CHAPTER V.

1834-1836.

LIFE ABROAD (CONTINUED).

Willis took lodgings at No. 2 Vigo Street. During the next ten months,

which he spent in London and its vicinity, he found himself something of a

lion. His articles in the English magazines had begun to be talked about

in the clubs, and society people who had known him abroad or in London

only as a dandy _attaché_ were surprised to learn that “that nice,

agreeable Mr. Willis” was identical with “Slingsby,” the brilliant

American _raconteur_ of the “New Monthly.” He had contributed in the

summer and autumn of 1834 a number of sketches--“By a Here and

Thereian”--to the “Court Magazine:” “Love and Diplomacy,” “Niagara and So

On;” to Captain Marryat’s “Metropolitan:” an episode of Italian travel,

“The Madhouse of Palermo;” and to Colburn’s “New Monthly:” “Incidents on

the Hudson,” “Tom Fane and I,” “Pedlar Karl,” “The Lunatic,” and “My

Hobby--Rather” (the same as “The Mad Senior” in “Scenes of Fear”). The

_nom de plume_ of Philip Slingsby he borrowed from the luckless wanderer

in Irving’s “Sketch-Book.” He followed these up during 1835-36 with “F.

Smith,” “Love in the Library” (“Edith Linsey”), “The Gypsy of Sardis,”

“The Cherokee’s Threat,” “The Revenge of the Signor Basil,” and “Larks in

Vacation.” For his “Slingsby” papers Willis got double pay: Colburn gave

him a guinea a page, and Morris, in his contract with whom he had reserved

the right to print twelve sketches a year in the English magazines,

published them simultaneously in the “Mirror,” and paid for them at the

same rate as for original articles. They were forwarded to him in

proof-sheets or in duplicate MSS., so as to arrive in advance of the

English periodicals, which sometimes, however, reached America first,

because of the uncertainties of the mail-carriage by sailing packet. To

the “New Monthly” Willis also contributed a number of short poems,

“Thoughts in a Balcony at Daybreak,” “The Absent,” “Chamber Scene,” and

“To ----” (“Were I a star,” etc.). He wrote for it after his return to

America and after it was united with “The Humorist” in 1837, under the

editorship of Theodore Hook. His last contribution to it was “The Picker

and Piler,” in the April number for 1839.

Lady Blessington’s kindness continued after his return to London, and he

was taken up by other fashionable bluestockings, dined and wined, fêted

and caressed to a degree that may well have made him giddy. The two rival

_salons_ to Lady Blessington’s were Holland House and the residence of the

Dowager Lady Charleville in Cavendish Square. It does not appear that

Willis was invited to the former, but he went to the reunions at

Charleville House, though not so constantly as to Seamore Place. Through

Lady Blessington’s influence he was admitted to the Travellers’ Club,

which was the resort of the ultra fashionable; and, on Sir George

Staunton’s nomination, to the Athenæum, which had more of a literary tinge

than the Alfred or the Travellers’. Sir George Staunton also presented him

at court, a favor which Mr. Vail, the American minister, who disliked

Willis for some reason, had declined to render. Another friend gave him a

perpetual ticket to the opera. Among his patronesses were the Countess of

Arundel and Lady Stepney, who wrote bad novels but gave good dinners. Lady

Blessington’s biographer, Madden, who saw a great deal of him in those

days, has recorded his recollections of him as follows:--

“I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Willis on many occasions at Gore

House, to which reference is made in the rather too celebrated

‘Pencillings by the Way,’ and also at the _soirées_ of the late Lady

Charleville in Cavendish Square. Mr. Willis was an extremely

agreeable young man in society, somewhat overdressed and a little

too _demonstratif_, but abounding in good spirits, pleasing

reminiscences of Eastern and Continental travel and of his residence

there for some time as _attaché_ to a foreign legation. He was

observant and communicative, lively and clever in conversation,

having the peculiar art of making himself agreeable to ladies, old

as well as young, _dégagé_ in his manner, and on exceedingly good

terms with himself and with the _élite_ of the best society,

wherever he went.”

The secret of Willis’s agreeableness to ladies lay in his unfailing

deference. It is extraordinary how many women much older than himself

cherished a warm affection for him. He had considered the meaning of

Bacon’s saying, “No Youth can be comely, but by Pardon,” and several of

his stories are studies on the thesis that there is a beauty in age which

may inspire passion. One in particular, not found among his collected

writings, deals with this speculation: “Poyntz’s Aunt,” published in “The

Ladies’ Companion” of December, 1842, where the hero falls violently in

love with a woman of sixty, to whose niece the family expected him to pay

his court.

Willis saw more “life” in London than was quite good for him, and went

into companies which were less select than the Gore House coterie,

although, to say truth, Lady Blessington herself was looked upon by “the

best people” as a trifle off color. Her house was frequented by men who

were entirely irreproachable, but the English ladies were shy of visiting

there. This was due mainly to her rather unusual relations with the Count

d’Orsay. In obedience to the wishes of the Earl of Blessington, his

daughter by a former marriage had been compelled to wed the count under

penalty of forfeiting her inheritance. The poor girl reluctantly espoused

the brilliant stranger provided for her by her father’s eccentric caprice;

but the match was unhappy, and was almost immediately followed by a

separation; notwithstanding which, D’Orsay continued to live in the

closest intimacy with his wife’s stepmother after the earl’s death, and in

time under the same roof with her. This last arrangement, which was, to

say the least, odd, and caused much scandal in British society, had not,

however, gone into effect when Willis first came to London. Lady

Blessington had not as yet moved to Gore House, but was living in Seamore

Place, while D’Orsay had lodgings in Curzon Street. Nor did the latter’s

formal separation from his wife take place till 1838. Another intimate

friend of Willis in London was that very unconventional, not to say rapid,

woman, Lady Dudley Stuart, the daughter of Lucien Bonaparte, “a lady of

remarkably small person, with the fairest foot ever seen,” under whose

bonnet “burn the most lambent and spiritual eyes that night and sleep ever

hid from the world.” She had about her a semi-foreign society, not without

its fascinations, of artists, actors, opera-singers, refugee nobles, and

adventurers of more or less shady antecedents. In his “Sketches of Travel”

Willis described a very free and easy supper party, following a private

concert given by Lady Antrobus, at which he and Lady Dudley Stuart

assisted, together with Grisi, Lablache, Rubini, and other members of the

Italian opera troupe then in London. Of course neither Lady Antrobus nor

Lady Stuart was mentioned by name in this account.

But Willis’s acquaintance was by no means confined to the Blessington set,

or to the Bohemian circle that surrounded Lady Dudley Stuart, but included

many families of unquestioned position. The Ramsays, for instance, were

solid people, above any suspicion of queerness, and the earl’s niece, Lady

Moncrieff, whom Willis visited in London, was decidedly “evangelical.”

There were two households in particular which were like homes to him

during the last year and more of his stay in England. These were Shirley

Park, near Croydon in Surrey, the residence of the Skinner family, and the

Manor House of the Shaws at Lee, in Kent, only a ten miles’ drive across

country from Shirley Park. The Hon. Mrs. Fanny Shaw was a daughter to Lord

Erskine and a sworn friend of Willis. Mrs. Mary Skinner was wife to an

Indian nabob, a leader of fashion, and a woman of intellectual tastes, who

patronized letters and entertained literary people, a kind of Mrs. Leo

Hunter, in short. Willis was introduced to her at Lady Simpkins’s by Sir

John Franklin, in February, 1835, and met her again at a dinner given by

Longman, the publisher, at Hampstead, where were present, among others,

Moore, Joanna Baillie, Jane Porter, and Miss Pardoe. The last was a very

pretty woman, author of “Beauties of the Bosphorus,” and other books more

remarkable for their sumptuous illustrations than for their literary

quality. She was a poetess, too, after her fashion, and once addressed a

tribute in verse “To the Author of Melanie,” which was printed in the

“Mirror” of October 17, 1835. Both Mrs. Shaw and Mrs. Skinner treated

their young guest with the most delicate and considerate kindness. They

made him offers of pecuniary help, of which, fortunately, he had no need

to avail himself, as his letters to the “Mirror” and his “New Monthly”

stories (which added fifteen or twenty guineas a month to his “poor two

hundred a year”) brought him in returns which were ample for his

occasions. The Skinners had a town house in Portland Place, and their

carriage in London was always at Willis’s service. Both of these ladies

regarded him as a son or a younger brother. Bruce Skinner, a son of

Willis’s hostess, named one of his children after him. At Shirley Park and

at the Shaws’ he met a number of very charming people, and his time there

was spent in drives, lawn-parties, etc. In the library at Shirley Park two

nieces of Walter Scott, the Misses Swinton, copied for him “Melanie” and

“Love in the Library,” which he was preparing for the press. An extract

from a very confidential letter from Willis to Mrs. Skinner may be worth

transcribing, to show the terms of frank and cordial familiarity on which

he lived with these excellent people. After a brief history of his life

and a statement of his financial situation, the letter concludes as

follows:--

“There is a passage in your note which pleased me. You say if you

had a daughter you would give her to me. If you _had_ one I

certainly would take you at your word, provided this _exposé_ of my

poverty did not change your fancy. I should like to marry in

England, and I feel every day (more and more) that my best years

and best affections are running to waste. I am proud to _be_ an

American, but as a literary man, I would rather live in England. So

if you know any affectionate and _good_ girl who would be content to

live rather a quiet life, and could love your humble servant, you

have full power of attorney to dispose of me, _provided_ she has

_five hundred_ a year, or as much more as she likes. I know enough

of the world to cut my throat sooner than bring a delicate woman

down to a dependence on my brains for support, though in a case of

exigency I could always retreat to America, and live comfortably by

my labors. Meantime I am the only sufferer by my poverty, and am

_not_ poor, for no man is so who lives upon his income.

