Chapter V (2)

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.”