Chapter VI (1)

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 me ramble over these mountain sides, while my flowers are
growing and my head silvering in tranquil happiness.”

In this secluded Arcadia his Penates had rest for five years, and hence he wrote his “À l’Abri, or the Tent Pitched,” contributed to the “Mirror” as “Letters from under a Bridge,” the first one appearing July 7, 1838. This is Willis’s happiest book, and reflects the happiest part of his life. There was a side of him which turned gladly to rural repose and simple household pleasures. He imagined it to be “the kind of life best suited to his disposition as well as to his better nature,” and it had at the time the zest of novelty. For the last five years he had been a vagabond “in the gayest circles of the gayest cities in the world.”

“There is a curious fact,” he writes, “I have learned for the first
time in this wild country; that, as the forest is cleared, new
springs rise to the surface of the ground, as if at the touch of the
sunshine.… You have yourself been in your day, dear doctor, ‘a
warped slip of wilderness,’ and will see at once that there lies in
this ordinance of nature a beautiful analogy to certain moral
changes that come in upon the heels of more cultivated and
thoughtful manhood. There is no divining-rod whose dip shall tell us
at twenty what we shall most relish at thirty.… You can scarce
understand with what pleasure I find this new spring in my path, the
content with which I admit the conviction that, without effort or
self-denial, the mind will slake its thirst and the heart be
satisfied with but the waste of what lies so near us.”

The “dear doctor” to whom these letters were addressed was Dr. T. O. Porter, with whom their author afterwards formed a literary partnership. The little bridge under which they were written, with its stone seat, its “floor of running water,” its nest of swallows, and its diminutive fresh-water lobster--which reminded Willis of Talleyrand--deserves remembering with Pope’s famous grotto at Twickenham. Like Cowley, Willis acknowledged himself fond of little things. He disliked the ocean and great rivers,--though he finally came to live on the banks of one. He loved small streams and narrow valleys. The lawny, homelike scenery of the Owego was just suited to his taste. Above all things in nature, he delighted in running water, which had an affinity with his own lively and sparkling temper. “À l’Abri” was, and remains, a thoroughly enjoyable book, chatty, pleasantly digressive, and filled with sunshine and the air of out-doors. It must be confessed that Willis was something of a cockney in the presence of great Nature. He viewed her more as a landscape gardener than as a naturalist. He had not the intense passion for her, the rapt communion with her, of elect spirits like Wordsworth and Thoreau. She furnished him rather with a hundred pretty and playful analogies, a hundred texts for little sermons on cheerfulness and content, in which he rode his fancy sometimes too far and let his sentiment answer too quickly to trifling provocations. He must have been but an amateurish farmer, too, ordering his breakfast served under a balsam fir, and selling his crops “for the oddity of the sensation.” Naturally, except in literary harvests, his farm did not pay, though he was always exclaiming with grateful surprise at the bounty of nature in yielding him actual buckwheat, in addition to the health, amusement, and moral lessons derived in the process of cultivating that interesting grain. One suspects that he grew more flowers of speech than any grosser product from his two hundred acres. If the crows ate his corn in the blade, he merely philosophized, “Think what times we live in, when even the crows are obliged to anticipate their income!” If the red heifer chewed up a lace cape bleaching on the lawn, he humorously excused the heifer on account of the drought. If the boys reported that the deer were browsing in troops on his buckwheat, by the light of the moon, he answered, “Let them!” One is reminded by this last discouragement to agriculture that Owego was still in the backwoods. Some of the most interesting passages in the letters describe the wild life of the lumbermen, whose rafts glided past the Glenmary meadows “like a singing and swearing phantom of an unfinished barn,” and whose fires by night lit up the bends of the Susquehanna, where their huge flotillas lay moored. Willis once descended the river on the top of a freshet in a steamboat of light draught, but his usual way of coming and going was by stage over very rough roads, the Erie railway having not as yet penetrated those solitudes. Another picturesque feature of the neighborhood were the forest fires, the “blazing and innumerable pillars swept by the wind till they stood in still and naked redness, while the eye could see far into their depths.” This phenomenon furnished a vivid description for his story, “The Picker and Piler,” contributed to the “Corsair” of March 16, 1839, and to the April number of the “New Monthly” for the same year, the plot of which seems to have been furnished him by Rand, the portrait painter, to whom Willis sat in London in 1835, and who regaled him during the sittings with stories of wild adventure. Willis kept up communication with the great world by frequent trips to New York, and by frequent visits from his metropolitan friends to Glenmary. Neither was he by any means cut off from civilization at home. He explains to the doctor in one of his letters that Owego, two miles away, and even the village of Canewana, a mile nearer, are within the latitude of silver forks and their accompanying vanities, morning calls, cards, dinner giving, champagne, and French bonnets. R. H. Stoddard, the poet, who visited Glenmary in the fall of 1841, with Mr. Mackay, a congressman from New York, has given a pleasant reminiscence of his pilgrimage, from which I quote the following interior:--

