1831-1834.
LIFE ABROAD.
Whatever may have been the effect of Willis’s career in Europe upon his
character, its influence on his literary fortunes was most propitious.
Foreign travel furnished just the stimulus that he wanted. As a writer he
was at all times very dependent on his supplies. If they were fresh and
abundant his writing was correspondingly so; if life stagnated with him
his writing wore thin. Place is comparatively indifferent to men of deep
or intense genius, to a philosopher like Emerson or a brooding idealist
like Hawthorne. They strike root anywhere, and it is no great matter from
what corner they look forth upon the world. The life of the soul, the life
of nature, the problems of the conscience, may be studied in Concord or
Salem as well as anywhere else. A profound insight, a subtle imagination
will interpret the humblest environment into philosophy and poetry. And
yet even these are not quite free of their surroundings. To all but sworn
Emersonians “English Traits” is probably the most intelligible and
satisfactory of Emerson’s writings. “The Marble Faun” is not Hawthorne’s
greatest romance, but there is a richness about it, a _body_, that comes
simply from its material, and is not to be found in “The Scarlet Letter”
or “The House of the Seven Gables.”
As for Willis, his genius, such as it was, was frankly external. His
bright fancy played over the surface of things. His curiosity and his
senses demanded gratification. He needed stir, change, adventure. He was
always turning his own experiences to account, and the more crowded his
life was with impressions from outside, the more vivid his page. He had
the artist’s craving for luxury, and was fond of quoting a saying of
Godwin: “A judicious and limited voluptuousness is necessary to the
cultivation of the mind, to the polishing of the manners, to the refining
of the sentiment, and to the development of the understanding.” This taste
for the sumptuous had been starved in Willis at home. Not only were
literature and society in America far more provincial then than now, but
life was plainer in every way. The rapid growth of wealth has obliterated
the most striking contrasts between cities like New York and Boston, on
the one hand, and cities like London and Paris, on the other. In every
foreign capital nowadays one finds his simple republican compatriots
grumbling at the absence of American conveniences, cursing the steamboats,
the railway carriages, the hotels, the luggage system, the portable baths
and bed-room candles, and proclaiming loudly that the Americans are the
most luxurious people on the face of the earth. In Europe, and especially
in England, circumstances threw Willis into a new world. He shared for a
time in the life of the titled aristocracy and the idle rich, and he took
to it like one to the manner born. He was at home at once amid all that
gay ease and leisure. The London clubs, the parks, the great country
houses, Almack’s and the Row, the beautiful haughty women, the grace,
indolence, and refinement, hereditary for generations, seemed no more than
the birthright of this New England printer’s son, from which some envious
fairy had hitherto shut him out.
“I have now and then a fit of low spirits,” he says, in a letter
from Marseilles, April 28, 1832, “though generally the excessive
excitement of new scenes and constant interest occupies me quite. It
is like an intoxication to travel in Europe. I feel no annoyance,
grumble at no imposition, am never out of temper. Fatigue is the
only thing that bears me down. I want leisure and money. I shall
come back, I think, to America after my engagement with Morris is
over, and marry and come out again. As to settling down for these
ten years, I cannot think of it without a sickness at my heart. I
wish to heaven I could keep a journal and publish after I got home.
This writing and sending off unrevised is the worst thing in the
world for one’s reputation. However, I see a world of things that I
cannot put into letters, and I feel every day that my mind is
ripening and laying up material which I could get nowhere else. You
can have no idea of the stirring, vivid habit one’s mind gets into
abroad. Living at home forever would never be of half the use to
me.”
Willis arrived at Havre November 3d, and went on by diligence to Paris,
where he spent between five and six months. He had taken out with him a
number of good letters, some from Martin Van Buren among the rest. The
American colony in Paris was then small and select. It was under the wing
of Lafayette, who was very polite to Willis during his stay. Cooper was
there and his _protégé_, Horatio Greenough, the sculptor, who had come
from Florence to execute a bust of Lafayette. Morse, the artist, too, who,
on his return trip to America in a Havre packet, in the year following,
was to hit upon his invention of the electric telegraph. And lastly,
Willis’s fellow-townsman, Dr. Howe, then a zealous young philanthropist,
who had won much glory by his recent campaign in Greece, and was now
attending medical lectures at the French capital. Willis took lodgings
with Howe until the latter, having been appointed president of the
American committee for the relief of the Poles, went off on his dangerous
mission of distributing supplies among the insurgent bands in Polish
Prussia, an enterprise which ended in his capture and confinement for six
weeks in a Prussian prison. All these gentlemen Willis had the good
fortune to meet in familiar and cordial intercourse. Cooper asked him to
breakfast with Morse and Howe, and walked and talked with him in the
gardens of the Tuileries. The acquaintance thus pleasantly begun between
the two authors was afterwards renewed at home, though, from accidents of
geography, they never became really intimate.
Willis also made desirable acquaintances among the foreigners resident in
Paris. Morse took him to call upon Sir John Bowring, editor of the
“Westminster Review,” the translator of much of the national poetry of the
Russians and Hungarians, and afterwards the English governor of Hong Kong
at the time of the Opium War. He made acquaintance, too, with Spurzheim,
the phrenologist, who took a cast of his head; with General Bertrand, who
had been with Napoleon at St. Helena; and with the Countess Guiccioli,
who presented him with a sonnet by herself, and an autograph note from
Shelley. The glamour of “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” was still over
Europe, and everywhere the American traveler looked eagerly for his
footprints. Mr. Rives, the minister of the United States at Paris, was
very attentive to his young countryman, and presented him to the king,
with two other American gentlemen, Mr. Ritchie and Mr. Carr. The latter
was American consul at Tangiers. He took a great liking to Willis, made
him a number of presents, and offered to appoint him his secretary, and
take him to Morocco. This offer Willis was at first inclined to accept. It
was a tempting one in many particulars, and in a birthday letter to his
mother, January 20, 1832, he thus explained its advantages:--
“Mr. Carr takes me into his family and pays all my expenses. We go
to the old palaces of the Abencerrages, perhaps the most romantic
country in history, and one very little written about, and it will
double the value of my journey to Morris at the same time that it
secures me from any reverse of fortune. He means to spend his
summers in Spain, which is right opposite Tangiers at two hours’
sail, and next fall he will run down to Italy and the Sicilies, thus
giving me every opportunity I want. I have letters from Lord James
Hay to his brother-in-law, the governor of Gibraltar, and one from
Lord Fife to the governor of the Ionian Islands.”
