Lady Morgan, though now an octogenarian, was by no means pleased at these remarks. She still prided herself on her fascinations, was never tired and never bored, and looked upon any one who died under a hundred years of age as a suicide. 'You have more strength and spirit, as well as more genius, than any of us,' wrote Abraham Hayward to her. 'We must go back to the brilliant women of the eighteenth century to find anything like a parallel to you and your soirées.' But bronchitis was an enemy with which even her high spirit was powerless to cope. She had an attack in 1858, but threw it off, and on Christmas Day gave a dinner, at which she told Irish stories with all her old vivacity, and sang 'The Night before Larry was Stretched.' On St. Patrick's Day, 1859, she gave a musical matinée, but caught cold the following week, and after a short illness, died on April 16th.
Thus ended the career of one of the most flattered and best abused women of the century. Held up as the Irish Madame de Staël by her admirers, and run down as a monster of impudence and iniquity by her enemies, it is no wonder that her character, by no means innately refined, became hardened, if not coarsened, by so unenviable a notoriety. Still, to her credit be it remembered that she never lost a friend, and that she converted more than one impersonal enmity (as in the case of Jeffrey and Lockhart) into a personal friendship. In spite of her passion for the society of the great, she wrote and worked throughout her whole career for the cause of liberty, and she was ever on the side of the oppressed. An incorrigible flirt before marriage, she developed into an irreproachable matron, while her natural frivolity and feather-headedness never tempted her to neglect her work, nor interfered with her faculty for making most advantageous business arrangements. 'With all her frank vanity,' we are told, 'she had shrewd good sense, and she valued herself much more on her industry than on her genius, because the one, she said, she owed to her organisation, but the other was a virtue of her own rearing.' It would be impossible to conclude a sketch of Lady Morgan more appropriately than by the following lines of Leigh Hunt, which she herself was fond of quoting, and in which her personal idiosyncrasies are pleasantly touched off:--
'And dear Lady Morgan, see, see, when she comes,
With her pulses all beating for freedom like drums,
So Irish, so modish, so mixtish, so wild;
So committing herself as she talks--like a child.
So trim, yet so easy--polite, yet high-hearted,
That truth and she, try all she can, won't be parted;
She'll put you your fashions, your latest new air,
And then talk so frankly, she'll make you all stare.'
PART I
Any fool, said a wise man, can write an interesting book if he will only take the trouble to set down exactly what he has seen and heard. Unfortunately, it is only a very special kind of fool who is capable of recording exactly what he sees and hears--a rare bird who flourishes perhaps once in a century, and is remembered long after wiser men are forgotten. It is not contended that the subject of this memoir was a fool in the crude sense of the word, though he was responsible for a good deal of folly; but he was inspired by that impertinent curiosity, that happy lack of dignity, and that passion for the trivial and the intimate, which, when joined to a natural talent for observation and a picturesque narrative style, enable the possessor to illuminate a circle and a period in a fashion never achieved by the most learned lucubrations of the profoundest scholars. Thanks to his Boswellising powers, 'Namby-Pamby Willis,' as he was called by his numerous enemies, has left an admirably vivid picture of the literary society of London in the 'thirties,' a picture that steadily increases in value as the period at which it was painted recedes into the past.
Willis came of a family that had contrived, not unsuccessfully, to combine religion with journalism. His immediate forebears seem to have been persons of marked individuality, and his pedigree was, for the New World, of quite respectable antiquity. The founder of the family, George Willis, was born early in the seventeenth century, and emigrated to New England about 1730, where he worked at his trade of brickmaking and building. Our hero's great-grandfather was a patriotic sailmaker, who assisted at a certain historic entertainment, when tar, feathers, and hot tea were administered gratis to his Majesty's tax-collector at Boston. His wife, Abigail, was a lady of character and maxims, who saved some tea for her private use when three hundred cases were emptied into Boston Harbour, and exhorted her family never to eat brown bread when they could get white, and never to go in at the back door when they might go in at the front. The son of this worthy couple conducted a Whig newspaper in Boston during the Rebellion, and became one of the pioneer journalists of the West. His son, Nathaniel's sire, was invited, in 1803, to start a newspaper at Portland, Maine, where the future Penciller was born in 1806, one year before his fellow-townsman Longfellow.