“The cottage,” he says, “had within it and about it the evidences of
a subtle, nice, clear refinement; of a thought that, even out of the
solitude of a rural life, could frame the pleasant things that make
the four and twenty hours turn to soft and kindly ways.… Mr. Willis
opened the door, received us cordially; and we found, in his
conversation and in such observation of all around us as a guest
might in propriety make, the hours of the evening as brilliant
in-doors as without. That thoroughly well-bred lady, so unpretending
and gentle, was at the table; at her feet, a large greyhound. On the
side table stood a large tulip-shaped vase of stained glass, whose
burden was, of course, bright flowers. There was everywhere copious
evidence that it was a home for literature. The books were abundant
and were gayly set.… And there was a miniature of lovely Mrs.
Willis. It was painted by Saunders, who had been a pet of the King
of Hanover. His exquisite work deserved the smile of royalty and,
what is better, of beauty. Amidst such scenes and the conversation
which came of such associations, our night went on. We left the lawn
of Glenmary with the memories of a night of romance.… Mr. Willis
belonged to a past school of men. He had the ways and tastes of a
more isolated and restricted society than belongs to our day, when
fortunes are fusing men and manners into one great glittering ball
that rolls through the year, before us and over us; but Mr.
Willis--whether in his early days, when the prince regent ruled, or
in our day, when we all rule, monarchs of ephemera--was an author
whose writings have added to what Doctor Johnson calls ‘the gayety
of mankind.’ He believed them better and higher and more
philosophical than this; and I believe there was truth and right in
his thought.”

The “Letters from Under a Bridge” are so heartsome in feeling and so much mellower and more leisurely in style than Willis’s later work, that one naturally speculates, in reading them, as to what might have been the effect upon his literary product had fortune granted his wish, to be allowed to end his days at Glenmary. Would study and the quiet of nature have ripened it to something deeper and richer than anything that he has left? Or would he have grown rusty with absence from the stir of cities and the gay society that had hitherto seemed his congenial element? It is impossible to answer this question with confidence. Undoubtedly his later work would have been other and better than it was if he had had the time to select and condense. He would have written more and scribbled less. But whether he would ever have excelled the best parts of his earlier writings is doubtful. His talent was of the kind which discipline does not always improve. It was the expression of his temperament, fresh, facile, spontaneous, but impatient of continuance. He was best at a dash--a sketch, or a short tale. His gift was of the sort that shows more gracefully in youth than age. _Idem manebat neque idem decebat._ It is not improbable that, even under the most favoring conditions, he would have kept on writing Jottings, Loiterings, Hurrygraphs, etc., lacking, as he evidently did, the power of construction required for a large and serious work. But this speculation is perhaps an idle one. Whether or not it lay in his nature to sing or to say that “something” of which Ben Jonson tells, “that must and shall be sung high and aloof,” fate denied him the proof. His necessities drove him back to the city and the editor’s chair, to write hastily and incessantly for a livelihood. Possibly the finer work might have shaped itself in silence, but “not in these noises.” Meanwhile his present content found utterance in his “Reverie at Glenmary,”--a single breath of gratitude to God,--the most sincerely devout of all his religious poems, and pathetic when one reflects how soon the sheltered happiness for which it gives thanks was to pass away.