Why he did not embrace this golden chance remains uncertain, though he
hints at a possible difficulty in the fact that his friend, the consul,
was a notorious duelist, who had shot seven or eight men and had a very
pretty wife. However, before he left Paris, Mr. Rives attached him to his
own embassy, a courtesy which proved of the greatest service to him. It
entitled him to wear the uniform of a secretary of legation, and the
diplomatic button gave him the _entrée_ to the court circles of every
country he visited.
Willis saw Paris at an interesting moment. The Polish revolution had just
failed, and the city swarmed with refugees. Louis Philippe was already
growing unpopular, and there were continual small _émeutes_ on the
Boulevard Montmartre, at the Porte Saint Denis, and in other quarters, led
by Polytechnic students and put down without much trouble by the troops.
It was a cholera year and people were dying by the hundreds daily.
Meanwhile the gay world went on much as ever. Carnival was kept with the
usual elaborate follies. There were masked balls at the palace. Malibran
and Taglioni were on the stage. Paris, with its novelties and splendors,
exercised the same fascination over Willis that it exercises proverbially
over his compatriots. He was never tired of promenading and sight-seeing.
His lodgings were in the Rue Rivoli, facing the Tuileries. Sismondi, the
historian, had the apartment under him. In a private letter he thus
describes his daily occupations:--
“I have bought a coffee maker and cups, and a loaf of sugar and a
pan, etc., etc., and my hostess’s daughter, Christine, brings me my
bread and butter, and I breakfast gloriously alone, the doctor
(Howe) being always at the hospitals in the morning. I breakfast and
write all along the forenoon till twelve, and then see sights and
hear lectures till dark, dine at five or six, and either go to some
party in the evening, or stay at home and study with Zelie.”
He had no fear of the cholera and firmly believed that it was not
contagious. He was advised that good living, frequent bathing, a cheerful
frame of mind, and regular habits were the best preventives. He even went
boldly through the cholera wards of the Hôtel Dieu, and sent a harrowing
description of them to the “Mirror.” But towards spring the pestilence
gained more and more. The theatres were shut, all gayeties suspended, and
thousands fled the city daily. The upper classes, who had thus far
escaped, began to be attacked. The streets were almost deserted, people
went about holding camphor bags to their nostrils, and the panic became
universal. Finally, toward the middle of April, while dancing at a party,
Willis was seized with violent pains in the stomach, vomiting, and chills.
He ran out of the room to an apothecary’s, swallowed thirty drops of
laudanum, took a carriage home, and a prescription of camphor and ether,
and went to bed. These instant remedies, he had no doubt, were all that
saved him, and on April 16th he started for Italy.
It is unnecessary for the biographer to follow him step by step in his
saunterings through Europe. These are fully recorded in his letters to the
“Mirror,” which covered a period of four years, the first appearing in the
issue of February 13, 1832, and the last on January 14, 1836. He began
them on the voyage out, as soon as he had recovered from his first
seasickness, and he continued them until about six months before his
return home. The title “Pencillings by the Way,” he had used before, but
he retained it and added the sub-caption, “First Impressions of Europe.”
Both described well the character of these letters, which were written
hastily, often on the wing, and sent off in many cases without revision,
to catch the next packet for America; in which, moreover, the writer aimed
to “record impressions, not statistics.” There were one hundred and
thirty-nine of them in all, and they were designed to appear weekly so far
as possible. But by reason of irregular postal facilities, they averaged
less than one a fortnight, and sometimes a month or more elapsed between
two of them. They were read with eagerness in America, and Morris asserted
that they were copied into five hundred newspapers. Their popularity is
explained in part by the fact that Europe was much farther off from us in
those days than it is now. The voyage by sailing-vessel was tedious, and
few Americans went abroad for pleasure. Willis, to be sure, professed
himself astonished by the numbers of his countrymen whom he met in Italy
and elsewhere, but these were but a handful compared with the annual horde
of tourists who rush back and forth in the steamers, and do Great Britain
and the continent in three months. It is also true that the literature of
travel was not then so abundant. The time has gone by for first
impressions of countries. The reader now demands a more minute and
authoritative study of some single corner of the map. Yet this does not
serve to account altogether for Willis’s success in his “Pencillings.”
There were already plenty of books by American travelers in Europe, such
as they were, which have long been obsolete. Who ever hears nowadays of
James’s “Travels,” for instance, published in 1820; or of Austin’s
“Letters from London,” 1804; or of “A Journal of a Tour in Italy by an
American,” 1824; to say nothing of innumerable “Americans in Paris,” and
“Americans in London,” of later dates? The truth is that Willis’s rapid
sketches were capital writing of their kind, and the work of a born
“foreign correspondent.” He was a quick and sympathetic, though not a
subtle observer, had an eye for effect, and a journalist’s instinct for
seizing the characteristic features of a scene and leaving out the lumber.
Few of his letters are in the least guide-bookish. His raptures in stated
places for admiration, such as galleries, palaces, and cathedrals, are
sometimes conventional, and doubtless his passing judgments on famous
works of art are often either at second hand or incorrect. His education
had not prepared him to pronounce on these, and he had not the patience to
cultivate a critical appreciation of them. But in the crowd and out of
doors--whither he gladly escapes--he is always happy, and there are many
pictures, scattered here and there through these excellent letters, which
for sharpness of line and brightness of color have not been excelled
either by Hawthorne, in his “Note-Books,” or by Bayard Taylor, in his
numerous views, afoot or otherwise, or by Henry James, in his more
penetrating and far more carefully finished studies.
Willis did not sit down in Europe, like Longfellow, and become the
interpreter to the New World of the Old World’s romantic past. He was
never much of a scholar. The literature and legends of the countries he
traveled had little to give him, though he possessed just enough of the
historic imagination for the proper equipment of a picturesque tourist. In
general it was the present that interested him: all this stirring modern
life, the strange manners and dresses, the changing landscapes, the gay
throngs in the streets, the pretty women and notable men at the drive or
the ball. Nor was his attitude that of criticism, but rather of intense
personal enjoyment. He had gone out ready to be pleased, and he was
pleased. He gave, in consequence, a somewhat rose-colored view of Europe
to his readers at home. Not that the disagreeable side escaped his notice,
but he was having his holiday and he gave a holiday account of it, and his
engaging egotism lent a personal interest to his descriptions. The
“Edinburgh Review,” in a just but rather heavy notice of “Pencillings,”
complained of the scantiness of useful information in them. Useful
information was a thing which Willis eschewed. He took small interest in
politics, public institutions, industrial conditions, etc.; and he knew
that they would bore nine out of ten among his readers. He lumped them
jauntily under the head of “statistics,” referred the anxious inquirer
concerning them to the cyclopædias, acknowledged with delightful candor
that he himself was an ornamental person, and went on with his sketches of
people and places. Yet “Pencillings by the Way” was a book which so solid
a man as Daniel Webster carried with him on a journey, and which, says his
biographer, “he read attentively and praised. He said the letters were
both instructive and amusing and evinced great talents on the part of the
author.” They inspired the young Bayard Taylor with his first longing to
travel. Thousands of Americans have taken their impressions of Europe from
them; and in spite of all that has since been written by more leisurely
and better instructed observers, they retain their freshness wonderfully,
and present to the reader of to-day vivid glimpses of the outside of
European life, at a time when steam had not yet made the byways of all
countries accessible.