_Comprends-tu?_ My dear friend, I have told you what I have told no

other person in the world. Most men and women would think it

incredible that an _attaché_ to a legation could keep up appearances

on two hundred a year, or pity him if he could; and I never thought

anybody worth the confidence--save only yourself. I would tell Miss

Porter just the same, or Mr. Swinton, but who else? No one! so

_gardez cela_!

“I enjoyed the ball at the Ravenshaws’ exceedingly, and am so much

obliged to you for introducing me to Praed, whom I like.”

“I have one or two homes in England,” wrote Willis to his mother,

July 22, 1835, “where I am loved like a child. I had a letter the

other day from Honorable Mrs. Shaw, who fancied I looked

low-spirited at the opera. ‘Young men have but two causes of

unhappiness,’ she says, ‘_love_ and _money_. If it is money, Mr.

Shaw wishes me to say, you shall have as much as you want; if it is

_love_, tell us the lady, and perhaps we can help you.’ Where could

be kinder friends? I spend my Sundays alternately at their splendid

country house and Mrs. Skinner’s, and they never can get enough of

me. I have a room always kept for me at both places, and there is

universal rejoicing when I come and mourning when I go. I am often

asked whether I carry a love philter with me; yet with all the

uncommon honors and favors shown me in England, I assure you I never

asked or made interest directly or indirectly for any acquaintance

or any favor since I landed at Dover. _What has come_ has come of

its own accord.”

Miss Porter and Miss Pardoe were both domesticated at Shirley Park, and he

met there at different times, as fellow guests, Lady Franklin, Lady Sidney

Morgan, author of once popular French and Italian travels, and the

brilliant young orator, poet, and wit, Winthrop Mackworth Praed. Of the

latter Willis wrote in the “Home Journal” many years later: “We were

followers together in the train of the admired belle (a visitor under the

same hospitable roof) whom I afterward brought home with me to Glenmary.”

Willis attributed to his religious poetry the honor of his first

acquaintance with Joanna Baillie, Jane Porter, and the Byrons. For the

authoress of “The Scottish Chiefs,” especially, he formed an enduring

attachment, and she regarded him with an almost motherly affection. A

lifelong correspondence was kept up between them, and at the death of

Admiral Robert Ker Porter at St. Petersburg in 1842, among the MSS. found

in his sea-chests were ninety letters from Willis to his sister. The

letters from Miss Porter, among Willis’s private papers, show that she was

an equally indefatigable, through a not very legible correspondent. Willis

encountered Ada Byron at an evening party in London, and thought her

“earnest and sweet.” Lady Byron, who was a Unitarian, was much interested

by the spirited sketch of Dr. Channing in a series of papers on American

literature which Willis had contributed to the “Athenæum,” and she

expressed her favorable opinion of them in a letter to Miss Baillie, as

also her pleasure that her daughter had made the author’s acquaintance.

Miss Baillie gave this note to Willis for his autograph book. Byron’s

sister, Augusta Leigh, he also met in London society. She gave him an

autograph letter of Byron, and on the appearance of “Melanie and Other

Poems,” in March 1835, he sent her a copy, and received an acknowledgment

in which she said that the book contained “some of the most touching and

exquisite lines I ever read.” The venerable Joanna Baillie wrote him, on

the same occasion, a letter filled with the most graceful compliments.

Among other London acquaintances of Willis’s at this time were John Leech,

the artist, and Martin Farquhar Tupper, the proverbial philosopher, who

afterwards visited him in America. A few extracts from a manuscript diary

irregularly kept by Willis from June, 1835, to March, 1836, will serve to

show the nature of his daily engagements and occupations:--

“June 30. Breakfasted with Samuel Rogers. Met Dr. Delancey, of

Philadelphia, and Corbin, _ditto_. Talked of Mrs. Butler’s book, and

Rogers gave us suppressed passages. Talked of critics, and said that

‘as long as you cast a shadow, you were sure you possessed

_substance_.’ Coleridge said of Southey: ‘I never think of him but

as mending a pen.’ Southey said of Coleridge: ‘Whenever anything

presents itself to him in the shape of a duty, that moment he finds

himself incapable of looking at it.’

“Went to the opera with Hon. Mrs. Shaw and heard Grisi in ‘I

Puritani,’ and saw Taglioni: both divine. Visited Lady Blessington’s

box and Lady Vincent.

“After to a party at Mrs. Leicester Stanhope’s. Saw Guiccioli, and

was stuffed to the eyelids by Lady Mary Shepard about my shorter and

scriptural poems.

“July 1. Mrs. Skinner drove Jane Porter and myself to Harrow to hear

the speeches.…

“In the evening to a party at Lady Cork’s, and after to Lady

Vincent’s _soirée_.”

Lady Cork was the aged but still beautiful Dowager Countess of Cork and

Derry; who in her youth, as Miss Moncton, had been a favorite of Dr.

Johnson, and whose _soirées_ in New Burlington Street, between 1820 and

1840, were crowded with talent and fashion.

“2. Sat to Rand for my picture. Went to Lady Dundonald’s _fête

champêtre_ at her beautiful villa in Regent’s Park. D’Orsay and all

the world there.

“3. Dined with Tyndale and Greenfield at the Wyndham Club. Took tea

with Jane Porter and went to a ball at the Longmans’, Hampstead.

“4. Went to Lee on a visit to Hon. Mrs. Shaw.

“5. Drove to Lady Hislop’s to tea.

“6. Duke de Regina, Vail, Gen. and Mrs. Talmadge dined with the

Shaws.

“7. Returned to town. Dined with Mrs. Channon. Lady D. Stuart,

Counts Battaglia, Vodiski, De Grognon, and Miss Cockaine present.

Came home ill.

“8. Dined with Mrs. S., and went to Lady Dudley Stuart’s _soirée_.

“9. Dined with Dr. Beattie and met Thomas Campbell. Praised my

poetry to the skies and quoted from ‘Melanie,’--

‘She died

With her last sunshine in her eyes.’

Spoke of Scott’s slavishness to men of rank, and after said it did

not interfere with his genius. Said it sank a man’s heart to think

he and Byron were dead and there was nobody left to praise or

approve. Why should he write now? Told story of the man at the deaf

and dumb who did not know him as a poet. Abused the nobility

bitterly. Said they were ungrateful, and thought they honored you by

receiving a favor from you. Said he was sorry for his vindication of

Lady Byron. Story of dining with Burns and a Bozzy friend who, when

C. proposed the health of _Mr._ Burns, said, ‘Sir, you will always

be known as _Mr._ Campbell, but posterity will talk of _Burns_.’ He

was playful and amusing, and drank gin and water. Went after in

uniform to the grand Coliseum ball. Seven thousand people present.

“10. Grand review in Hyde Park. Went to a _déjeuner_ at Mrs. Wyndham

Lewis’s on the Park. Talked to Miss Caton and the Duchess of St.

Albans. Music after the review. Malibran sang.

“Received a congratulatory letter from Edward Everett.

“Party at Mrs. F.’s, Lady Franklin’s sister. Stupid.

“11. Went to the Duchess St. Albans’s _fête_ at Holly Lodge. The

duke flew a falcon and killed a pigeon. Fireworks, dinner in a tent,

dancing, singing, etc., etc., there. Mrs. Marjoribanks brought me

home.”

This _fête_ furnished some items for Willis’s story of “Lady Ravelgold.”

“12. Dined with Mrs. Joanna Baillie at Hampstead. She gave me some

of the wedding cake of Ada Byron. Said that her husband, Lord King,

was hated by his own father and mother and often in want of money,

but an excellent person and beloved by his own second brother, who

had received from the father all that was not entailed. On the death

of the father, Lord K. had nine thousand a year. Mrs. Baillie said

that Lady Byron had given to the present Lord B. her whole jointure

when he came to the title.

“Went to Lady Blessington at ten, and had a long talk with Countess

Guiccioli, who said she wished nevermore to be spoken of in good or

ill. The evil was remembered and the good forgotten. She made a

point of never reading the papers.

“Thence to Charles Kemble’s _soirée_. Countess d’Orsay there.”

And thus the journal proceeds with its daily count of dinners, balls,

_soirées_, garden parties, and opera-going, the diarist finally recording

himself as “fatigued to death with dinners and dissipations.” In fact the

pace began to tell upon him. Following the last entry that I have copied

here, for July 12th, comes the first draft of a poem, “Thoughts on the

Balcony of Devonshire House at Sunrise after a Splendid Ball:”

“Morn in the East! How coldly fair

It breaks upon my fevered eye!

How chides the calm and dewy air;

How chides the pure and pearly sky!

The stars melt in a brighter fire,--

The dew in sunshine leaves the flowers,--

They from their watch in light retire,

While we in sadness pass from ours.”

