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True Images Devotional 90 Daily
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 True Images Devotional 90
Daily Devotions For Teen
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.
 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.”
 CHAPTER VI.
1836-1845.
GLENMARY—THE CORSAIR—THE NEW
MIRROR.

Willis was now fully committed to the profession of letters, but he

wished to connect it with foreign residence, if possible. His sojourn
abroad had been pleasant and successful, and when he sailed for
home it was with a strong expectation of returning before long to
the Old World in some diplomatic capacity. This hope he did not
cease to entertain for several years. In a letter to Mrs. Skinner,
written from Niagara October 12, 1836, he said that he had missed
the secretaryship to France by a hand’s-breadth, and that he wanted
the next diplomatic mission that turned up; that the climate of the
United States did not agree either with him or with Mrs. Willis; that
he was constantly subject to the rheumatism, etc. During the winter
of 1836-37, while in Washington, he made interest to secure the
post of secretary of legation at St. Petersburg, with the view of
writing a book on Russia, but Mr. Dallas, the newly-appointed
minister to that country, had promised the place to a kinsman. Later,
in a letter to Mrs. Willis at Glenmary, written from Boston, where he
had just met Sumner and Longfellow and was about to dine with the
latter, he speaks of a letter from a friend who says that the President
had told him that “no young man in Washington had impressed him
so favorably. It looks like going abroad,” he adds, “and not for six or
nine months merely.” This letter is dated simply “February,” but was
written, probably, in 1842, during Tyler’s administration. To the same
year, doubtless, may be referred another, dated at New York, July
9th, in which he speaks of having made the rounds of the men-of-
war in the harbor with John Tyler, the President’s son, “who seems
very much my friend,” and of being invited to dinner by Dakin, to
meet Tyler, Halleck, and Bryant. “A politician,” he says, tells him that
he will be appointed abroad soon. These hopes were all doomed to
disappointment, and to the end of his career his pen was destined to
be his best reliance.
The first few months after his return to America were spent in
visiting his home and friends, and in presenting his young English
bride to her new relatives. He stayed some time at the Astor House,
in New York, then newly opened under the hosting of the genial
Stetson, and regarded as the greatest wonder on the continent in
the way of metropolitan caravansaries. On September 20th he
signed an agreement with the agent of George Virtue, the London
publisher, to furnish the letterpress for a big illustrated work on
American scenery, the drawings for which were to be supplied by
Bartlett, the English artist, who was then in America for the purpose.
The work was to come out in monthly numbers, each containing four
plates and eight pages of letterpress, and Willis was to receive
fifteen guineas a number. The first installment, containing
descriptions of twenty drawings, was to be ready November 1st. It
was in pursuance of this agreement that Willis went to Niagara in
the autumn of 1836, retracing ground which he had visited eight
years before. A part of the winter of 1836-37 and the early spring of
1837 he passed in Washington, whence he contributed to the
“Mirror” the four letters afterwards included in “Sketches of Travel.”
He found Washington society agreeable, and Mrs. Willis was greatly
admired and became an especial favorite with Henry Clay. But the
national capital was then a raw, straggling town, built, said Willis, “to
please nobody on earth but a hackney coachman.” It had not begun
to grow up to the ambitious plan on which it was projected, and
there was a ludicrous contrast between the wide, radiating avenues,
with their imposing public buildings scattered here and there, and
the wastes between, dotted at intervals with naked brick houses or
mean negro cabins. The large shifting population, which fled as soon
as Congress rose, lodged uncomfortably in hotels and boarding-
houses. In short, Washington was a dismal place to live in. Willis set
his practiced observation at work to describe the picturesque and
humorous social aspects of this unfinished city. He never took more
than the most casual interest in politics, but he lounged about the
rotunda and lobbies of the Capitol, climbed up into the stifling
galleries of the old House and Senate chambers, whence the ladies’
toilets could be observed, though the voices of speakers on the floor,
owing to the acoustic defects in the building, reached the ear “as
articulate as water from a narrow-necked bottle.” He was present at
Van Buren’s inauguration, went to a levee at the White House, and
to a dinner with Power the comedian, at which several Indian chiefs
were present who behaved in an extraordinary manner. In the
summer of 1837 he traveled about with Bartlett, who was making
his sketches for “American Scenery.” In the course of these
peregrinations he found a lovely spot on the banks of Owego Creek
near its junction with the Susquehanna, which so took his fancy that
he decided to pitch his tent there. He bought from his college friend
Pumpelly, who lived near by, a domain of some two hundred acres,
which he named Glenmary, in honor of his wife, and there in the fall
of 1837 he set up his household gods. In his paper on “The Four
Rivers,” contributed to one of the September “Mirrors” of that year,
he thus announces his discovery:—
“Owego Creek should have a prettier name, for its
small vale is the soul and essence of loveliness. A
meadow of a mile in breadth, fertile, soft, and
sprinkled with stately trees, furnishes a bed for its
swift windings; and from the edge of this new Tempé,
on the southern side, rise three steppes or natural
terraces, over the highest of which the forest rears its
head, and looks in upon the meeting of the rivers;
while down the sides, terrace by terrace, leap the
small streamlets from the mountain springs, forming
each again its own smaller dimple in this loveliest face
of Nature.… Here would I have a home! Give me a
cottage by one of these shining streamlets, upon one
of these terraces that seem steps to Olympus, and let