Willis spent the summer and autumn of 1832 in the north of Italy, making
Florence his headquarters. Dr. Bowring had given him in Paris a letter to
Count Porro at Marseilles. The latter had been with Byron in Greece, where
Count Gamba, the Guiccioli’s brother, was of his corps and served under
him. He gave Willis letters to “half the rank of Italy:” among others, to
the Marquis Borromeo, who owned the “Isola Bella” in Lake Maggiore. Porro
assured Willis that Borromeo would give him the use of one of his
palazzos, “as he has five or six and is happy when people he knows occupy
his servants.” The nominal position of _attaché_ to the American legation
at Paris obtained for him a private presentation to the Grand Duke of
Tuscany, and an invitation to the ducal balls and the receptions at the
Casino, both of which were given weekly. The Florentines did not entertain
much at their houses, but the foreign residents did, and especially the
English. Willis was dined by Jerome Bonaparte, the ex-King of Westphalia,
who was living at the Tuscan capital with the title of Prince Montfort,
and giving very exclusive parties. He resorted to the Saturday _soirées_
of Prince Poniatowski, who professed love for Americans, and whose august
name was afterwards borne by the favorite pony of the Willis children at
Idlewild. In short, he was freely admitted to Florentine society and took
part in its fashionable intrigues and dissipations. He secured lodgings in
Florence in the same palazzo with Greenough, in the apartment just vacated
by Cole, the American landscape painter. Through Greenough he saw a great
deal of artist life in Italy. At Rome Greenough subsequently introduced
him to Gibson, the English sculptor, who presented him with a cast of his
bas-relief, Cupid and Psyche. Under the guidance of the two, Willis amused
himself by trying his hand, in an amateurish fashion, at moulding in clay.
He was flattered by their assurances that he had a good touch, and felt
half inclined, for a moment, to exchange his dilettantish pursuit of
letters for an equally dilettantish pursuit of art. His dreams of the
possibilities of such a career took shape long after in the novel of “Paul
Fane.” Greenough had moulded a bust of Willis at Florence, and some years
after he cut it in marble and gave it to him. There is a story about this
which is authentic, and too pretty to leave untold. Mr. Joseph Grinnell of
New Bedford happened to be in Florence in the spring of 1830 and had
employed Greenough to make him a statue of his niece Cornelia,--then a
child of five years,--who became in time Willis’s second wife. It was from
a remnant of the same block used for her statue that the sculptor,
unconscious of the omen, afterwards carved the bust of her future husband.
The two fragments thus strangely reunited stand now in the same
drawing-room, the head of the youthful poet, with its Hyperion curls, and
the full-length figure of the demure little Quaker maiden, holding in one
hand a drinking-cup and in the other a bird. From this portrait-bust of
Willis is taken the engraving by Halpin in the illustrated edition of
Willis’s poems published by Clark, Austin & Smith, 1859. It was a fair
likeness, but somewhat heavy and unideal. Its original had grown quite fat
abroad. His inherited tendency to _embonpoint_ was counteracted in later
life by the emaciation of long illness. Even as a young man his height
gave him a look of slenderness, though his face was full. The “Autocrat,”
apropos of dandies whose jaws could not fill out their collars, affirms
that “Willis touched this last point in one of his earlier ambrotypes.”
August found him at the Baths of Lucca, “The Saratoga of Italy,” flirting,
and recuperating from the exhausting effects of an Italian summer. In a
private letter dated on the 20th, he announces his intention of starting
for England to-morrow by way of Switzerland and the Rhine, returning to
Italy in a few months in time for the Roman season.
“In London I mean to make arrangements with the magazines, and then
live abroad altogether. It costs so little here and one lives so
luxuriously too, and there is so much to fill one’s mind and eye,
that I think of returning to naked America with daily increasing
repugnance. I love my country, but the _ornamental_ is my vocation,
and of this she has none. I shall pass the next summer, perhaps, in
Germany at a university, and I mean to learn German thoroughly. You
would be astonished at the facility of learning a language _in the
country_. I speak French well and Italian passably, and you know how
little I knew and how short a time I have been abroad.”
This programme was altered for some reason. Instead of starting for
England, he made a second visit to Venice, then returned to Florence, and
when the autumn was far enough advanced to make it safe went on to Rome.
In the letter just quoted he mentions that he has made the acquaintance of
a young Mr. Noel, a cousin of Byron.
The winter of 1832-33 and the spring of 1833 were spent between Florence,
Rome, and Naples.
Wherever he traveled he made friends. He was not without a title to his
secretary’s button, for his whole progress through Europe was a ticklish
feat of diplomacy. Few of the people whom he met in society suspected what
thin ice he was skating on, or dreamed for an instant that the dashing
young _attaché_ was dependent for his bread and butter on weekly letters
to a newspaper. The failure of remittances from Morris sometimes put him
in an awkward predicament, but he always managed to find a way out. In one
of the letters which he made it a religion to write his mother on each
recurring birthday--this one dated at Florence, January 20, 1833--he
relates some of his experiences of the kind:--
“I have dined with a prince one day and alone for a shilling in a
cook-shop the next. I have twice been entirely destitute of money in
places where I had not an acquaintance, and the instant before the
last coin was out of my pocket, chances too improbable for a dream
have provided for me. One was at Marseilles. I had relied on
receiving a letter of credit when I got there. I was disappointed
and was at the hotel a week, wondering whether I should find fate
working its usual miracle for me. I had only two francs remaining,
when a gentlemanly man, who had commenced conversation with me at
table, asked me to his room and ended with offering me a seat in his
carriage to Nice. The quarantine drove him back, but he had brought
me two hundred miles on my route, and knowing my disappointment by
my inquiries at the post office, he offered me the use of his banker
to any amount and took drafts for the money on my partner in New
York. This now is a thing that does not occur once in a century. I
have corresponded with Doyne (that was his name) ever since. I find
that he is a _religious man_, and from one of the first families in
Dublin.”