This is one of Willis’s most genuine utterances. The same revulsion of

feeling is expressed in “Better Moments” and “She was not There.” There

were two men in him, the worldling and the poet; and when worn with

fashionable dissipation he was sensitive to the rebuke of the midnight

heaven or of that “awful rose of dawn” which God makes for himself in the

“Vision of Sin.” But the mood, though sincere, was not lasting. “Recovered

my spirits,” runs the entry for July 15th, “after a causeless depression

for a week.”

Toward the end of July he escaped to the country and “passed a month at

Shirley Park and the Manor, Lee, alternately reading and lying on the

grass in delightful idleness, with the kindest friends and the greatest

contentment.” At Shirley Park there were archery _fêtes_, the

Archbishopess of Canterbury, “lords and ladies in abundance, and poets and

travelers _ad libitum_. It is midsummer,” continues the letter from which

I quote (August 5th), “in cool and breezy England, five o’clock in the

afternoon, and a beautiful day. The house is in the middle of a park

(nothing but grass and trees) as large as the Common in Boston, the soft

velvet greensward closely shaven all around the house, and a lovely

archery ground on the edge of the lake just beneath my window, with red

and gold targets, and a dozen young girls and beaux with beautiful bows

and quivers shooting with all the merriment conceivable. There is a

beautiful daughter of Sir Henry Brydges beating everybody, and my friend

Mrs. Shaw, and Lady Encombe, and quantities of nice people.”

At Shirley Park he had a letter from Jane Porter, inclosing an invitation

to him from Sir Charles Throckmorton, a Catholic gentleman in

Warwickshire, at whose country seat she was staying. Willis joined her

there on September 10th, but meanwhile something else of great importance

to him had happened. While visiting at the Skinners’ he had met his fate

in the person of Miss Mary Stace, a daughter of General William Stace of

Woolwich. He saw her first at a picnic on the grounds of Lord Londonderry,

at North Cray, and “thought her the loveliest girl he had ever seen.” At

Shirley Park--whither she came as a guest--he was thrown much in her

company, and after a week’s acquaintance made her a proposal of marriage,

and was accepted. On the 1st of September he went to Woolwich on a visit

to the Staces, and in the course of a day or two asked the general for his

daughter’s hand. It was agreed that the engagement should be short, like

the courtship, and that the wedding should come off on the 1st of

October. Mary Stace, who became Mrs. Willis on the day fixed, was a girl

of uncommon beauty and sweetness. In appearance she was of the purest

Saxon type, a blonde, with bright color, blue eyes, light brown hair, and

delicate, regular features. She had a gentle, clinging, affectionate

disposition, adored her husband, had been religiously and carefully

educated, and possessed the true Englishwoman’s sense of the importance of

the male sex and the due subordination of woman. Her family were most

worthy and substantial people, and strictly evangelical. General Stace was

the Royal Ordnance Storekeeper at Woolwich Arsenal. He had been commissary

to the British navy in Egypt, and commissary of ordnance at the battle of

Waterloo, and had been rewarded for gallant service in that famous action.

He gave Willis, as a souvenir, a military cloak and an eagle clasp taken

from the body of a French officer after the battle, which are still

preserved in the family. His son-in-law described him as honest, hearty,

and plain-spoken, with the common soldierly weakness for telling

post-prandial stories of his campaigns. Mrs. Stace was Irish, a great

singer, and a friend of Tom Moore, who used to listen to her songs by the

hour. There were five other children besides Mary. Two of the sons were

in the army, and afterwards there were three Colonels Stace. The general

agreed to give his daughter £300 a year, which, with the £300 or £400

which Willis counted upon making by literary work, would do, wrote the

latter to Mrs. Skinner, for a poet. Having completed the arrangements for

his marriage, he set out from London, September 10th, by the Tantivy coach

for Sir Charles Throckmorton’s seat of Coughton Court. This was a fine old

Elizabethan mansion near Alcester, and Willis spent ten days there very

agreeably, visiting, in company with Miss Porter and his host, Warwick

Castle, Kenilworth, Stratford, and other points of interest in the

neighborhood. Of these jaunts an ample narrative is given in “Sketches of

Travel,” originally communicated to the “Mirror.” Thence he returned to

Woolwich, receiving on his departure an invitation from the hospitable

baronet to bring his wife and stay a fortnight with him. At Woolwich he

was again joined by Miss Porter, on the 25th, who came for a week’s visit

to the Staces and to be present at the wedding. From Coughton Court the

expectant groom had written to his friends announcing his engagement, and

received in reply many expressions of good wishes. Among others, Lady

Blessington wrote as follows:--

ANGLESEY-NEAR-GOSPORT, _September 19, 1835_.

MY DEAR MR. WILLIS,--Yours of the 16th has been forwarded to me

here, and I lose not an hour in replying to it. I congratulate you

with my whole heart on your approaching marriage, and wish you all

the happiness you so well deserve, and which a marriage well

assorted will alone bestow. I predict the happiness I wish you, for

you would not, I am sure, make an unworthy choice, and the distaste

which the scenes you have gone through during the last year must

have engendered in your mind will have taught you still more highly

to appreciate the society and affection of a pure-minded and amiable

woman, on whom your future happiness will depend. I think you have

acted most wisely, and am sure that the rational plans you have laid

down will insure your felicity. A residence _near_ London, which

gives you the opportunity of enjoying its numerous advantages,

without weakening your mind by a too frequent contact with its

dissipations, is, of all others, the one I would select for a

literary man, and I shall look forward with pleasure to seeing you

at Seamore Place in your new and more respectable character of a

Domestic Man, which, be assured, will bestow more happiness on you

than all the futile successes ever acquired in the heartless maze of

fashion and folly, in whose vortex you have been whirled during so

many months. A Man of Genius is out of his natural sphere in such a

circle; he loses his identity and blunts the fine edge of his

sensibility. You have retired in time, and will, I am persuaded,

have reason to bless the gentle and benign influence that has

attracted you from it to the pure and healthy atmosphere of domestic

life. Be assured, my dear Mr. Willis, that out of the circle of your

immediate family you have no friend more truly interested in your

welfare or more anxious to promote it than I am, of which no proof

in my power shall ever be wanting. I shall be in London on the 22d,

and shall have great pleasure in seeing you. Your secret shall be

safe with me, you may be sure. I hope the little tale will be sent

for your correction in a day or two. Pray have “Ion” left at my

house. Mr. Talfourd requested that it might not leave my possession,

so that in lending it to you I disobeyed his request.

The old Earl of Dalhousie wrote a letter of hearty congratulation.

“Wherever you go or sit down at last,” it said, “think of us as

being with you in our minds’ eye at least, and if it shall please

God that, in the course of time, we ever meet again, it will be

truly a day of joy here, for from hence I move no more.”

His son, the young Lord Ramsay, had jestingly promised to be Willis’s

groomsman some day at Niagara, and the former now reminded him of it, and

asked him to stand up with him, and Ramsay sent the following excuses some

three weeks after the wedding:--

YESTER, _October 23, 1835_.

I promised to play my part as best man, my dear Willis, at

_Niagara_, and to have descended from that to Woolwich would have

been a sad _bathos_, so that it was perhaps as well that your notice

was too short to allow of the possibility of my being with you

before the 1st of October. Still I can congratulate you as well at a

distance as with my own lips, and though the romance which we

proposed for ourselves is gone, I am very happy to congratulate you

on the prose reality.

I had written all this to you three weeks ago, and directed my frank

to the Athenæum Club, a place which I took it into my head you

frequented, when, this morning, the letter was returned by the

porter with a “_non est inventus_” written on it. This to save my

character.

Furthermore, your example was so good an one, and, fortunately, so

_contagious_, that I have fallen a victim, and am going to be

married, and as this is _not_ a lady’s letter, it will be as well

not to keep the most important part of the intelligence for the

postscript, but to tell you at once that it is to Lady Susan Hay. If

I were to dash out into a rhapsody you, whose experience of such a

situation is of so recent a date, might easily forgive me, but I

will take mercy even on you. I am happy,--happy now, and if I am not

happy always in time to come, Heaven knows how utterly it will be my

own fault.

When next summer brings visiting time we shall meet, I trust, in

Scotland, and exchange at once news, visits, and congratulations.

May I beg, even though a stranger, my compliments to Mrs. Willis,

and believe me

Ever yours sincerely,

RAMSAY.

Mrs. Skinner wrote, in a letter to Jane Porter:--

“Mary Stace is a sweet, gentle, affectionate, lively girl,--natural,

so that you may see at once there is no deceit in her and no guile.

She is religious, accomplished, sings sweetly, is pretty, and will

make Willis more happy than any other woman I know. He will have no

heart-burnings, no misgivings with her, for she is true and sincere.

You will love her. She was so religious, good, and depend-on-able

that I told her she should be my daughter-in-law.”

In his letters to his folks at home announcing his betrothal, Willis

insisted a good deal on this point of his _fiancée’s_ religiousness, and

he evidently shared the belief commonly held and proclaimed among men of

the world, that religion, like a low voice, is an excellent thing--in

woman; a theory which some women resent as a covert insult to their

understandings, and some men as an open insult to their religion, and

which may be described as the converse of the proposition that a reformed

rake makes the best husband.

“I should never have wished to marry you,” he wrote to his

betrothed, about a fortnight before the wedding, “if you had not

been religious, for I have confidence in no woman who is not so. I

only think there is sometimes an excess in the ostentation of

religious sanctity, and of that I have a dread, as you have

yourself, no doubt. Miss Porter,” he adds, “is sincere and _refined_

as few professedly religious people are.”

