Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century

by George Paston

Willis fell into conversation with the good-natured, though gouty James Smith, who talked to him of America, and declared that there never was so delightful a fellow as Washington Irving. 'I was once,' he said, 'taken down with him into the country by a merchant to dinner. Our friend stopped his carriage at the gate of his park, and asked if we would walk through the grounds to the house. Irving refused, and held me down by the coat-tails, so that we drove on to the house together, leaving our host to follow on foot. "I make it a principle," said Irving, "never to walk with a man through his own grounds. I have no idea of praising a thing whether I like it or not. You and I will do them to-morrow by ourselves."' 'The Rejected Addresses,' continues Willis, 'got on his crutches about three o'clock in the morning, and I made my exit with the rest, thanking Heaven that, though in a strange country, my mother-tongue was the language of its men of genius.'

One of the most interesting passages in the Pencillings is that in which Willis describes a breakfast at Crabb Robinson's chambers in the Temple, where he met Charles and Mary Lamb, a privilege which he seems thoroughly to have appreciated. 'I never in my life,' he declares, 'had an invitation more to my taste. The Essays of Elia are certainly the most charming things in the world, and it has been, for the last ten years, my highest compliment to the literary taste of a friend to present him with a copy.... I arrived half an hour before Lamb, and had time to learn something of his peculiarities. Some family circumstances have tended to depress him of late years, and unless excited by convivial intercourse, he never shows a trace of what he once was. He is excessively given to mystifying his friends, and is never so delighted as when he has persuaded some one into a belief in one of his grave inventions.... There was a rap at the door at last, and enter a gentleman in black small clothes and gaiters, short and very slight in his person, his hair just sprinkled with grey, a beautiful, deep-set, grey eye, aquiline nose, and a very indescribable mouth. His sister, whose literary reputation is very closely associated with her brother's, came in after him. She is a small, bent figure, evidently a victim to ill-health, and hears with difficulty. Her face has been, I should think, a fine, handsome one, and her bright grey eye is still full of intelligence and fire....

'I had set a large arm-chair for Miss Lamb. "Don't take it, Mary," said Lamb, pulling it away from her very gravely. "It looks as if you were going to have a tooth drawn." The conversation was very local, but perhaps in this way I saw more of the author, for his manner of speaking of their mutual friends, and the quaint humour with which he complained of one, and spoke well of another, was so completely in the vein of his inimitable writings, that I could have fancied myself listening to an audible composition of new Elia. Nothing could be more delightful than the kindness and affection between the brother and sister, though Lamb was continually taking advantage of her deafness to mystify her on every topic that was started. "Poor Mary," he said, "she hears all of an epigram but the point." "What are you saying of me, Charles?" she asked. "Mr. Willis," said he, raising his voice, "admires your Confessions of a Drunkard very much, and I was saying that it was no merit of yours that you understood the subject."

'The conversation presently turned upon literary topics, and Lamb observed: "I don't know much of your American authors. Mary, there, devours Cooper's novels with a ravenous appetite with which I have no sympathy. The only American book I ever read twice was the Journal of Edward Woolman, a Quaker preacher and tinker, whose character is one of the finest I ever met. He tells a story or two about negro slaves that brought the tears into my eyes. I can read no prose now, though Hazlitt sometimes, to be sure--but then Hazlitt is worth all the modern prose-writers put together." I mentioned having bought a copy of Elia the last day I was in America, to send as a parting gift to one of the most lovely and talented women in the country. "What did you give for it?" asked Lamb. "About seven-and-six." "Permit me to pay you that," said he, and with the utmost earnestness he counted the money out on the table. "I never yet wrote anything that would sell," he continued. "I am the publisher's ruin. My last poem won't sell a copy. Have you seen it, Mr. Willis?" I had not. "It is only eighteenpence, and I'll give you sixpence towards it," and he described to me where I should find it sticking up in a shop-window in the Strand.

'Lamb ate nothing, and complained in a querulous tone of the veal pie. There was a kind of potted fish, which he had expected that our friend would procure for him. He inquired whether there was not a morsel left in the bottom of the last pot. Mr. Robinson was not sure. "Send and see," said Lamb, "and if the pot has been cleaned, bring me the lid. I think the sight of it would do me good." The cover was brought, upon which there was a picture of the fish. Lamb kissed it with a reproachful look at his friend, and then left the table and began to wander round the room with a broken, uncertain step, as if he almost forgot to put one leg before the other. His sister rose after a while, and commenced walking up and down in the same manner on the opposite side of the table, and in the course of half an hour they took their leave.' Landor, in commenting on this passage, says it is evident that Willis 'fidgeted the Lambs,' and seems rather unaccountably annoyed at his having alluded to Crabb Robinson simply as 'a barrister.'