With all his taste for luxury, Willis knew how to make economies, and
living was much cheaper then. He never affected a mystery, and in one of
his letters to the “Mirror” he explained how it was that he could live in
Florence on three hundred dollars a year “exclusive of postage and
pleasure,” paying four dollars a month for his apartment and attendance,
breakfasting for six cents, and dining “quite magnificently” for
twenty-five. Meanwhile a deal of gossip about him was in circulation in
America, and the editor of the “Mirror” had to contradict, _inter alia_, a
rumor that his foreign collaborator had married the widow of a British
nobleman and was faring sumptuously in Rome.
Having been invited by the officers of the frigate United States to join
them in a six months’ cruise up the Mediterranean, he repaired to Leghorn,
from which port the United States, with her consort the Constellation, set
sail on the 3d of June, 1833. Commodore Patterson of Baltimore commanded
the former ship and Captain Reed of Philadelphia the latter. Both
gentlemen were accompanied by their wives and the commodore by his three
beautiful daughters. These were all old friends of Willis, and he had made
acquaintance with the other officers of the squadron in Italy. He could
not have seen the East under pleasanter auspices, and the next half year
was the richest in literary fruit of his entire sojourn upon the
continent. The squadron loitered along like a pair of pleasure yachts,
touching at all the more interesting ports. The bright shores of the
Mediterranean and the Levant passed in a magic panorama before the eyes of
the passengers, who sailed and danced and ate the lotus day after day.
Elba, Naples, and Sicily; Trieste and Vienna; the Ionian Islands, Greece,
and the shores of the Dardanelles were visited in turn, and at length in
October the frigate dropped anchor in the Golden Horn. Willis’s
“Pencillings” of Constantinople are among the best in his portfolio, among
the best, indeed, that have ever been made of the surface of Oriental
life. Italy was hackneyed: the Rialto and Saint Mark’s, the Coliseum and
the Vatican, Pompeii and the Bay of Naples, had been described a thousand
times. But here he was off the track of common tourists. His nature
reveled in the barbaric riches of the East and cheerfully blinked the
discomforts and the dirt. The mysteries of the seraglio and the slave
market and the veiled women in the bazaars piqued his curiosity, and the
poetry of the Turkish cemeteries and mosques appealed to his sentiment. He
was never weary of wandering through the grand bazaar. “I have idled up
and down in the dim light and fingered the soft henna, and bought small
parcels of incense wood for my pastille lamp, studying the remarkable
faces of the unconscious old Mussulmans, till my mind became somehow
tinctured of the East, and my clothes steeped in the mixed and agreeable
odors of its thousand spices.” Willis was a born shopper and had a
feminine eye for the niceties not only of costume, but of upholstery,
pottery, and all kinds of purchasable knick-knacks. He relished a fine
appeal to his senses and his fancy all in one. So he liked to go through
the street of the confectioners and taste the queer sweetmeats with
flowery names, “peace to your throat” and “lumps of delight,” and to
inventory the merchants’ stock in trade, their gilded saucers, brass
spoons, and vases of rose water. He liked the opium-eating druggists,
smoking their narghiles and fingering their spice wood beads, the edges of
their jars “turned over with rich colored papers (a peculiar color to
every drug), and broad spoons of box-wood crossed on the top.” He
delighted to cheapen amber and embroidered slippers in the Bezestein, and
best of all to lounge on the cushioned divan, taking sherbet and aromatic
coffee and bargaining for attar of roses in the octagonal shop of
Mustapha, the perfumer to the Sultan, whom he has introduced as a _deus ex
machina_ into his story, “The Gypsy of Sardis.” In the “Letters from under
a Bridge,” he affirms, whether seriously or not I cannot say, that the
English artist Bartlett, who was his collaborator in “American Scenery,”
encountered old Mustapha in Constantinople, and that the latter showed him
Willis’s card “stained to a deep orange with the fingering of his fat
hand, unctuous from bath hour to bath hour with the precious oils he
traffics in.” He questioned Bartlett about America, “a country which to
Mustapha’s fancy is as far beyond the moon as the moon is beyond the gilt
tip of the seraglio,” and finally gave him a jar of attar of jasmine to
send to Willis. “The small gilt bottle, with its cubical edge and cap of
parchment, lies breathing before me.” Then there was the street of the
booksellers, where “the small brown reed stood in every clotted inkstand,”
and the bearded old Armenian bookworm, interrupted in eating rice from a
wooden bowl, took down an illuminated Hafiz, “and opening it with a
careful thumb, read a line in mellifluous Persian.” Willis also struck up
an acquaintance with Dr. Millingen, the Sultan’s physician, who had
attended Byron in his last illness. He spent two days with him, by
invitation, at his house on the Bosphorus, and picked up a smattering of
Romaic from Mrs. Millingen, who was a Greek.
After five weeks at Constantinople, the frigate weighed anchor for Smyrna.
There he found an old schoolmate, Octavus Langdon, a Smyrniote merchant,
who entertained him very hospitably, and invited him to join a party for a
few days’ tour in Asia Minor. The party consisted of Willis and his host,
an American missionary named Brewer, and two other gentlemen, and their
adventures included a night in a real Oriental khan at Magnesia, and a
visit to the site of ancient Sardis. A beautiful girl, of whom Willis
caught a glimpse, through a tent door, in a gypsy encampment on the plain
of Hadjilar, was the original of his “Gypsy of Sardis.” At Smyrna he said
good-by to Commodore Patterson and his other friends on the United States;
and the ship which had been his home for more than six months sailed away
to winter at Minorca, leaving him “waiting for a vessel to go--I care not
where. I rather lean toward Palestine and Egypt, but there are no vessels
for Jaffa or Alexandria.”
By this time Willis’s literary reputation had penetrated to the London
press, though not as yet to the London public, possibly through scattered
copies of his “Mirror” letters; and while staying at Smyrna he received
“an offer of a thousand dollars a year to write for the London ‘Morning
Herald.’ But the articles were to be _political_, and that I had modesty
enough to think beyond my calibre. I was to live abroad, however, and go
wherever there was a war or the prospect of one. I would much rather
write about pictures and green fields.” The not unpleasant hesitation as
to his next move was ended at last by the departure from Smyrna of the
Yankee brig Metamora, bound for his native Portland with a cargo of figs
and opium. The skipper, a Down-Easter, agreed to take him as a passenger,
and land him at Malta. At Malta, accordingly, he arrived late in December,
after being nearly shipwrecked in a Levanter, and was put ashore through a
heavy sea in the brig’s long boat, narrowly escaping being carried all the
way to America. The letter to the “Mirror” in which this part of his
travels was recorded was lost, and the “Pencillings” leap at once from
Smyrna to Milan. He afterwards rewrote the episode, turning it into a
capital story (“A Lost Letter Rewritten,” in the “Mirror” for May 14 and
June 11, 1836), which figures in his collected writings as “A Log in the
Archipelago.” The startling conjunction of East and Down East on board the
Metamora suggested, no doubt, some of the incidents in “The Widow by
Brevet,” a tale which moves between the poles of Constantinople and Salem,
Massachusetts.