In another letter he says:--

“Mine is not a love such as I have fancied and written about. It is

more sober, more mingled with esteem and respect, and more fitted

for every-day life. It had well need be, indeed, for I have taken it

in lieu of what has hitherto been the principal occupation of my

life. I am to live for you, dear Mary, and you for me,--if you like!

That is to say, henceforth dissipation (if we indulge in it) will be

_your_ pleasure, not mine. I have lived the last ten years in gay

society, and I am sick at heart of it. I want an apology to try

something else. I am made for something better, and I feel sincerely

that this is the turning-point of both mind and heart, both of which

are injured in their best qualities with the kind of life I have

been leading. Do not understand me that I am to make a hermit of

myself, however, or a prisoner of you. You will have always friends

enough, and society enough, and change of place and scene enough. In

short, I shall exact but one thing,--four or five hours in my study

in the morning, and you may do what you like with the rest.”

They were married in Plumstead Church, by the Rev. Mr. Shackleton, on the

1st of October. “It was a kind of April day,” writes Willis, “half

sunshine, half rain,”--recalling, somehow, the coincidence in Julia

Mills’s diary between the checker-board tavern-sign and checkered human

existence on a similar occasion in David Copperfield’s life,--“but

everybody was kind, the villagers strewed flowers in the way, the church

was half full of people, and my heart and eyes were more than full of

tears.” The bridal pair were driven in Mr. Stace’s carriage to Rochester,

posted next day to Dover, and crossed the Channel on the 3d. They passed a

fortnight at the Hôtel Castiglione in Paris, and then returned to England,

where they spent the winter, partly in London and partly at Woolwich, and

in visits to the Shaws, Skinners, and other friends. Willis was busy in

getting out the first and second English editions of “Pencillings” and the

“Inklings of Adventure.” He presented his bride to his “swell”

acquaintances in London, and was himself introduced by his brothers-in-law

to numbers of military people, dined at the Artillery Mess, and was given

the freedom of the Army and Navy Club. He set up an “establishment,” a

cabriolet and a gray cab-horse, “tall, showy, and magnificent.” He had

taken into service a young fellow named William Michell, the son of his

landlady, a bright and handsome lad, who now made a very presentable

tiger. William went to America with his master in the spring, remained in

his service during his residence at Glenmary, and came back with him, in

1839, to England, where he ultimately got employment as a machinist,

having a good education and a knack at mechanics.

In May, 1836, after many leave-takings, Willis sailed with his wife for

America. His “Lines on Leaving Europe,”--

“Bright flag at yonder tapering mast,”--

dated in the English Channel, express the feelings at once of regret and

of hope with which he set his face homeward after an absence of four years

and a half. These spirited lines are among the very few poems of Willis

which seem destined to last. They have the real lyrical impulse, and it is

not easy to read them without emotion. Emerson, who gives part of the poem

in “Parnassus,” omits the closing stanza, in which the poet touchingly

bespeaks a welcome for his English bride.

“Room in thy heart! The hearth she left

Is darkened to lend light to ours.

There are bright flowers of care bereft,

And hearts--that languish more than flowers.

She was their light--their very air;

Room, mother, in thy heart! place for her in thy prayer!”

Willis published three books while in England. “Melanie and Other Poems”

appeared March 31, 1835. It was divided into three parts and included a

selection from the three volumes of verse published in America, but

unfamiliar to the British public, besides some half dozen new poems,

dated, said the author, in his prefatory note, from “the corner of a club

[the Travellers’] in the ungenial month of January.” It was introduced by

Barry Cornwall, who speaks of the poet as “a man of high talent and

sensibility,” and then goes on with some reflections of a friendly nature

on American literature and the desirableness of cultivating kinder

feelings between England and America. Wilson, who reviewed “Melanie” very

favorably in “Blackwood’s,” made Procter’s introduction to it the theme of

much elaborate ridicule, in the well-known style of “Maga,” when rending a

cockney author. He affected to have gathered an impression from the

title-page,--which described the poems as “edited” by Barry

Cornwall,--that Willis was dead, and that Procter was performing the

office of literary undertaker for “poor Willis’s remains.” “Alas! thought

we, on reading this title-page; is Willis dead? Then America has lost one

of the most promising of her young poets. We had seen him not many months

before in high health and spirits and had much enjoyed his various and

vivacious conversation.… But why weep for him, the accomplished

acquaintance of an hour?” He goes out on the street and tells the first

friend he meets that Willis is dead. “Impossible,” answers the friend;

“day before yesterday he was sitting very much alive in the Athenæum Club:

here is a letter from him franked Mahon,” etc. Another Scotch

professor--Aytoun--who belonged, like Wilson, to the Tory light artillery,

was moved to write a parody of “Melanie.” The same humorist also paid his

respects to Willis in one of his “Ballads of Bon Gaultier,”--a strenuous

piece of North British playfulness, in which Willis and Bryant are

represented as sallying forth like knights errant on the Quest of the

Snapping Turtle:--

“Have you heard of Philip Slingsby--

Slingsby of the manly chest?

How he slew the snapping turtle

In the regions of the west?”

The two longest and most ambitious poems in this volume were “Melanie” and

“Lord Ivon and his Daughter.” The first is the story “told during a walk

around the cascatelles of Tivoli,” of an English girl, “the last of the De

Brevern race,” who betroths herself in Italy to a young painter of unknown

parentage; but at their bridal at St. Mona’s altar a nun shrieks through

the lattice of the chapel:--

“The bridegroom is thy blood--thy brother!

Rudolph de Brevern wronged his mother,”

and the bride thereupon “sunk and died, without a sign or word.” The

stanza and style are taken from Byron’s and Scott’s metrical romances. The

very first line--

“I stood on yonder rocky brow”--

is a reminiscence of “The Isles of Greece.” The second poem, which is

equally melodramatic in its catastrophe, is in blank verse and in the form

of a dialogue between the Lady Isidore and her father, Lord Ivon. He tells

his daughter (with a few interruptions from her, such as “Impossible!” and

“Nay, dear father! Was’t so indeed?”) how he had in vain wooed her

grandmother with minstrelsy and feats of arms, and then her mother more

successfully with gold: marrying whom, he had begotten Isidore, and

afterwards, in remorse for having dragged his young bride to the altar,

had been on the point of draining a poisoned chalice, when she had

anticipated him by running away with a younger lover, leaving to his care

the babe, now grown to a woman, who dutifully concludes the dialogue with,

“Thank God! Thank God!” Both of these poems were imitative and artificial,

and the last not a little absurd. Willis had no genius for narrative or

dramatic poetry, and when he tried to be impersonal and “objective,” he

wrought against the grain. The lyrical pieces in the book were almost all

of them graceful and sweet. He himself thought that the best thing in the

volume was “Birth-Day Verses,” addressed to his mother on January 20,

1835. Similar in theme were the lines, “To my Mother, from the Apennines,”

written at an _auberge_ on the mountains, August 3, 1832. The verses to

Mary Benjamin, written in Scotland in September, 1834, have been already

mentioned. They stand in his collected poems as “To M----, from Abroad,”

and were also incorporated in “Edith Linsey,” under the title “To Edith,

from the North.” “The Confessional,” dated Hellespont, October 1, 1833,

was also meant for Mary Benjamin. This and “Florence Gray” had the note of

travel. But a Boston poem, “The Belfry Pigeon,” was the most popular of

anything in the book and has retained a place in readers and collections

to the present day. These shorter pieces, like all of Willis’s truest

poetry, were purely poems of sentiment. His description, in “Edith

Linsey,” of Job Smith’s verses as “the mixed product of feeling and

courtesy” applies consciously to his own. They were “the delicate

offspring of tenderness and chivalry,” airy, facile, smooth, but thin in

content: not rich, full, concrete, but buoyed up by light currents of

emotion in a region, to quote his own words again, of “floating and

colorless sentiments.” This disembodied character is a mark of almost all

the American poetry of the Annual or _Gemmiferous_ period, and is seen at

its extreme in the unsubstantial prolixity of Percival and the drab

diffuseness of Mrs. Sigourney. It was the reflection on this side the

water from Shelley, from Byron’s earlier manner, from Wordsworth’s most

didactic passages, and from the imitations of all these by secondary

poets, like Mrs. Norton and L. E. L. Willis’s verses were much better than

Percival’s or Mrs. Sigourney’s--defter, briefer, more pointed. But they

had a certain poverty of imagery and allusion which belonged to the

school, a recurrence of stock properties, such as roses, stars, and bells.

He was ridiculed by the critics, in particular, for his constancy to the

Pleiades, which would almost seem to have been the only constellation in

his horizon.

Toward the last of November, 1835, the first edition of “Pencillings by

the Way” was published. It was an imperfect one, made up hastily for the

London market from a broken set of the “Mirror,” and gave only

seventy-nine out of the one hundred and thirty-nine letters since printed

in the complete editions. From this imperfect copy the first American

impression (1836) was taken, and all in fact down to 1844. The book

reached a second English edition in March, 1836, and a seventh in 1863.

For this first edition Willis received £250. He afterwards testified,

that from the republication of the original “Pencillings,” for which

Morris had paid him $500 a year, he had made, all told, about $5,000.

