other, a desperate flirtation with Willis the conqueror.… He must have whole mattresses stuffed with the blonde or raven or auburn memoriesof England’s fairest daughters. When the female English aristocracy reads this title of ‘People I have Met,’ I can fancy the whole female peerage of Willis’s time in a shudder: and the melancholy marchioness, and the abandoned countess, and the heart-stricken baroness trembling, as each gets the volume, and asking of her guilty conscience, ‘Gracious goodness! Is the monster going to show upme?’”

“That famous and clever N. P. Willis of former days, whose reminiscences have delighted so many of us, and in whose company one is always sure to find amusement of one sort or the other. Sometimes it is amusement at the writer’s wit and smartness, his brilliant descriptions and wondrous flow and rattle of spirits, and sometimes it is wicked amusement, and, it must be confessed, at Willis’s own expense.… To know a duchess, for instance, is given to very few of us. He sees things that are not given to us to see. We see the duchess pass by in her carriage and gaze with much reverence on the strawberry leaves on the panels and her Grace within; whereas the odds are that the lovely duchess has had, at one time or the other, a desperate flirtation with Willis the conqueror.… He must have whole mattresses stuffed with the blonde or raven or auburn memoriesof England’s fairest daughters. When the female English aristocracy reads this title of ‘People I have Met,’ I can fancy the whole female peerage of Willis’s time in a shudder: and the melancholy marchioness, and the abandoned countess, and the heart-stricken baroness trembling, as each gets the volume, and asking of her guilty conscience, ‘Gracious goodness! Is the monster going to show upme?’”

Especially does he chaff Willis about his story of “Brown’s Day with the Mimpsons,” the hero of which adventure, an American who is hand in glove with noble dukes, etc., is asked home to dinner by Mimpson, a plain, blunt British merchant, whose wife snubs Mr. Brown, mistaking him for a plebeian person. The latter avenges himself by a somewhat cavalier deportment, and by obtaining, through his dear friend Lady X., a ticket to Almack’s for Mrs. M.’s companion, the pretty Miss Bellamy; while the matron herself and her haughty daughter, who are dying for a ticket, are left out in the cold. Thackeray remonstrates as follows with Mr. Brown, under whose modest mask he fancies that he sees the “features of an N. P. W. himself:”—

“There’s a rascal for you! He enters a house, is received coolly by the mistress, walks into chicken-fixings in a side room, and, not content with Mimpson’s sherry, calls for a bottle of champagne—notfor a glass of champagne, but for a bottle. He catches hold of it and pours out for himself, the rogue, and for Miss Bellamy, to whom Thomas (the butler) introduces him. Come, Brown, you are a stranger and on the dinner list of most of the patricians of May Fair, but isn’t thisun peu fort, my boy? If Mrs. Mimpson, who is described as a haughty lady, fourth cousin of a Scotch earl, and marrying M. for his money merely, had suspicions regarding the conduct of her husband’s friends, don’t you see that this sort of behavior on your part, my dear Brown, was not likely to do away with Mrs. M.’s little prejudices?”