From Malta he made his way _via_ Italy, Switzerland, and France to
England, arriving at Dover on the 1st of June, 1834.
While at Florence, Willis had been introduced by Greenough to Walter
Savage Landor, who was then living in his villa at Fiesole. Landor
entertained him hospitably, and, at parting, made him a present of a Cuyp,
for which Willis had expressed admiration, and gave him some valuable
letters to people in England. One of these was to the Countess of
Blessington, and with it Landor intrusted to his American guest the
manuscript of his “Citation and Examination of William Shakespeare,” for
delivery to the same lady, under whose superintendence it was duly
published the following autumn. He also put into his hands a package whose
temporary disappearance was the cause of some blame attaching to Willis.
Landor’s own story of the transaction, told in an addendum to the first
edition of “Pericles and Aspasia,” is as follows:--
“At this time an American traveler passed through Tuscany and
favored me with a visit at my country seat. He expressed a wish to
reprint in America a large selection of my ‘Imaginary
Conversations,’ omitting the political. He assured me they were the
most _thumbed_ books on his table. With a smile at so energetic an
expression of perhaps an undesirable distinction, I offered him
unreservedly and unconditionally my only copy of the five printed
volumes, interlined and interleaved in most places, together with
my MS. of the sixth, unpublished. He wrote to me on his arrival in
England, telling me that they were already on their voyage to their
destination.”
It seems from Willis’s public explanation in “Letters from under a
Bridge,” that he received the volumes, which were in a dilapidated
condition, at the moment of starting, and not knowing how to add them to
his baggage he--rather carelessly, perhaps--“sent them with a note to
Theodore Fay, who was then in Florence, requesting him to forward them to
America by ship from Leghorn.” Fay accordingly committed them to a Mr.
Miles, an American straw-bonnet-maker, who did send them to New York,
where Willis expected to follow in the course of the summer and take
charge of them. Instead of doing this, he spent the next two years in
England, and meanwhile wrote to Landor that the package had been left with
Miles, to forward it to America. Landor “called in consequence at the shop
of this person, who denied any knowledge of the books.” These, however,
after a brief stay in New York, were consigned to Willis at London, “and
Fay and Mr. Landor both happening there together, the explanation was
made, and the books and manuscripts restored unharmed to the author,” but
not in time to keep Willis from going down “to posterity astride the finis
of ‘Pericles and Aspasia.’ I trust,” he continues, “that his [Landor’s]
biographer will either let me slip off at Lethe’s wharf, by expurgating
the book of me, or do me justice in a note.” In spite of which trust the
biographers have been a little hard on Willis in the matter. Sidney
Colvin, heartened, probably, by the “Quarterly’s” onslaught, denounces him
as “that most assiduous of flatterers and least delicate of gossips,” and
says that he gave Landor occasion to repent of his hospitality by
consigning his books to America and then basely lingering on in England
“in obsequious enjoyment of the great company among whom he found himself
invited:” while Forster, after declaring that Willis’s “fuss and fury of
boundless hero-worship found in Landor an easy victim,” adds that “Landor
will perhaps be thought not without excuse for the way in which he always
afterwards spoke of Mr. N. P. Willis.” But whatever inconvenience the
latter may have caused in this business, he certainly made the _amende
honorable_ in the letter to Landor from which Mr. Forster quotes:--
“I have to beg,” he writes, “that you will lay to the charge of
England a part of the annoyance you will feel about your books and
manuscripts. I was never more flattered by a commission and I have
never fulfilled one so ill. They went to America _via_ Leghorn, and
I expected fully to have arrived in New York a month or two after
them.”
Landor was a man of noble courtesy and most generous nature, although, to
put it mildly, often unreasonable. The delay and uncertainty about his
precious manuscripts were certainly vexatious and may, very likely, as his
biographer implies, have influenced “the way in which he always afterwards
spoke” of the man who, innocently enough, made him the trouble. But up to
the time of this little misunderstanding, his feelings toward Willis, as
expressed in their correspondence, were exceedingly cordial; as will
sufficiently appear from the following letter, undated, but written,
probably, during the winter of 1834-35:--
MR DEAR SIR,--By a singular and strange coincidence, I wrote this
morning and put into the post office a letter directed to you at New
York. And now comes Mr. Macquay, bringing me one from you,
delightful in all respects. I know not any man in whose fame and
fortunes I feel a deeper interest than in yours. Pardon me if I am
writing all this illegibly in some degree, for certainly I shall
scarcely be in time for the post with all the agility both of hand
and legs. For I am resolved to transcribe an ode to your President
in spite of the resistance his [MS. illegible] has met
with,--indeed, the more am I resolved for this very reason. I envy
you the evenings you pass with the most accomplished and graceful of
all our fashionable world, my excellent friend, Lady Blessington. Do
not believe that I have written any paper in the magazine. Whatever
I write I submit to Lady B. My “Examination of Shakespeare” I
published for a particular and private purpose, which, however, it
has not answered. I should not be surprised if it procured me a
hundred pounds or more within seven years. Had I known of your being
in England I should have ordered a copy to have been sent to you.
Pray tell Lady Blessington I have at last received her Byron from
Colonel Hughes. It came a week ago. I think better of him than I
did, and thank her for it. Nevertheless, I suspect she has given him
powers of ratiocination which he never attained. I must now try to
recollect my verses. So adieu, and believe me,
Ever yours most sincerely,
W. S. LANDOR.
Pray write to me when you find time.
The verses accompanying this letter were the rough draft of the ode “To
Andrew Jackson,” numbered CCLXXXVIII. in Landor’s miscellaneous poems. On
his side Willis could not thank Landor enough for his introduction to Lady
Blessington. “She is my lode star and most valued friend,” he writes, “for
whose acquaintance I am so much indebted to you that you will find it
difficult in your lifetime to diminish my obligations.”
In England Willis fell at once upon his feet. While traveling on the
Continent, his intimacies had been principally among Englishmen and
Americans, and though well received in the native society of Florence by
virtue of his diplomatic credentials, he had remained, after all, a
stranger and a looker-on. A foreign language imperfectly learned is a
barrier to complete intercourse even in the most cosmopolitan society. In
France and Italy he had made acquaintances; in England he made friends and
formed domestic ties which bound him to the country as long as he lived.
He did not fancy the French and Italians, though he found their cities
interesting to visit; but he liked the English and they treated him well.