Their appearance in book form had been anticipated by a severe criticism

of the original “Mirror” letters, written by Lockhart for the “London

Quarterly” of September, 1835. This was echoed by the Tory press

generally, and it was their attacks which led to the issue of the London

edition and greatly stimulated its sale. There were several reasons why

the Tory papers were “down on” Willis. In the first place he was an

American. In the next place he had been admitted and made much of in

English social circles, where English men of letters, who were merely men

of letters, did not often go. And, finally, he had spoken disrespectfully

in these letters of the editor of the “Quarterly” himself. “Do you know

Lockhart?” Wilson is made to ask in Willis’s report of their conversation

at Edinburgh. “No, I do not,” replies his interlocutor. “He is almost the

only literary man in London I have not met; and I must say, as the editor

of the ‘Quarterly,’ and the most unfair and unprincipled critic of the

day, I have no wish to know him. I never heard him well spoken of. I

probably have met a hundred of his acquaintances, but I have not yet seen

one who pretended to be his friend.”

This paragraph was enough to account for the “Quarterly” article; but the

personal grievance was kept well out of sight, and Willis was taken to

task for his alleged abuse of the rights of hospitality in reporting for a

public journal private conversations at gentlemen’s tables. The article

was a very offensive one, written with ability and with that air of cold

contempt of which Lockhart was master. It sneered at Willis as a “Yankee

poetaster,” and a “sonneteer of the most ultra-sentimental delicacy;”

intimated that his surprise and delight at the manners of the English

aristocracy came from his not having been familiar with the usages of the

best society at home, and accused him of “conceited vulgarity” and

“cockneyism” (an awful word, under which the Scotch Tories connoted all

possible offenses against sound politics and good literature). The

passages that seem to have given most offense to the critic were the report

of the conversation with Lord Aberdeen at Gordon Castle and the remarks

of Moore about O’Connell at Lady Blessington’s. “It is fortunate in this

particular case,” wrote Lockhart, “that what Lord Aberdeen said to Mr.

Willis might be repeated in print without paining any of the persons his

lordship talked of; but what he did say, he said under the impression that

the guest of the Duke of Gordon was a gentleman, and there are abundance

of passages in Mr. Willis’s book which can leave no doubt that, had the

noble earl spoken in a different sense, it would not, at all events, have

been from any feeling of what was due to his lordship, or to himself, that

Mr. Willis would have hesitated to report the conversation with equal

freedom.” The article concludes as follows: “This is the first example of

a man creeping into your home and forthwith printing,--accurately or

inaccurately, no matter which,--before your claret is dry on his

lips,--unrestrained _table-talk on delicate subjects, and capable of

compromising individuals_.” Lockhart, as usual, contrived to insult

Willis’s country, through her representative. “We can well believe,” he

said, “that Mr. Willis has been depicting the sort of society that most

interests his countrymen.

‘Born to be slaves and struggling to be lords,’

their servile adulation of rank and title, their stupid admiration of

processions and _levées_, and so forth, are leading features in almost all

the American books of travels that we have met with.”

To this censure Willis replied, in substance, in the preface to the first

London edition of “Pencillings,” first, that from “the distance of

America, and the ephemeral nature and usual obscurity of periodical

correspondence,” he had never expected that the “Mirror” letters would

reach England; nor would they have done so, had not the “Quarterly” “made

a long arm over the water,” and reprinted all the offending portions;

thereby forcing the author’s hand and compelling him to publish the entire

collection in justification of himself. Secondly, that his sketches of

distinguished people were neither ill-natured nor untrue; that he had said

nothing in them which could injure the feelings of those who had admitted

him to their confidence or hospitality. “There _are_ passages,” he allows,

“I would not rewrite, and some remarks on individuals which I would recall

at some cost,” but “I may state as a fact that the only instance in which

a quotation by me from the conversation of distinguished men gave the

least offense in England was the one remark made by Moore, the poet, at a

dinner party, on the subject of O’Connell. It would have been harmless, as

it was designed to be, but for the unexpected celebrity of my

‘Pencillings;’ yet with all my heart I wish it unwritten.” And finally,

that whatever violations of delicacy and good taste might have been

committed in the “Pencillings,” the author of “Peter’s Letters to his

Kinsfolk” was not the one to throw a stone at them. The first plea in this

defense was sincerely made, as might be easily proved from Willis’s

private letters. It _was_ a disagreeable surprise to him when the

“Quarterly” reprinted passages from the “Mirror” letters. And it is true

that America was much farther away from England than England was from

America. Still, if Willis had published anything that he should not have

published, it was not a perfect excuse to say that he had done it in a

corner. As the event showed, foreign correspondence in an American

newspaper might reach England. But this apology was not needed, for his

second plea covered the ground. There was, in truth, nothing malicious or

slanderous in “Pencillings;” almost nothing that could give pain even to

the most sensitive. The people described were, nearly all of them, in a

sense, public characters, accustomed to seeing themselves gossiped about

in print. In one or two instances Willis had been indiscreet, as he freely

admitted. But it is hard for one living in these times of society journals

and “interviewers” to understand why the papers should have made such a

pother over a comparatively trifling trespass upon the reserves of private

life. The best proof of Willis’s innocence in the matter is that the

people whose hospitality and confidence he was charged with abusing took

no kind of umbrage at the liberty. On the contrary, Lord Aberdeen, Wilson,

Dalhousie, and others wrote to him in warm approval of his book. “With

what feelings,” said the “Quarterly” article, apropos of the description

of Gordon Castle, “the whole may have been perused by the generous lord

and lady of the castle themselves, it is no business of ours to

conjecture.” This point, however, need not be left to conjecture, as it is

amply answered in the following letter to Willis from the Earl of

Dalhousie, dated February 25, 1836:--

… In the long evenings of winter we have beguiled the time with

“Pencillings by the Way,” and whatever critics and reviewers may

say, I take pleasure in assuring you that we all agree in one

sentiment, that a more amusing or more delightful production was

never issued by the press. In what we know of it, it is true and

graphic, and therefore in what is foreign to us, we think, must be

so also. _The Duke and Duchess of Gordon were here lately and

expressed themselves in similar terms._

Lady D---- desires me to say that the reviews could not have done

more for its success by their amplest praises, for it is now in

every hand.

Our family has been much occupied by Ramsay’s marriage this winter,

he following your steps so closely. He has added greatly to his

parents’ happiness, and, I hope, to his own in life. Lady Susan Hay

is a handsome woman, and an amiable, pretty creature. They have

settled themselves at Coalstown, until called into a more active

life, which I hope he looks forward to, and you have thought him

fitted for. It is not unlikely that he will be chosen member for the

East Lothian, in which he has made his residence, triangular between

me and his father-in-law, Lord Tweeddale, about sixteen miles from

me.

Pray let me hear from you, as your sincere attached friend,

DALHOUSIE.

Lady Dalhousie had written some two mouths before:--

I feel that it is positive ingratitude not to offer our united

thanks for your book, which we received in safety, and Miss Hathorne

and I are now reading it aloud to Lord Dalhousie in the evening,

with very great pleasure and amusement. Your descriptions recall to

my mind admirably what I have seen, and paint to my mind’s eye what

I wish to see, and the happy sunshine which your own mind has shed

over every person and thing you have met is refreshing and

enlivening to us, living now much alone in this dark and gloomy

December. The “Quarterly” we read with extreme wrath and

indignation, and, believe me, it will afford us the most sincere

pleasure if you will take, if you find them worthy of it, a few more

of your spirited pencillings from D. Castle.… Believe me always very

sincerely yours.

C. B. DALHOUSIE.

It has been said above that there was almost nothing in “Pencillings” that

could give pain to any one; but to this statement there are one or two

exceptions. The first was the instance of Moore and O’Connell, in which

Willis acknowledged and regretted his imprudence. “This publication, to my

knowledge,” says Madden in his “Life of the Countess of Blessington,” “was

attended with results which I cannot think Mr. Willis contemplated when he

transmitted his hasty notes to America,--to estrangements of persons who,

previously to the printed reports of their private conversations, had been

on terms of intimate acquaintance. This was the case with respect to

O’Connell and Moore. Moore’s reported remarks on O’Connell gave offense to

the latter, and aroused bad feelings between them which had never

previously existed, and which, I believe, never ceased to exist.”

It also appears from a letter from Willis to Lady Blessington, and an

unsigned note from a friend of hers to Willis, both of which are printed

in Madden’s “Life,” that Fonblanque resented the description of himself in

“Pencillings,” and had written the author a note in terms which the latter

thought “very unjustifiable.” Fonblanque was an able and estimable man,

and Willis’s portrait, or caricature, of him, though not unkindly meant

and applying merely to his personal appearance, was certainly not pleasant

for the subject of it to see in print.

“I never saw,” it runs, “a much worse face; sallow, seamed, and

hollow, his teeth irregular, his skin livid, his straight black

hair uncombed and straggling over his forehead; he looked as if he

might be the gentleman ‘whose coat was red and whose breeches were

blue.’ A hollow, croaking voice, and a small, fiery black eye, with

a smile like a skeleton’s, certainly did not improve his

physiognomy. He sat upon his chair very awkwardly, and was very ill

dressed, but every word he uttered showed him to be a man of claims

very superior to exterior attraction.”