In April, 1840, Mr. and Mrs. Willis sailed for America, taking with them Miss Bessie Stace, a younger sister of Mrs. Willis, who was to make them a visit at Owego. The “Corsair” had not been a success financially, and Dr. Porter had become discouraged and discontinued publication in March, transferring his subscription list to the “Albion.” Since the establishment of the paper, a year before, Willis had ceased his contributions to the New York “Mirror,” and he did not resume them until the end of 1842. But meanwhile he was not left without a market for his literary wares. Just before leaving England he had received a letter from Mr. J. Gregg Wilson, the publisher of “Brother Jonathan,” a new weekly printed in New York, with a circulation of some twenty thousand, informinghim of the “Corsair’s” suspension, expressing a warm admiration for his talents, and inviting him to write the “Brother Jonathan” a weekly letter, a column in length, for which he promised to pay him at the highest current rates. To this paper Willis contributed about a year and a half, or up to September, 1841. His humorous poem, “Lady Jane,” was published in installments in the “Dollar,” the monthly edition of “Brother Jonathan.” With both of these periodicals he had aquasieditorial connection, though the real editor was Mr. H. Hastings Weld. He received similar invitations from the two monthlies, “Graham’s Magazine” and “Godey’s Lady’s Book,” which were paying their contributors—among whom were nearly all the principal writers in the country—prices hitherto unknown to American periodicals. Willis was paid at the rate of $50 for an article of four printed pages of the “Lady’s Book,”—less, no doubt, than a writer of equal reputation could command now, but regarded as wildly munificent in 1841. Twelve dollars a page were the regular rates of both these magazines. “The burst on author-land of Graham’s and Godey’s liberal prices,” said Willis, “was like a sunrise without a dawn.” Mr. Charles T. Congdon, in his interesting “Reminiscences of a Journalist,” says that “Mr. Willis was the first magazinewriter who was tolerably well paid. At one time, about 1842, he was writing four articles monthly for four magazines, and receiving $100 each.” This means an income of $4,800 a year, but the strain required to keep up such a rate of production must tax the powers of the readiest writer, and it was no wonder if the product was of very uneven excellence. The four magazines here referred to were undoubtedly the “Mirror,” “Graham’s,” “Godey’s,” and “The Ladies’ Companion,” of which Mrs. Sigourney was for a time the editor, and to which Willis contributed in 1842 and 1843 a half dozen stories and a few “Passages from Correspondence” and “Leaves from a Table Book.” Two of these stories are not found among his collected writings: “Poyntz’s Aunt,” a Saratoga tale, which has been mentioned before, and “Fitz Powys and the Nun, or Diplomacy in High Life,” a very impossible fiction, and not worth describing. Such of the “Leaves” and “Scraps” as deserved preserving found their way into “Ephemera.” His contributions to “Godey’s” began with the January number for 1842, and continued, though with greatly diminished frequency, till January, 1850. During the first year he had an article in nearly every number, most of them stories. For “Graham’s” he began to write in January, 1843, and contributedoccasionally as late as 1851. “The Marquis in Petticoats” and “Broadway; A Sketch” were published in 1843 in Epes Sargent’s short-lived magazine; “The Power of an Injured Look” in the “Gift” for 1845, an annual issued in Philadelphia. He edited another annual, the “Opal” for 1844, and wrote articles of various kinds for other periodicals. During the two years and a half from January, 1842, to June, 1844, he published, all in all, some forty stories, collected, with two or three exceptions, in “Dashes at Life with a Free Pencil.” Willis was at this time, beyond a doubt, the most popular, best paid, and in every way most successful magazinist that America had yet seen. He commanded the sympathy of his readers more than any other periodical writer of his day, and his reputation almost amounted to fame. Colonel Higginson tells a story, illustrating his vogue, about a solid commercial gentleman in Boston, who, finding himself by chance at some literary dinner or tea, is reported to have entered into the spirit of the occasion by saying that “he guessed Gō-ēthe was the N. P. Willis of Germany.”

Willis lived at Owego till 1842, and continued to date his letters to “Brother Jonathan,” “Graham’s,” etc., “from under a bridge.” He had expected something like £1,000 from General Stace’s estate, but it yielded him nothing.His publisher failed about this time, and his arrangement with “Brother Jonathan” coming to an end, he engaged with a Washington paper, the “National Intelligencer,” to send it fortnightly correspondence from New York. All these causes combined made it necessary for him to take up his residence in the city and to offer Glenmary for sale; which he did with a heavy heart, taking the public into his confidence, as usual, in his affecting “Letter to the Unknown Purchaser and Next Occupant of Glenmary,” first printed in “Godey’s” for December, 1842, and included in all subsequent editions of “Letters from under a Bridge.”

“I thought to have shuffled off my mortal coil tranquilly here; flitting at last in some company of my autumn leaves, or some bevy of spring blossoms, or with snow in the thaw.… In the shady depths of the small glen above you, among the wild flowers and music, the music of the brook babbling over rocky steps, is a spot sacred to love and memory. Keep it inviolate, and as much of the happiness of Glenmary as we can leave behind stay with you for recompense!”