No American author except Irving and Cooper had received from them a tithe
of the attentions which they accorded to Willis; and Cooper, though
personally well liked, had offended British prejudices by his pugnacious
writings and was more popular in Paris than in London. The next two years
of Willis’s life were perhaps the acme of his social and literary career,
and he always looked back to them as the brightest spot in his memory. The
experience was not altogether healthy for him, though it was stimulating
at the time. He was not spoiled by success, but he was naturally a little
intoxicated by it, and a little dazzled by the courtly splendors of the
circles to which he was now admitted. When he went back to America, he did
so reluctantly, and with the hope of returning soon to make his home in
England. He found the change to the plainer conditions of American life a
chilling one, and he had acquired habits and standards which did not fit
in easily with the requirements of a journalist’s career in a new country.
As soon as he reached Dover he began to have that feeling of being at home
once more which is familiar to American travelers who make their first
entrance to England by way of the Channel. Everything was new, and yet
nothing was strange. The blazing coal fires--it was June--the warm
carpets, the quiet coffee-room with the London newspapers on the table,
the subdued, respectful servants, the mother-tongue again, the plain
richness of the furnishings, the snugness and comfort,--the Anglo-Saxon
knows by these that he is once more in Anglo-Saxondom. Arrived at London,
he lost no time in delivering his note of introduction from Landor to Lady
Blessington, who immediately asked him to dinner and presented him to the
_beaux esprits_ who frequented Seamore Place. For this charming woman her
young _protégé_ conceived at once the strongest admiration, tinctured, it
may be, by a tenderer sentiment. Her wit and beauty, her cordiality and
social graces, had drawn about her a court of statesmen, authors, and
notabilities of all kinds, over whom she presided like the queen of a
Parisian _salon_. It was natural that Willis should have formed, or at
least should have politely expressed, an exaggerated estimate of her
literary gifts. To posterity, who have not the advantage of her personal
acquaintance, Lady Blessington’s writings seem of very little importance,
with the possible exception of her “Conversations with Lord Byron,” whose
subject lends it a certain claim to remembrance. At her house Willis met
Bulwer, Moore, Lord Durham, Disraeli, James Smith, Galt, Procter,
Fonblanque of the “Examiner,” and many other distinguished men whose
portraits he has given in the “Pencillings” with a sharpness of outline
which makes them increasingly valuable as their figures recede into
history. It is not at all strange that an enthusiastic and fanciful young
American, without antecedents, ushered all at once into a roomful of
people about whom all the world was talking, should have been a little
imposed upon by these exalted personages. He was not in a critical mood,
and it may be freely conceded that he had too high an opinion of Barry
Cornwall’s poetry, and of the electroplated novels of the authors of
“Pelham” and “Vivian Grey;” and that he exclaimed more than was necessary
over the varied accomplishments of that gorgeous dandy--Byron’s _Cupidon
déchainé_--the Count d’Orsay.
Still he kept his head fairly well. Fortunate in his introductions, he was
the man to make the most of his chances. His talent for society and his
easy assurance put him quickly _de niveau_ with his new acquaintances. He
was not at all above owning that the English nobility, for example,
impressed his imagination. He liked to stay at their houses; he enjoyed
the wealth, the grandeur, the historic associations that surrounded them.
His appetite for luxury was gratified by the perfection of all their
appointments in the art of living. The fineness of their manners pleased
his aristocratic tastes and he could not sufficiently admire the high-bred
women and the simple, cordial, dignified gentlemen with whom he dined or
drove through the cultivated landscapes. But Willis was no snob or vulgar
tuft hunter. His enjoyment of his privileges was accompanied with an
entire reserve of his self-respect. He liked the company of those whom Dr.
Johnson was wont to call “the great.” But though he loved a lord, he
preferred a commoner, if the commoner was preferable. The Duke of
Richelieu, whom he had met at Lady Blessington’s, and previously at the
French court, he described as “the inheritor of nothing but the name of
his great ancestor, a dandy and a fool.”
“What a star is mine!” he wrote in a letter to his sister Julia,
three days after his landing in England. “All the best society of
London exclusives is now open to me--_me!_ a sometime apprentice at
setting types--_me!_ without a sou in the world beyond what my pen
brings me, and with not only no influence from friends at home, but
a world of envy and slander at my back. Thank heaven, there is not a
countryman of mine, except Washington Irving, who has even the
standing in England which I have got in _three days_ only. I should
not boast of it if I had not been wounded and stung to the quick by
the calumnies and falsehoods of every description which come to me
from America. But let it pass! It reconciles me to my exile at
least, and may drive me to adopt the mother country for my own. In a
literary way, I have had already offers from the ‘Court Magazine,’
the ‘Metropolitan Monthly,’ and the ‘New Monthly’ of the first price
for my articles. I sent a short tale, written in one day, to the
‘Court Magazine’ yesterday, and the publishers gave me eight guineas
for it at once. They all pay in this proportion, and you can easily
see, with my present resources of matter, how well I can live. I
lodge in Cavendish Square, the most fashionable part of the town,
paying a guinea a week for my lodgings, and am as well off as if I
had been the son of the President, with as much as I could spend in
the year. Except my family now, I have forgotten everybody in
America. [Here follows the passage about Mary Benjamin already
quoted in chapter III.] I never can return, however, till I can pay
my debts, and it will take me long to lay up three thousand
dollars. When I can do it, I shall, and make America a farewell
visit for years.”
Willis followed up his advantages assiduously. He went constantly to Lady
Blessington’s, exchanged calls with Moore, breakfasted with Procter and
also with that entertaining diarist, Henry Crabb Robinson, to whom he
brought a letter from Landor, and in whose rooms in the Temple he met
Charles and Mary Lamb. His Parisian acquaintance, Dr. Bowring, was back in
London and introduced him to a number of people. At an evening party at
the Bulwers’ he met Sir Leicester Stanhope, who had been with Byron in
Greece, and with whose beautiful wife Willis became quite a favorite,
composing his verses “Upon the Portrait of the Hon. Mrs. Stanhope” to
accompany an engraving of her in Lady Blessington’s “Book of Beauty.” At
the Stanhopes’ he met that famous pair of beauties, “the Sheridan girls,”
Mrs. Norton and her sister, Lady Dufferin, to the former of whom he had
addressed a poem written at Paris in 1832 and printed in the “Mirror” of
July 7, 1834.
It was the height of the London season, and the opera was in full blast,
with Grisi singing and Fanny Elssler in the ballet. Willis was admitted to
the Alfred Club, and invitations to dinners and parties began to pour in
upon him. All these gayeties he described in his letters to Morris,
which, losing somewhat, it may be, in picturesqueness, gained greatly in
personal interest during his stay in England. It was in the course of this
first summer in London that he got acquainted with Mary Russell Mitford,
who invited him to spend a week at Reading, and with whom he maintained
for some time a friendly correspondence. A letter to Miss Jephson, July
23, 1834, gives her first impression of him:--
“I also liked very much Mr. Willis, an American author, whose
‘Unwritten Poetry’ and ‘Unwritten Philosophy’ you may remember in my
American book,[2] and who is now understood to be here to publish
his account of England. He is a very elegant young man, and more
like one of the best of our peers’ sons than a rough republican.”