Not long after his return to America, he had begun to try his hand at play writing. The “Mirror” of August 19, 1837, gave passages from a five act tragedy that he had lately completed, “Bianca Visconti, or the Heart Overtasked,” with the announcement that it was to be acted at the Park Theatre on the 24th instant. It was founded upon the life of Francesco Sforza, a soldier of fortune in the fourteenth century, who obtained the hand of Bianca, daughter to the Duke of Milan, and thereby succeeded to the duchy. The play was composed expressly for Josephine Clifton, a popular actress of some talent, and of great physical force and beauty of the large, queenly type, who took the part of the heroine. The _rôle_ of Pasquali, “a whimsical poet,” was written for Harry Placide, a favorite player in his generation, whose “Grandfather Whitehead” and other impersonations, humorous or pathetic, are still affectionately remembered by old play-goers. When this tragedy was published in the spring of 1839, with some changes in the fifth act, the “Mirror” declared that its success upon the stage had been complete. This was an overstatement, but whatever partial success or qualified failure it may have met with on its first representation, Willis felt sufficiently encouraged to persevere in his dramatic experiments. In a private letter from New York, December 15, 1838, he said that Colman had just given him $300 for an edition of “Bianca,” which he considered a good price, as Epes Sargent had sold his “Velasco” for $60. Wallack, he continues, who managed the National, the rival theatre to the Park, was full of admiration of it, and was coming to see the whole play rehearsed. Willis was going to charge him $1,000 for the use of it, and a benefit which, he calculated, would be equal to from $500 to $700 more. On the 1st of September, 1837, just after the first representation of “Bianca” at the Park, Willis entered into an agreement with its manager, Turner Merritt, by which the latter agreed to pay him $1,000, one year from date, provided he should write a comedy for Miss Clifton, pronounced successful by her after three months’ acting. In pursuance of this agreement, he had ready in two months “The Betrothal,” a comedy, which was announced in the “Mirror” of November 25th as to be acted at the Park on the Monday following. The notice added that the play would probably take with the public, as it had pleased the actors,--a good criterion. “The Betrothal,” however, was unequivocally damned, much to Willis’s mortification, though not to his permanent discouragement. The text of this play was never published, nor was that of another comedy, “Imei, the Jew,” with which he was busy in January, 1839, and of which he seems to have finished only a few scenes. Rumors were in circulation that Willis had sued Miss Clifton for failing to complete the engagement in the matter of “The Betrothal,” but these were officially contradicted in the “Mirror.” He had better luck with another comedy, successively entitled “Dying for Him,” “The Usurer Matched,” and “Tortesa the Usurer,” based on the Florentine story of Genevra d’Amori and written with more care than his two previous attempts. He prepared the way for its representation by printing four installments of it in the “Mirror;” and about a year after the first of these appeared it was put on at the National, April 8, 1839, with Wallack cast for Tortesa, the principal character. It ran four times the first week, and kept the stage to the 20th, “being received,” said the “Mirror,” “with acclamations by one of the most crowded and fashionable audiences ever assembled within the walls of a theatre.” In spite of this glowing language, “Tortesa” seems to have had a _succès d’estime_ merely. Wallack had agreed to pay the author one half the proceeds of the fourth, ninth, thirteenth, and eighteenth nights, after deducting $300 each night for expenses. If it was produced in England, Willis was to have one third of the proceeds of the fourth, eighth, and twelfth performances there. Wallack did bring it out at the Surrey Theatre in London, in August of this same year. Willis was in England at the time and wrote to Dr. Porter that it had had “a splendid run--crammed houses every night.” It shared the honors of the “first night” with Willis’s old adversary, Captain Marryat, whose “Phantom Ship” was the afterpiece. All this brought the author nothing but empty glory, as Wallack was distressed for money and could not afford to pay him his one third share of the profits. “So I gave it up,” wrote Willis, “and he pocketed the whole. By the way,” he adds, “I have two more nights at the National which I authorize you to look after and receive for me. The thirteenth and eighteenth representations remain for me. Will you see if you can get Kean or Vandenhoff in for Angelo on those nights? I have seen a great deal of Kean since I have been here, and he is truly a good fellow and a great actor. He breakfasted with us a day or two ago and Mary was very much interested that he should do well in America. I have given Vandenhoff ‘Bianca’ for himself and daughter to play in America. She is a fine, handsome girl, but I have not seen her play.”

These two plays of Willis did not add many leaves to his laurels. His genius was undramatic; in his stories the dramatic element is not the most pronounced. Both “Bianca” and “Tortesa” have passages which are good as poetry or declamation, and here and there occur bits of spirited dialogue; but in general the characters are only half vitalized, the situations are not firmly grasped and presented, and the language is stilted. In short, they are book plays merely, with nothing to distinguish them from the numerous experiments of other American literary gentlemen who have essayed to feed the stage with manuscripts from their library tables. In “Bianca Visconti” the main situation--the heroine’s connivance at her brother’s murder, in order that her husband might become Duke of Milan--is strongly imagined but feebly carried out. One cannot help thinking how Victor Hugo, for instance, would have dealt with this motive. “Tortesa the Usurer” seems to be made up of hints from Shakespeare. The hero has some slight resemblance to Shylock; the heroine drinks a sleeping potion, like Juliet, to escape an odious marriage; and in the last act, which is constructed with some skill, she stands in the frame of a picture, like Hermione in “Winter’s Tale,” though with a different purpose.

Willis’s official connection with the “New York Mirror” had stopped with the termination of his “Pencillings,” and after January 16, 1836, his name ceased to appear at the head of the editorial column. His contributions, however, as we have seen, went on, and included not only “Letters from Under a Bridge,” but poems and miscellaneous correspondence, besides a half dozen of stories, afterwards collected in “Romance of Travel.” The verse contributions were added to the American edition of “Melanie,” 1837, which contained a number of things written since the appearance of the English edition two years previous. Notable among these were “Lines on Leaving Europe,” “To a Face Beloved,”--both of which have been mentioned,--“To Ermengarde,” and a song-like little piece entitled “Spring,” the opening lines of which are especially Willisy:--

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

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

THE PIRATE,

A GAZETTE OF LITERATURE, FASHION, AND NOVELTY.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The great characteristic of high society in England, Mr. Willis
assures us, is admiration of literary talent. As some captain of
free lancers of former days elbowed his way through royal palaces
with the eyes of all womankind after him, so in the present time, a
man by being a famous _Free Pencil_ may achieve a similar
distinction. This truly surprising truth forms the text of almost
every one of Mr. Willis’s ‘Dashes’ at English and Continental life.”

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