This sacred nook—reserved from purchase—was the spot where his own hands had broken the snow and frozen earth to bury the little body of his first child, a daughter, born dead December 4, 1840. The father’s grief and disappointmentfound a voice in one of the most naturally and simply written of his poems, “Thoughts while making the Grave of a New-Born Child.” On June 20, 1842, a second daughter, Imogen, was born, his only surviving child by his first wife. Later in the same summer he broke up his home at Glenmary and removed to New York. For a while he “pitched his uprooted tent” in Brooklyn lodgings; then he went to housekeeping for a time, and afterwards took rooms at the Astor. When in London in 1836, Willis had accompanied his publisher, Macrone, on a visit to Dickens, then “a young paragraphist for the ‘Morning Chronicle,’” living in lodgings at Furnivall’s Inn. This visit he afterwards described in his “Ephemera,” and Forster says that he and Dickens “laughed heartily at the description, hardly a word of which is true.” Be this as it may, when Mr. and Mrs. Dickens came to America in 1842, Willis ran down to New York to be present at the “Boz” ball. He wrote to his wife at Glenmary that he had spent an afternoon in showing Mrs. Dickens the splendors of Broadway, and had danced with her at the ball, where, encountering Halleck, the two poets “slipped down about midnight to the ‘Cornucopia’ and had rum toddy and broiled oysters.” Among Willis’s private papers is a cordial letter from Dickens, dated at Niagara, April 30, 1842,regretting that he should not have time to accept his invitation to make him a visit at Owego.

Arapprochementnow took place between Willis and his former associate General Morris. The “New York Mirror” of December 31, 1842, announced that, expenditures having largely exceeded receipts, the paper would henceforth be discontinued, but that a new series would begin in a few weeks. The issue of the 17th of the same month had contained two short sketches, “Imogen and Cymbeline” and “A Charming Widow of Sixty,” which were afterwards joined into one and worked up into “Poyntz’s Aunt.” These were of no importance except as being his first direct contributions to the “Mirror” since the establishment of the “Corsair,” over two years and a half before. On Saturday, April 8, 1843, the first number of the “New Mirror” was issued under the joint editorship of Morris and Willis. The latter had now entered upon an active career of journalism which lasted, with a single brief interruption, for nearly a quarter of a century, till his death in 1867. With the “New Mirror” he resumed the duties of an editor, which he had laid down when he sold out the “American Monthly” in 1831. He had been, it is true, a nominal editor of the old “New York Mirror” and of the “Corsair,” but virtually he was merely a contributor and foreign correspondentof both these papers, and had felt no real responsibility for their conduct. In the three periodicals which Morris and Willis now edited successively, the “New Mirror,” the “Evening Mirror,” and the “Home Journal,” the business management remained in the hands of the former, but the literary policy was largely shaped by Willis, and almost the entire time and energies of both partners were given to their enterprises. The office of the new journal was at No. 4 Ann Street, and its title in full ran as follows:—

“The New Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction: Containing Original Papers, Tales of Romance, Sketches of Society, Manners, and Everyday Life; Domestic and Foreign Correspondence; Wit and Humor; Fashion and Gossip; the Fine Arts and Literary, Musical, and Dramatic Criticism; extracts from New Works; Poetry, Original and Selected; the Spirit of the Public Journals, etc., etc., etc.”

Willis could not afford to give up all the other strings to his bow until he saw how the new venture was going to succeed. He retained his position as New York correspondent to the “National Intelligencer,” and his “Daguerreotype Sketches of New York,” published in that paper, were regularly reprinted in the “New Mirror.” His stories in “Graham’s” and “Godey’s” wenton up to January, 1844, after which time he announced that he should write in future exclusively for his own paper. His contributions to the “Mirror,” while editor, included tales, poems, sketches, reminiscences, letters, book notices, besides editorial papers of a miscellaneous sort, such as “Jottings,” “Slipshoddities,” “Diary of Town Trifles,” “More Particularly,” “Just You and I,” “While We hold You by the Button,” and what not, in which he set himself to catch and reflect the passing humors and picturesque surfaces of town life. He might have said of his muse at this time, as the psalmist of his soul,Adhæsit pavimento. He wrote a number of “City Lyrics,” signed “Down Town Bard,” celebrating beauties in white chip hats, whom he had helped into omnibuses: Broadway odes, inviting his sweetheart to a moonlight walk up to Thompson’s for an ice; or mock heroic lamentations in blank verse, that the lady in the chemisette with black buttons, whose sixpence he had passed up to the driver, might be doomed to pass him forever without meeting,—

“Thou in a Knickerbocker Line, and ILone in the Waverley.”