The generally agreeable impression which Willis made in English society
was not without its exceptions. During this same summer in London he had
been taken by a friend to see Miss Harriet Martineau. She was then on the
point of embarking for that trip in America, her very outspoken narrative
of which afterwards caused so many heart-burnings in this country. Her
vinegary reminiscences of Willis, as recorded in her autobiography, though
rather long, are perhaps worth reproducing here, not only for their
liveliness, but because any contemporary impression, however unjust and
mistaken, helps to fill out a complete picture of the man, and there were
plenty of people who disliked Willis cordially.
“I encountered,” she says, “one specimen of American oddity before I
left home, which should certainly have lessened my surprise at any
that I met afterwards. While I was preparing for my travels, an
acquaintance one day brought a buxom gentleman, whom he introduced
to me under the name of Willis. There was something rather engaging
in the round face, brisk air, and _enjouement_ of the young man; but
his conscious dandyism and unparalleled self-complacency spoiled the
satisfaction, though they increased the inclination to laugh. Mr. N.
P. Willis’s plea for coming to see me was his gratification that I
was going to America, and his real reason was presently apparent: a
desire to increase his consequence in London society by giving
apparent proof that he was on intimate terms with every eminent
person in America. He placed himself in an attitude of infinite
ease, and whipped his little bright boot with a little bright cane,
while he ran over the names of all his distinguished countrymen and
countrywomen, and declared he should send me letters to them all.
This offer of intervention went so very far that I said (what I have
ever since said in the case of introductions offered by strangers),
while thanking him for his intended good offices, that I was
sufficiently uncertain in my plans to beg for excuse beforehand, in
case I should find myself unable to use the letters. It appeared
afterwards that to supply them and not to have them used suited Mr.
Willis’s convenience exactly. It made him appear to have the
friendships he boasted of without putting the boast to the proof. It
was immediately before a late dinner that the gentleman called; and
I found on the breakfast-table next morning a great parcel of Mr.
Willis’s letters, inclosed in a prodigious one to myself, in which
he offered advice. Among other things, he desired me not to use his
letter to Dr. Channing if I had others from persons more intimate
with him; and he proceeded to warn me against two friends of Dr. and
Mrs. Channing’s, whose names I had never heard and whom Mr. Willis
represented as bad and dangerous people. This gratuitous defamation
of strangers whom I was likely to meet confirmed the suspicions my
mother and I had confided to each other about the quality of Mr.
Willis’s introductions. It seemed ungrateful to be so suspicious:
but we could not see any good reason for such prodigious efforts on
my behalf, nor for his naming any countrywomen of his to me in a way
so spontaneously slanderous. So I resolved to use that packet of
letters very cautiously, and to begin with one which should be well
accompanied. In New York harbor newspapers were brought on board, in
one of which was an extract from an article transmitted by Mr.
Willis to the ‘New York Mirror,’ containing a most audacious account
of me as an intimate friend of the writer. The friendship was not
stated as a matter of fact, but so conveyed that it cost me much
trouble to make it understood and believed, even by Mr. Willis’s own
family, that I had never seen him but once, and then without having
previously heard so much as his name. On my return the acquaintance
who brought him was anxious to ask pardon if he had done mischief,
events having by that time made Mr. Willis’s ways pretty well known.
His partner in the property and editorship of the ‘New York Mirror’
called on me at West Point, and offered and rendered such
extraordinary courtesy that I was at first almost as much perplexed
as he and his wife were when they learned that I had never seen Mr.
Willis but once. They pondered, they consulted, they
cross-questioned me, they inquired whether _I_ had any notion what
Mr. Willis could have meant by writing of me as in a state of close
intimacy with him. In like manner, when, some time after, I was in a
carriage with some members of a picnic party to Monument Mountain, a
little girl seated at my feet clasped my knees fondly, looked up in
my face, and said, ‘O Miss Martineau! You are _such_ a friend of my
Uncle Nathaniel’s!’ Her father was present; and I tried to get off
without explanation. But it was impossible,--they all knew how very
intimate I was with Nathaniel; and there was a renewal of the
amazement at my having seen him only once. I tried three of his
letters; and the reception was in each case much the same,--a
throwing down of the letter with an air not to be mistaken. In each
case the reply was the same, when I subsequently found myself at
liberty to ask what this might mean. ‘Mr. Willis is not entitled to
write to me: he is no acquaintance of mine.’ As for the two ladies
of whom I was especially to beware, I became exceedingly well
acquainted with them, to my own advantage and pleasure; and, as a
natural consequence, I discovered Mr. Willis’s reasons for desiring
to keep us apart. I hardly need add that I burned the rest of his
letters. He had better have spared himself the trouble of so much
manœuvring, by which he lost a good deal, and could hardly have
gained anything. I have simply stated the facts, because, in the
first place, I do not wish to be considered one of Mr. Willis’s
friends; and, in the next, it may be useful, and conducive to
justice, to show, by a practical instance, what Mr. Willis’s
pretensions to intimacy are worth. His countrymen and countrywomen
accept, in simplicity, his accounts of our aristocracy as from the
pen of one of their own coterie; and they may as well have the
opportunity of judging for themselves whether their notorious
‘Penciller’ is qualified to write of Scotch dukes and English
marquises and European celebrities of all kinds in the way he has
done.”
The simple American reader will have a chance to make up his mind, on
independent evidence, of how far Willis was qualified to write of Scotch
dukes, etc.; but meanwhile it is not true that the audacious article in
the “Mirror” of September 6, 1834 (which was not an “article,” by the way,
but an extract from a private letter to Morris), conveyed any implication
of an intimacy between Willis and Miss Martineau. On the contrary, it
expressly says that his acquaintance with the lady was of only one day’s
standing.
“I was taken yesterday,” it begins, “by the clever translator of
‘Faust’ to see the celebrated Miss Martineau. She has perhaps at
this moment the most general and enviable reputation in England, and
is the only one of the literary _clique_ whose name is mentioned
without some envious qualification.”
After some entirely respectful mention of her manner and appearance, the
letter then goes on to say:--
“There is no necessity of bespeaking for so distinguished a visitor
as Miss Martineau the warmest attentions of our country. She goes
with high anticipations, and whatever she may find to object to in
our society and institutions, it will be done, there cannot be a
doubt, in a spirit of womanly and simple candor. She is sped on her
way by the best wishes of the best hearts in England. I trust she
will be met over there by wishes and welcomes as warm and as many.”