With the exception of Lockhart, Moore, Fonblanque, and Captain Marryat,

whose case will be mentioned presently, it does not appear that anyone

took offense at anything in “Pencillings.” As to Lady Blessington,

Lockhart’s misgiving as to whether she would ever “again admit to her

table the animal who has printed what ensues” was needless. It was she who

saw the book through the press while Willis was in France on his wedding

journey. He went to see her frequently during the remainder of his stay in

London, and called upon her on his two subsequent visits to England; and

their friendship and correspondence continued unbroken till her death in

1849. His poem, “To a Face Beloved,” originally printed in the “Mirror” of

November 14, 1835, was addressed to her. It may well have been, however,

that the noise made about the book, and the cause for complaint given to a

few of the _habitués_ of Gore House, put a certain constraint upon his

visits there, and he probably absented himself from the dinners and

receptions given by the mistress of the mansion, and which it had formerly

been his chief pleasure to attend. In a letter to her from Dublin, January

25, 1840, he says: “I have, I assure you, no deeper regret than that my

indiscretion (in ‘Pencillings’) should have checked the freedom of my

approach to you. Still my attachment and admiration (so unhappily

recorded) are always on the alert for some trace that I am still

remembered by you.… My first pleasure when I return to town will be to

avail myself of your kind invitation, and call at Gore House.”

In spite of the “Quarterly’s” attack--partly no doubt in consequence of

it--“Pencillings by the Way” met, on the whole, with a generous reception

from the English public, and even from the English press. Literary

criticism in those days was largely influenced by political prejudice. It

was useless for a Whig, a “Cockney,” or an American, to hope for justice

from the Tory reviews. The “Westminster” (Radical) was edited by Willis’s

friend, Dr. Bowring; the “Edinburgh” (Whig), by his acquaintance, Lord

Jeffrey. The former accordingly greeted his book with warm approval, and

the latter praised it with faint damns. On the other hand, “Fraser’s,” the

lightest and brightest of the Tory organs, received it with uproarious

contempt. The notice of “Pencillings” in the February number of the

magazine for 1836 was by Maginn,--the “Odoherty” of the “Noctes,”--a witty

Irish blackguard, the hired bravo of the Tory press, who spent his time,

except when drunk or in jail for debt, in writing lampoons and rollicking

songs for “Blackwood” and “Fraser,” expressive chiefly of convivial joys

and of boisterous scorn of the Whigs. There was a flavor of whiskey and

Donnybrook about whatever Maginn wrote, and he wielded his blackthorn with

such droll abandon that his victims could hardly help laughing, while

rubbing their heads. His onslaught on “Pencillings” began, “This is really

a goose of a book, or if anybody wishes the idiom to be changed, a book of

a goose. There is not a single idea in it, from the first page to the

last, beyond what might germinate in the brain of a washerwoman.” He then

goes on to call the author a lickspittle, a “beggarly skittler,” a

jackass, a ninny, a haberdasher, a “namby-pamby writer in twaddling

albums, kept by the moustachioed and strong-smelling widows or bony

matrons of Portland Place;” a “fifty-fifth rate scribbler of gripe-visited

sonnets,” a “windy-gutted visitor,” and a “sumph,” whatever that mystic

monosyllable may import.[3] His writing is characterized as “chamber-maid

gabble,” “small beer,” “penny-trumpet eloquence,” “Willis’s bray,” and

“Niagara in a jordan.” President Jackson, whom Maginn supposes to have

appointed Willis _attaché_ to the French embassy, is “that most

open-throated of flummery-gulpers, Old Hickory.” Alluding to a passage in

Willis’s “slimy preface,” the reviewer says, “that Willis should literally

set his foot on Lockhart’s head is what we think no one imagines the silly

man to have meant. The probabilities are that if the imposition of feet

should take place between them, the toe of Lockhart would find itself in

disgusting contact with a part of Willis which is considerably removed

from his head, and deemed to be the quarter in which the honor of such

persons is most peculiarly called into action.” Such were the amenities of

criticism half a century ago. Of course this animated billingsgate could

not hurt Willis in anybody’s esteem, and called for no reply. Maginn was a

wretched creature and no one minded what he said; though, to be sure, the

Hon. Grantley Berkeley thought it necessary, in this same year, 1836, to

call him out for a scurrilous attack upon himself and his cousin, Lady

Euston, in a notice of Berkeley’s novel, “Castle Berkeley.” The latter,

in his very diverting “Life and Recollections,” gives a circumstantial

history of this duel and of the flogging which he administered to Fraser

for publishing the article, and of Maginn’s shameful treatment of poor

Miss Landon.

But one of the notices provoked by “Pencillings” came near having serious

consequences for Willis. In a letter in the “Mirror” of April 18, 1835, he

had inserted a postscript, after his signature, as he claimed, and meant

only for Morris’s private eye, giving some information about the sales of

books in London. In this occurred, among other things, the sentence

following: “Captain Marryat’s gross trash sells immensely about Wapping

and Portsmouth, and brings him five or six hundred the book, but that can

scarce be called literature.” Morris printed it with the rest of the

letter, and when it reached England the gallant captain was naturally

displeased by it. His revenge was to publish in his magazine, the

“Metropolitan” for January, 1836, a review of “Pencillings,” or rather a

grossly personal review of the author of “Pencillings.” The article was

less telling than the “Quarterly’s,” simply because Marryat did not drive

so sharp a quill as the editor of the “Quarterly.” But the latter knew his

business as a reviewer and confined himself to the book in hand. Marryat,

on the contrary, traveled outside the record and helplessly allowed his

private grievance to appear. He declared that Willis was a “spurious

_attaché_,” who had made his way into English society under false colors.

“He makes invidious, uncharitable, and ill-natured remarks upon

authors and their works; all of which he dispatches for the benefit

of the reading public of America, and, at the same time that he has

thus stabbed them behind their backs, he is requesting to be

introduced to them--bowing, smiling, and simpering.” “Although we

are well acquainted with the birth, parentage, and history of Mr.

Willis, previous to his making his continental tour, we will pass

them over in silence; and we think that Mr. Willis will acknowledge

that we are generous in so doing.” “It is evident that Mr. Willis

has never, till lately, been in good society, either in England or

America.”

Finally he exhumed from some quarter the pasquinade of poor Joe Snelling,

referred to in our third chapter, from which he printed the following

lines by way of showing Willis’s standing at home:--

“Then Natty filled the ‘Statesman’s’ ribald page

With the rank breathings of his prurient age,

And told the world how many a half-bred Miss,

Like Shakspere’s fairy, gave an ass a kiss;

Long did he try the art of sinking on

The muddy pool he took for Helicon;

Long did he delve and grub with fins of lead

At its foul bottom for precarious bread.…

Dishonest critic and ungrateful friend,

Still on a woman[4] thy stale jokes expend.

Live--at thy meagre table still preside,

While foes commiserate and friends deride;

Yet live--thy wonted follies to repeat,

Live--till thy printer’s ruin is complete;

Strut out thy fleeting hour upon the stage,

Amidst the hisses of the passing age.”

Marryat’s article was a stupid one, ungrammatical and coarsely written.

But its clumsy malice made it all the more exasperating. Lockhart was a

gentleman and Maginn was an Irishman. The former took care not to say too

much, and what the latter said was of no consequence. Both of them,

besides, were clever writers, and a man of wit and spirit had rather be

pricked by a rapier in the hand of a dexterous adversary than pounded on

the head by an awkward bully with a bludgeon. Willis made a mistake in

noticing Marryat’s article at all, but he was stung by the implied insult

to his parents, and his military friends persuaded him that his honor was

touched. Accordingly he prepared an elaborate reply in the shape of a

letter, dated January 10th, and sent it to Marryat at Brussels, whither

the latter had gone about the middle of December, while his article was

still in proof.

“Of that part of the paper which refers to the merits of my book,” Willis

wrote, “I have nothing to say. You were at liberty, as a critic, to deal

with it as you pleased. You have transcended the limits of criticism,

however, to make an attack on my character, and your absence compels me to

represent, by my own letter, those claims for reparation which I should

have intrusted to a friend, had you been in England.” The letter then

proceeds to answer, in detail, the charges and innuendoes of the

“Metropolitan.” As to his seeking introductions, Willis declares, “I have

never, since my arrival in England, requested an introduction to _any

man_.… In the single interview which I had with yourself, I was informed

by the lady who was the medium of the introduction, that _you wished_ to

know me.” The letter concludes, apropos of Marryat’s slur on Willis’s

birth and parentage, “You will readily admit that this dark insinuation

must be completely withdrawn. My literary reputation and my position in

society are things I could outlive. My honesty as a critic is a point on

which the world may decide. But my own honor and that of my family are

sacred, and while I live, no breath of calumny shall rest on either. I

trust to receive, at your earliest convenience, that explanation which you

cannot but acknowledge is due to me on this point, and which is most

imperatively required by my own character and the feelings of my

friends.” As to the remark which had drawn the “Metropolitan” article upon

him, Willis confesses that it was an unjust one, but says that “it

occurred in a private communication to the editor of the ‘Mirror’ and was

never intended for publication.”