“Thou in a Knickerbocker Line, and I

Lone in the Waverley.”

It might have been expected that Willis, with his peculiarly dainty instinct, would excel in this carving of cherry stones. But his society verses in this kind were too hurriedly done and fellshort of that perfect workmanship and fineness of taste which float many a trifle of Praed or Dobson. Willis’s city poems are flimsy and sometimes a little vulgar, and their place is mid-way between really artistic society verse and such metropolitan ballads as “Walking Down Broadway” and “Tassels on the Boots,” which Lingard used to sing. The best of them, perhaps, is “Love in a Cottage,” a charmingly frank expression of a preference for the artificial, a quatrain from which has got into common quotation:—

“But give me a sly flirtationBy the light of a chandelier,With music to play in the pauses,And nobody very near.”

“But give me a sly flirtation

By the light of a chandelier,

With music to play in the pauses,

And nobody very near.”

These “City Lyrics” were not all humorous, however. The bitter contrasts which forced themselves upon Bryant walking “slowly through the crowded street” appealed also to the “Down Town Bard,” who expressed them in “The Pity of the Park Fountain,” and more successfully in “Unseen Spirits,” first printed in the “New Mirror” of July 29, 1843. This little poem—suggested, perhaps, in some mood of abstraction when the poet was strolling listlessly up Broadway, his spirits low and his eternal watchfulness for effects asleep—has, for that very reason doubtless, the sudden touch of genius, theunconsciousness and careless felicity which seem likely to keep it alive and to make it, possibly, the only work of Willis destined to reach posterity. It was a favorite with Edgar Poe, who used to recite it at reading clubs and the like, and who said that, in his opinion and that of nearly all his friends, it was “the truest poem ever written by Mr. Willis. There is about this little poem,” he continues, “(evidently written in haste and through impulse) a true imagination. Its grace, dignity, and pathos are impressive, and there is more in it of earnestness of soul than in anything I have seen from the pen of its author.”[6]

Willis took advantage of his new facilities to become his own publisher, issuing successively, as shilling extras in the “Mirror Library,” his “Sacred Poems,” “Poems of Passion,” and “Lady Jane and Humorous Poems;” following these up with the first complete editions, from the “Mirror” press, of “Letters from Under a Bridge,” and “Pencillings by the Way.” Thepoems contained few notable additions to “Melanie” and earlier volumes, except those just mentioned as printed in the “New Mirror,” and the lines on the death of President Harrison, which were much admired at the time. They were in anapestics, an unusual metre with him, but one which he handled not without fire in this excellent elegy. “Lady Jane” was a society poem in some two hundred “Don Juan” stanzas and was by no means the worst of the many imitations of Byron’s inimitable masterpiece—if the bull may be pardoned. The hero was the inevitable dandy poet,—this time he was twenty-two,—and the heroine who doted on him with a half motherly affection was a well preserved English countess of forty, wedded to a decrepit but accommodating earl. The noble pair go traveling, with the boyish poet in their train, and coming to Rome, the latter becomes enamored of an Italian marchioness and cuts loose from Lady Jane, who, “having loved too late to dream of love again,” grows old as best she may. This is all, but the poet has caught, as successfully as was possible for him, the alternate irony and sentiment, the rattling digressiveness, and the eccentric rhyming and audacious punning of his original. There is a delicate suggestion of Lady Blessington in the heroine; but Willis’s English acquaintances could hardlyhave felt pleased at being served up by name in the picture of a Londonsoirée, as “Savage Landor, wanting soap and sand,” as “frisky Bowring, London’s wisest bore,” or even as “calm, old, lily-white Joanna Baillie.” Willis was now in considerable request for lectures and occasional poems. On August 17, 1841, he delivered a poem before the Linonian Society of Yale College, extracts from which appear in his collected poems as “The Elms of New Haven.” This address was not without touches of fancy and tender reminders to the assembled scholars of

Back to Index Next