In London Willis appears to have fallen upon his feet from the very first. To the end of his life he looked back upon his first two years in England as the happiest and most successful period in his whole career. It was small wonder that he became a little dazzled and intoxicated by the brilliancy of his surroundings, which spoilt him for the homelier conditions of American life. 'What a star is mine,' he wrote to his sister Julia, three days after landing at Dover. 'All the best society of London exclusives is now open to me--me! without a sou in my pocket beyond what my pen brings me, and with not only no influence from friends at home, but with a world of envy and slander at my back.... In a literary way I have already had offers from the Court Magazine, the Metropolitan, and the New Monthly, of the first price for my articles. I sent a short tale, written in one day, to the Court Magazine, and they gave me eight guineas for it at once. I lodge in Cavendish Square, the most fashionable part of the town, paying a guinea a week for my lodgings, and am as well off as if I had been the son of the President.'

Willis was constantly at Lady Blessington's house, where he met some of the best masculine society of the day. At one dinner-party among his fellow-guests were D'Israeli, Bulwer, Procter (Barry Cornwall), Lord Durham, and Sir Martin Shee. It was his first sight of Dizzy, whom he found looking out of the window with the last rays of sunlight reflected on the gorgeous gold flowers of an embroidered waistcoat. A white stick with a black cord and tassel, and a quantity of chains about his neck and pocket, rendered him rather a conspicuous object. 'D'Israeli,' says our chronicler, 'has one of the most remarkable faces I ever saw. He is vividly pale, and but for the energy of his action and the strength of his lungs, would seem a victim to consumption. His eye is as black as Erebus, and has the most mocking, lying-in-wait expression conceivable. His mouth is alive with a kind of impatient nervousness, and when he has burst forth with a particularly successful cataract of expression, it assumes a curl of triumphant scorn that would be worthy of Mephistopheles. A thick, heavy mass of jet-black ringlets falls over his left cheek almost to his collarless stock, while on the right temple it is parted and put away with the smooth carefulness of a girl's, and shines most unctuously with "thy incomparable oil, Macassar."' Willis was always interested in dress, being himself a born dandy, and he was inclined to judge a man by the cut of his coat and the set of his hat. On this occasion he remarks that Bulwer was very badly dressed as usual, while Count D'Orsay was very splendid, but quite indefinable. 'He seemed showily dressed till you looked to particulars, and then it seemed only a simple thing well fitted to a very magnificent person.'

The conversation ran at first on Sir Henry Taylor's new play, Philip van Artevelde, which the company thought overrated, and then passed to Beckford, of Vathek fame, who had already retired from the world, and was living at Bath in his usual eccentric fashion. Dizzy was the only person present who had met him, and, declares Willis, 'I might as well attempt to gather up the foam of the sea as to convey an idea of the extraordinary language in which he clothed his description. There were at least five words in every sentence which must have been very much astonished at the use to which they were put, and yet no others apparently could so well have conveyed his idea. He talked like a racehorse approaching the winning-post, every muscle in action, and the utmost energy of expression flowing out in every burst. It is a great pity he is not in Parliament.'

At midnight Lady Blessington left the table, when the conversation took a political turn, but D'Israeli soon dashed off again with a story of an Irish dragoon who was killed in the Peninsular. 'His arm was shot off, and he was bleeding to death. When told he could not live, he called for a large silver goblet, out of which he usually drank his claret. He held it to the gushing artery, and filled it to the brim, then poured it slowly out upon the ground, saying, "If that had been shed for old Ireland." You can have no idea how thrillingly this little story was told. Fonblanque, however, who is a cold political satirist, could see nothing in a man's "decanting his claret" that was in the least sublime, so "Vivian Grey" got into a passion, and for a while was silent.'

Willis was now fairly launched in London society, literary and fashionable. He went to the Opera to hear Grisi, then young and pretty, and Lady Blessington pointed out the beautiful Mrs. Norton, looking like a queen, and Lord Brougham flirting desperately with a lovely woman, 'his mouth going with the convulsive twitch that so disfigures him, and his most unsightly of pug-noses in the strongest relief against the red lining of the box.' He breakfasted with 'Barry Cornwall,' whose poetry he greatly admired, and was introduced to the charming Mrs. Procter and the 'yellow-tressed Adelaide,' then only eight or nine years old. Procter gave his visitor a volume of his own poems, and told him anecdotes of the various authors he had known, Hazlitt, Lamb, Keats, and Shelley. Another interesting entertainment was an evening party at Edward Bulwer's house. Willis arrived at eleven, and found his hostess alone, playing with a King Charles' spaniel, while she awaited her guests.