Willis had this letter lithographed and sent copies to seven of his

particular friends, to clear his character, as he said, in his own

immediate circle, of the aspersions in Marryat’s article. The reply to

this demand was a long letter, under date of January 21st, declining to

make any apology until Willis had publicly withdrawn his remark in the

“Mirror” about Marryat’s gross trash selling about Wapping, etc., which,

said the latter, amounted by implication to an attack on his private

character; denying, furthermore, that _he_ had attacked _Willis’s_ private

character. “The observations made by you upon my writings must be

considered as more or less injurious in proportion to the rank in society

and estimation of the person who made them.… It was therefore necessary,

in this instance, to point out that the critic had not been accustomed to

good society.… Now this, if true, is no crime, and therefore the remark

can be no attack upon private character.” Willis accepted this

explanation, in a second letter to Marryat, and then sent the entire

correspondence to the “Times” for publication. Marryat was furious at

this, and wrote at once to Willis, “I refuse all explanation--insist upon

immediate satisfaction--and that you forthwith repair to Ostend to meet

me.” If the captain thought that his opponent was a dandy poet, who would

be afraid to face his pistol, he mistook his man. “The puppies will

fight,” said the Duke. Willis was no shot, and the only weapon that he

knew how to handle was his pen, but he never showed any want of personal

courage. The correspondence that followed this challenge was long and

tedious. The documents in the case are a score in number and need not be

reproduced here. The substance of these various protocols and formalities

was as follows. Willis answered Marryat’s letter, explaining why he had

thought right to publish the first three letters that had passed between

them, accepting his challenge, in case he found this explanation

insufficient, but claiming his privilege, as the challenged party, to name

some place in England for the meeting. Meanwhile a duplicate of Marryat’s

challenge had been handed to Willis by the former’s “friend,” a Mr. F.

Mills, and Willis had referred him to _his_ friend, Captain Walker, and

had agreed to waive his right to name a place, and to meet Marryat at

Ostend. Mr. Mills and Captain Walker finally adjusted the matter and

arranged a basis for an amicable settlement. But while these negotiations

were pending, Marryat, on the receipt of Willis’s letter of explanation,

withdrew his challenge in a letter dated February 9th, which he sent to

the “Times,” along with his challenge and Willis’s reply to it. The terms

of this withdrawal Willis considered insulting, and the publication of the

challenge after it had been agreed upon between the friends of the parties

that Marryat “should entirely withdraw the offensive letter containing his

challenge,” he regarded as a further insult. He therefore wrote to the

“Times,” on the day following the appearance of these letters, that the

differences between himself and Captain Marryat were _not_ at an end; and

on February 17th he wrote to Marryat that his challenge still stood

accepted, insisting on his right to name England as the place of meeting,

but offering in case of interruption there to give him a meeting on the

other side of the Channel. Marryat accordingly came to England and--Mr.

Mills having withdrawn from the affair--named as his second Captain Edward

Belcher of the Royal Navy. Captain Belcher’s ship was at Chatham and

thither all parties repaired on the 27th of February. Willis’s second

declared to Captain Belcher that his principal “had come to fight, not to

negotiate,” but on a little discussion Captain Belcher found his principal

in the wrong, and made him concede what was necessary, the following

pronunciamento being signed by both seconds:--

CHATHAM.

Captain Marryat and Mr. Willis having placed the arrangement of the

dispute between them in our hands, and both parties having repaired

hither with the intent of a hostile meeting; we have, previously to

permitting such to take place, carefully gone through the original

grounds of quarrel, which do not appear to us of sufficient

importance to call for a meeting of such a nature.

We are perfectly borne out in this opinion by the arrangement of the

8th of February entered into by the mutual friends of the parties,

and on which we think Captain Marryat ought to have withdrawn his

challenge of the 4th inst.

That the new quarrel arises from the publication of the challenge

and subsequent letters, in which, in our opinion, Captain Marryat

was not justified. We are further of opinion that both parties

should mutually withdraw the offensive correspondence, the terms on

either side being unjustifiable, and we conceive that they more

honorably act in so doing than in meeting in the field.

EDWARD BELCHER.

F. G. WALKER.

Thus peacefully ended this tempest in a teapot. Willis had carried his

point and had acted throughout in a high-spirited and creditable

manner--barring the folly of entering into “an affair of honor,” in the

first place. His letters to Marryat are those of a gentleman, while his

adversary’s language is invariably hectoring and coarse. The quarrel, of

course, made a great deal of noise at the time in London literary and

social circles. “The United Service Gazette,” the organ of the British

Army and Navy, took Willis’s side in a long editorial in which much of the

correspondence was reprinted from the “Times.” The latter journal,

however, probably voiced the true sentiment of the community when it said:

“We confess that we have a great distaste for this sort of squabbling,

which exhibits, to say the least, an extraordinary want of judgment in the

disputing parties.”

From Chatham Willis posted at once to Woolwich, thirty miles away, where

he found his wife in convulsions. He had left a farewell letter for her,

fully expecting to be killed in a duel with Marryat, who was reputed a

crack shot. Two days later Willis went to London and called out Mr. F.

Mills, who had acted as Marryat’s “mediator,” for an offensive letter in

the “Times.” Mr. Mills named W. F. Campbell of Islay and Willis named John

Tyndale, between whom this subsidiary quarrel was soon patched up, in a

manner honorable to both. The assaults in the English magazines and the

rumors of the Marryat affair of course found their way speedily to

America, and were circulated and commented upon in the American

periodicals according to their various prepossessions. “The cultivated old

clergymen of the ‘North American Review,’” as Poe used to call them, lent

the support of that influential quarterly to Willis in an article by C. C.

Felton, a very friendly review of the “Pencillings,” and a defense of

their author--a favor which Willis gratefully appreciated.

In March, 1836, he published in London “Inklings of Adventure,” consisting

of thirteen stories and sketches of American and European life, reprinted

from the “New Monthly,” “The Metropolitan,” and the “Court Magazine,”

together with “Minute Philosophies” (from the “American Monthly”) and “A

Log in the Archipelago,” from the “Mirror.” The book was handsomely

published in three volumes, and dedicated to Edward Everett. For an

edition of 1,200 copies Willis was paid £300, reserving to himself the

copyright; and as he had received a guinea a page for the original

articles, besides what Morris gave him for their republication in the

“Mirror,” they may be said to have been fairly profitable.

These “Slingsby” papers are exceedingly clever. With the possible

exception of “Letters from under a Bridge” and portions of “Pencillings by

the Way,” they are the best work that Willis ever did; and they compare

well with such lighter fiction, in the way of short tales or sketches of

travel and adventure, as has been produced in America since Willis’s day.

Whatever else they are, they are never dull and always readable. They are

not read now only because the readers of light fiction habitually follow

the market and inquire merely for the last thing out. Many of them were

worked over from his “American Monthly” _juvenilia_, but his touch had

grown firmer and he had purchased experience, as his motto declared, by

his “penny of observation.” These “Inklings” do not penetrate to the

stratum of real character, of strong passion, and of the interplay of

motives and moral relations in which all vital fiction has its roots.

Their plots are commonly slight, their persons sketchy, their incidents

not seldom improbable, their coloring sometimes too high. As transcripts

of actual life such stories as “Pedlar Karl,” “The Cherokee’s Threat,” and

“Tom Fane and I,” with the easy optimism of their conclusions and their

cheerful avoidance of all the responsibilities imposed upon the dwellers

in this workaday world, are of course misleading and false. Their air is

the air of every day, but their happenings are those of the wildest

romance. Their charm--and they have for many old-fashioned readers a quite

decided charm--does not lie in truth to life, but in the vivacious

movement of the narrative, the glimpses of scenery by the way, the

alternations of sentiment and gayety, neither very profound, but each for

the time sincere and passing quickly into one another; and finally in the

style, always graceful, and in passages really exquisite. It has recently

been announced that style is “increasingly unimportant,” but can this be

true? Not surely, unless fiction is to become hereafter a branch of social

science and valuable only for its accurate report of life. It will then be

the novelist’s duty to obliterate himself in his message, and any

intrusion of his personality between the reader and the subject will be an

impertinence. But it is hard to believe that the personal element is to

lose its place in fiction and be banished to the realm of autobiography

and lyric poetry. Style may be a purely external part of an artist’s

equipment, but it is a necessary part all the same. A bad man or a weak

man may have it, but that does not make it any the less indispensable for

the good man intending literature. Willis was born with it; it showed in

his manners, in his dress, in his writing. Whatever he did was done with

an air.

The American parts of “Inklings,” written for the English reader, are the

best. They reproduce for us the life of gay society, when society was, or

seemed, gayer, or at least fresher than at present. It was the era of

expansion and hope before the financial panic of 1837. The great waterway

lately opened through the state of New York had set people traveling. The

beauties of American lakes, forests, and rivers were being discovered, but

were as yet unhackneyed. Lake George, The Thousand Isles, and the St.

Lawrence, did not swarm with tourists. Nahant was still a fashionable

seaside resort and Niagara a watering-place, where people actually went to

spend months, and not a fleeting show for bridal couples and a mill-race

for manufacturers. Saratoga, and Ballston, and Lebanon were rival spas,

the first a “mushroom village” merely,--“the work of a lath and plaster

Aladdin,”--when Congress Hall, with its big wooden colonnades, was in its

glory. “A relic or two of the still astonished forest towers above the

chimneys, in the shape of a melancholy grove of firs, and five minutes’

walk from the door, the dim old wilderness stands looking down on the

village.” In which wilderness was embosomed Barhydt’s once famous

hermitage, with its ear-shaped tarn and columnar pine shafts, whither one

resorted for trout dinners, and where “the long, soft mornings, quiet as a

shadowy elysium, on the rim of that ebon lake were as solitary as a

melancholy man could desire.”