Any one who knew Willis would have felt sure that his “prodigious efforts”
on Miss Martineau’s behalf sprang from his always good-natured and
sometimes even officious eagerness to be of service. And most who knew him
would probably have admitted that there was some mixture of a “desire to
increase his consequence” in his offer of introductions. Motives are
usually mixed in this bad world and Willis was seldom indifferent to
opportunities for ingratiating himself with people worth knowing. But even
so, it would have been more gracious in the lady if, after accepting his
offers and the attentions of his partner at West Point, she had taken his
professions for what they were worth, and omitted this spiteful mention of
him in her book. Had he lived to read the passage, he would probably have
consoled himself with the reflection that it was better to win smiles from
beauty than approbation from a strong-minded Unitarian female with an
ear-trumpet, or, as he politely paraphrased it in his letter to Morris, a
“pliable, acoustic tube.”
The last fortnight in August he was ill of a bilious fever, during which
his new friends proved very kind. Lady Blessington called daily in her
carriage at his lodgings (over the shop of a baker, who gratified Willis
by being overwhelmed at her ladyship’s condescension), and Dr. William
Beattie, the king’s physician, attended his interesting patient devotedly
and refused to take any fee. This excellent gentleman, who was the
anonymous author of “Heliotrope” and a prolific contributor to the
Annuals, became a firm friend of Willis and his correspondent for many
years after his return to America. He was an intimate of Samuel Rogers and
of Thomas Campbell, whose life he afterwards wrote, and he introduced
Willis to both of them.
By September the latter was sufficiently convalescent to be ordered into
the country. He had received an invitation from the Earl of Dalhousie,
whom he had met in Italy, to make him a visit at Dalhousie Castle, near
Edinburgh, and accordingly he set out for Scotland on the second of the
month. Lady Charlotte Bury, a “scribbling woman,” had given him a letter
to her brother, the Duke of Argyle, and he carried a score beside to other
people in Scotland. At Dalhousie, the feudal castle of the Ramsays, nobly
situated on a branch of the Esk, Willis was heartily welcomed, and passed
a most agreeable fortnight. The earl had been governor of the Canadas in
1831; Lady Dalhousie was an invalid, and both of them were quiet, domestic
people, kindly and simple, living with the profuse and even splendid
hospitality proper to their rank, but without ostentation of fashion or
gayety. The house was full of guests, among them the countess’s niece,
Lady Moncrieff, a lovely widow of twenty-five, who was very polite to
Willis during his next winter in London. The earl’s son, Lord Ramsay, was
home from Oxford and initiated Willis into the mysteries of shooting over
the stubble. This young gentleman succeeded to his father’s title in 1838,
was a member of Sir Robert Peel’s ministry from 1843 to 1847, and in the
latter year was made Governor-General of India. It was during his
viceroyalty that the Burmese war was fought, the Punjaub annexed, and the
railway begun from Calcutta to Bombay.
After leaving Dalhousie, Willis spent a few days in Edinburgh, where he
breakfasted with Professor Wilson, dined with Jeffrey, and danced till
three o’clock in the morning at the Whig ball given in honor of Lord Grey.
An attack of scrofula in his left leg, which he chose to describe in his
correspondence with his English friends as “gout,” was aggravated by this
last dissipation, and after two or three days more of poultices and
plasters at Edinburgh, he took steamer to Aberdeen. “The loss of a wedding
in Perthshire, by the way, a week’s deer-shooting in the forest of Athol,
and a week’s fishing with a noble friend at Kinvara (long standing
engagements all), I lay at the door of the Whigs.” He was laid up four
days at Aberdeen, but finally recovered so far as to take coach seventy
miles across country to Lochabers, a small town on the estates of the Duke
of Gordon, to whom he brought a letter from Dalhousie. At Gordon Castle he
found a distinguished company and passed ten days of unmixed enjoyment.
There were thirty guests, among whom were Lord Aberdeen, who had been
foreign secretary under Wellington; his son, Lord Claude Hamilton, a
handsome young Cantab, who invited Willis to visit him at the university
for a day’s hunt; Lord Aberdeen’s daughter, Lady Harriet Hamilton,
“eighteen and brilliantly beautiful;” Lord and Lady Stormont, Lord
Mandeville, Lord and Lady Morton, the Duchess of Richmond and her
daughter, Lady Sophia Lennox, “the palest, proudest, and most high-born
looking woman I ever saw.” This Lady Sophia Lennox was probably the
original of Mildred Ashly, the disdainful beauty in “Paul Fane.” She seems
to have impressed Willis as the type and embodiment of English
aristocracy. In a letter to Lady Blessington, written from Gordon Castle
and printed in Madden’s “Life of Lady Blessington,” he says, “There is a
Lady Something, very pale, tall and haughty, twenty-three and sarcastic,
whom I sat next at dinner yesterday,--a woman I came as near an antipathy
for as is possible, with a very handsome face for an apology.” The same
letter gives his opinion of his host and hostess more unreservedly than he
could venture to do in “Pencillings.” The duke he describes as “a
delightful, hearty old fellow full of fun and conversation.” Willis’s
letters from Gordon Castle were perhaps more criticised than any other
part of his “Pencillings” for their alleged violation of the sanctities of
private life. They are, nevertheless, among the very best passages in his
correspondence and, taken together, they present a brilliant picture of
what is, doubtless, so far as material conditions go, the most perfect
life lived by man; the life, namely, of a chosen party of guests, in late
September, at the country seat of a great British noble.
From this pleasant province in the land of Cockayne, Willis departed
toward the last of the month and, after a tour of the Highlands, returned
October 6th to Dalhousie, where he passed a few days more and then set out
for England. He had meant, on his way back to London, to call upon
Wordsworth and Surrey, having letters to both of them, and to pass some
days by appointment with Miss Mitford at Reading. But continued trouble
with his ankle altered his plans, and, after spending a few weeks at the
country house of a friend in Lancashire--whose acquaintance he had made
in Italy--and of another in Cheshire, he returned hastily to London by way
of Liverpool and Manchester, and on the 1st of November took up his
quarters there for the winter. At this stage of his journeyings
“Pencilling by the Way” come to an end. A number of supplementary letters
descriptive of London life, of the Isle of Wight, of Stratford-upon-Avon,
Charlecote, Kenilworth, Warwick Castle, etc., were published at irregular
intervals in the “Mirror” under the general heading “Loiterings of
Travel.” With letters from Washington and the paper on “The Four Rivers,”
they make up the “Sketches of Travel” in their author’s collected works.