This newness in life at the Springs, this background of primitive

wilderness against which the drives and dances and piazza promenades of

the fashionable frequenters were projected, has long since disappeared,

and with it has gone a certain old school exclusiveness which once marked

the society at American baths. That society, if not more aristocratic than

at present, was at all events more select, simply by virtue of being

smaller. Fewer people were in the habit of going into the country in

summer, and fashionable circles in the cities were not so large but that

“the best people” from all over the States might know each other at least

by name. A reigning belle or a distinguished beau had a national

reputation. Southern planters brought their families to Northern resorts

and supplied an element which has been missed since the war.

“In the fourteen millions of inhabitants in the United States,”

Willis explains, “there are precisely four authenticated and

undisputed aristocratic families. There is one in Boston, one in

New York, one in Philadelphia, and one in Baltimore. With two

hundred miles’ interval between them, they agree passably, and

generally meet at one or another of the three watering-places of

Saratoga, Ballston, or Lebanon. Their meeting is as mysterious as

the process of crystallization, for it is not by agreement. As it is

not known till the moment they arrive, there is, of course, great

excitement among the hotel-keepers in these different parts of the

country, and a village that has ten thousand transient inhabitants

one summer, has, for the next, scarcely as many score. The vast and

solitary temples of Pæstum are gay in comparison with these halls of

disappointment.”

It is, for the most part, the life of this society which Willis so

engagingly portrays in the “Slingsby” sketches. His heroes are

devil-may-care young fellows, who wander about from one fashionable resort

to another, composing love verses, flirting, dancing, eloping, or

assisting at elopements. It was the era of the buck or beau, a joyous,

flamboyant creature who wore figured waistcoats, was a knowing whip,

danced with vigor, loved pink champagne, serenaded the ladies, was gallant

in speech, dashing and confident in bearing, and never in the least

_blasé_.

This freshness and youthfulness, this air of stir, adventure, excitement,

hope, which was impressed upon American life, books, and society of that

date are reflected from Willis’s sparkling pages and give them even a sort

of historical interest, apart from their claims as literature. There is a

breath of morning wind in them. With the homelier side of life he had

little concern, and his writing lacks gravity and simplicity. Whenever he

grows serious, it is to grow sentimental. “F. Smith” is perhaps the most

artistic of these sketches, and the most representative of its author’s

talent, in its quick interchange of poetic description, bright dialogue,

light, malicious humor, and natural sentiment; neither mood in excess, nor

dwelt on long enough to fatigue. It is a trifling episode--the caprice of

a summer belle at Nahant. Its hero is the same “gentle monster” who

reappears in many of the “Inklings”--in “Edith Linsey,” “The Gypsy of

Sardis,” and “Niagara,” a Green Mountain Frankenstein and Quixote in one,

absent-minded and uncouth of aspect, but with a soul filled with

enthusiasm for beauty and a delicate, chivalrous devotion to women. He is

half hero and half butt, and introduced as a constant foil to Slingsby,

the dandy exquisite and man of the world.

“Edith Linsey” was the most ambitious of the American sketches. It was a

novel in outline, and had an original plot, the intellectual passion of a

young student for a girl who is thought to be dying of consumption, and

whose disease has imparted an exaltation to her feelings, and a nervous,

spiritual intensity to her thoughts. The anti-climax comes when she

unexpectedly recovers her health, and with it her worldly ambitions, and

coolly jilts her quondam lover. There are passages in “Edith

Linsey”--particularly in the scenes between the lovers in the library--of

unusual thoughtfulness, eloquence, and emotional depth, but the story is

loosely put together, and interrupted by digressions, and in the latter

part of it the author seemed more concerned to deliver himself of college

reminiscences and descriptions of scenery than to carry on his narrative

with a firm hand.

“The Gypsy of Sardis” was the best of the European sketches, and had a

very moving, though slightly melodramatic, conclusion. It was a more

highly finished study of Eastern scenery and life than Willis had had

leisure to give in his “Pencillings.” A comparison of the two shows from

what slight hints he worked up the romance,--a momentary glimpse of a

gypsy girl at a tent door, and of an Arab in the slave market at Stamboul,

a ride up the Valley of Sweet Waters, and a morning in the shop of old

Mustapha, the perfumer. “Love and Diplomacy” and “The Revenge of the

Signor Basil” were less successful, because more remote from their

author’s experience. He had not the kind of imagination necessary to

transport him into alien characters and situations. His fancy required

some contact with its object before it would take off the electric spark.

Willis’s English had many excellent qualities. It was crisp, clean cut,

pointed, nimble on the turn. He was good at a quotation, deftly brought

in, unhackneyed, and never too much of it, a single phrase or sentence or

half a line of verse maybe. There is a perpetual twinkle or ripple over

his style, like a quaver in music, which sometimes fatigues. Is the man

never going to forget himself and say a thing plainly? the reader asks.

But the verbal prettinesses and affectations which disfigured his later

prose do not abound in his earlier and better work. He had at all times,

however, a feminine fondness for italics and exclamations, and his figures

had a daintiness which displeased severe critics. Thus: “The gold of the

sunset had glided up the dark pine-tops and disappeared, like a ring taken

slowly from an Ethiop’s finger.” “As much salt as could be tied up in the

cup of a large water-lily” is an instance of his superfine way of putting

things. He likened Daniel Webster’s forehead, among the heads at a Jenny

Lind concert, to “a massive magnolia blossom, too heavy for the breeze to

stir, splendid and silent amid fluttering poplar leaves.” The “crushed

orange blossom, clinging to one of the heels” of Ernest Clay’s boots, was

a touch which greatly amused Thackeray. And others have been amused by the

fantastic headings which he invented for certain columns in the “Home

Journal”: “Sparklings of Tenth Waves: or Bits Relished in Recent

Readings,” “Breezes from Spice Islands, passed in the Voyage of Life,” and

the like, which read like the title of a sixteenth century pamphlet. An

old lady in Hartford used to say that “Nat Willis ought to go about in

spring, in sky-blue breeches, with a rose-colored bellows to blow the buds

open.” It is remarkable with what consent all who have had occasion to

characterize Willis’s diction hit upon the metaphor of champagne. “The

wine of Bacon’s writings,” said Dr. Johnson, “is a dry wine.” The wine of

Willis’s writings was certainly a _Schaumwein_. It had not the rich, still

glow of burgundy, but a fizz and an up-streaming of golden bubbles, and

when the spirit had effervesced the residue, as in his later writings, was

rather flat.

During his stay abroad he made a few other contributions to literature

which have not yet been mentioned. Among these were some miscellaneous

papers in the “Mirror”: “Notes from a Scrap Book” and “Fragments of

Rambling Impressions,” portions of which he afterwards republished in

“Ephemera.” Also a short tale of no value, “The Dilemma,” from which he

rescued the verses “To Ermengarde” for his collected poems. He contributed

to the London “Athenæum” for January and February, 1835, a series of four

articles on American literature, which do not appear in his “Complete

Works.” That pioneer of literature in the West, the Rev. Timothy Flint,

some time editor of the “Cincinnati Monthly Review,” author of a novel

called “Francis Berrian,” and of a work on the Mississippi Valley, had

agreed to supply the required papers, but he having left New York for

Louisiana Territory, and failed to come to time, Willis was invited to

take his place. He wrote the articles hastily, though he asserted that he

had “read the productions of two hundred poets and seventy-two prose

writers whose works have been printed in America since the settlement of

New England.” He made no approach to an exhaustive treatment of the

subject, but gave a number of graphic personal sketches of American

authors, one in particular, of Channing as a pulpit orator, which excited

Lady Byron’s interest, as has been mentioned, and another of Cooper, whom

he indignantly defended against the slanders of a portion of the American

press. The literary judgments are not always sound (Poe said that Willis

had good taste, but was not a good critic), but they were the current

opinions of the day rather than of Willis individually. They were in the

air. Thus he pronounces Bryant’s “Evening Wind” the best thing he had

written, and prefers Percival to Bryant, saying that he is “the most

interesting man in America. He has not written anything equal to the

‘Evening Wind’ of Bryant, but his birthright lies a thousand leagues

higher up Parnassus.” Timothy Flint afterwards supplemented these papers

by a dozen of his own, which amply made up in heaviness for any want of

ballast in Willis’s, and were full of “general views,” which, if not

correct, were harmless because unreadable. Willis’s “Athenæum” articles

first introduced the English public to “The Culprit Fay,” long passages of

which he gave from a manuscript in his possession, the poem having not as

yet appeared in print. Miss Mitford, who took a warm interest in American

literature, wrote him a note of thanks on the publication of this series,

praising it in the highest terms.

It appears by a letter to Willis from Carl August, Freiherr von Killinger,

dated Carlsruhe, April 13, 1836, that some of the “Inklings” had already

attained to the honors of translation. The Freiherr, it seems, was

engaged in translating “Pencillings” also, and wanted material for a

biographical notice.

“To the author of the ‘Slingsby Papers,’” he wrote, “It is, perhaps,

flattering to hear that his ‘Lunatic,’ his ‘Incidents on the

Hudson,’ ‘Adventures on the Green Mountains,’[5] his ‘Niagara and So

Forth,’ etc., etc., which I had translated into a little periodical

of mine, or, rather, a choice collection of interesting articles

from English periodicals and annuals, have been read with much

interest, and repeatedly been reprinted in Germany.… I could wish to

be favored by you with some biographical notices _of your own_ in

token, as it were, of your consentment to my translatory attempt.”