'Many of this person's discoveries,' continues Lockhart, warming to his work, 'will be received with ridicule in his own country, where the doors of the best houses were probably not opened to him as liberally as those of the English nobility. In short, we are apt to consider him as a just representative--not of the American mind and manners generally--but only of the young men of fair education among the busy, middling orders of mercantile cities. In his letters from Gordon Castle there are bits of solid, full-grown impudence and impertinence; while over not a few of the paragraphs is a varnish of conceited vulgarity which is too ludicrous to be seriously offensive.... We can well believe that Mr. Willis depicted the sort of society that most interests his countrymen, "born to be slaves and struggling to be lords," their servile adulation of rank and talent; their stupid admiration of processions and levees, are leading features of all the American books of travel.... We much doubt if all the pretty things we have quoted will so far propitiate Lady Blessington as to make her again admit to her table the animal who has printed what ensues. [Here follows the report of Moore's conversation on the subject of O'Connell.] As far as we are acquainted with English or American literature, this is the first example of a man creeping into your home, and forthwith, before your claret is dry on his lips, printing table-talk on delicate subjects, and capable of compromising individuals.'
The Quarterly having thus given the lead, the rest of the Tory magazines gaily followed suit. Maginn flourished his shillelagh, and belaboured his victim with a brutality that has hardly ever been equalled, even by the pioneer journals of the Wild West. 'This is a goose of a book,' he begins, 'or if anybody wishes the idiom changed, the book of a goose. There is not an idea in it beyond what might germinate in the brain of a washerwoman.' He then proceeds to call the author by such elegant names as 'lickspittle,' 'beggarly skittler,' jackass, ninny, haberdasher, 'fifty-fifth rate scribbler of gripe-visited sonnets,' and 'namby-pamby writer in twaddling albums kept by the mustachioed widows or bony matrons of Portland Place.'
The people whose hospitality Willis was accused of violating wrote to assure him of the pleasure his book had given them. Lord Dalhousie writes: 'We all agree in one sentiment, that a more amusing and delightful production was never issued by the press. The Duke and Duchess of Gordon were here lately, and expressed themselves in similar terms.' Lady Blessington did not withdraw her friendship, but Willis admits, in one of his letters, that he had no deeper regret than that his indiscretion should have checked the freedom of his approach to her. As a result of the slashing reviews, the book sold with the readiness of a succés de scandale, though it had been so rigorously edited for the English market, that very few indiscretions were left.
The unexpurgated version of the Pencillings was, however, copied into the English papers and eagerly read by the persons most concerned, such as Fonblanque, who bitterly complained of the libel upon his personal appearance, O'Connell, who broke off his lifelong friendship with Moore, and Captain Marryat, who was furious at the remark that his 'gross trash' sold immensely in Wapping. Like Lockhart, he revenged himself by an article in his own magazine, the Metropolitan, in which he denounced Willis as a 'spurious attaché,' and made dark insinuations against his birth and parentage. This attack was too personal to be ignored. Willis demanded an apology, to which Marryat replied with a challenge, and after a long correspondence, most of which found its way into the Times, a duel was fixed to take place at Chatham. At the last moment the seconds managed to arrange matters between their principals, and the affair ended without bloodshed. This was fortunate for Willis, who was little used to fire-arms, whilst Marryat was a crack shot.
In his preface to the first edition of the Pencillings Willis explains that the ephemeral nature and usual obscurity of periodical correspondence gave a sufficient warrant to his mind that his descriptions would die where they first saw the light, and that therefore he had indulged himself in a freedom of detail and topic only customary in posthumous memoirs. He expresses his astonishment that this particular sin should have been visited upon him at a distance of three thousand miles, when the Quarterly reviewer's own fame rested on the more aggravated instance of a book of personalities published under the very noses of the persons described (Peter's Letters to his Kinsfolk). After observing that he was little disposed to find fault, since everything in England pleased him, he proceeds: 'In one single instance I indulged myself in strictures upon individual character.... I but repeated what I had said a thousand times, and never without an indignant echo to its truth, that the editor of that Review was the most unprincipled critic of the age. Aside from its flagrant literary injustice, we owe to the Quarterly every spark of ill-feeling that has been kept alive between England and America for the last twenty years. The sneers, the opprobrious epithets of this bravo of literature have been received in a country where the machinery of reviewing was not understood, as the voice of the English people, and animosity for which there was no other reason has been thus periodically fed and exasperated. I conceive it to be my duty as a literary man--I know it is my duty as an American--to lose no opportunity of setting my heel on this reptile of criticism. He has turned and stung me. Thank God, I have escaped the slime of his approbation.'
The winter was spent in London, and in the following March Willis brought out his Inklings of Adventure, a reprint of the stories that had appeared in various magazines over the signature of Philip Slingsby. These were supposed to be real adventures under a thin disguise of fiction, and the public eagerly read the tawdry little tales in the hope of discovering the identities of the dramatis personæ. The majority of the 'Inklings' deal with the romantic adventures of a young literary man who wins the affection of high-born ladies, and is made much of in aristrocratic circles. The author revels in descriptions of luxurious boudoirs in which recline voluptuous blondes or exquisite brunettes, with hearts always at the disposal of the all-conquering Philip Slingsby. Fashionable fiction, however, was unable to support the expense of a fashionable establishment, and in May 1836 the couple sailed for America. Willis hoped to obtain a diplomatic appointment, and return to Europe for good, but all his efforts were vain, and he was obliged to rely on his pen for a livelihood. His first undertaking was the letterpress for an illustrated volume on American scenery; and for some months he travelled about the country with the artist who was responsible for the illustrations. On one of his journeys he fell in love with a pretty spot on the banks of the Owego Creek, near the junction with the Susquehanna, and bought a couple of hundred acres and a house, which he named Glenmary after his wife.
Here the pair settled down happily for some five years, and here Willis wrote his pleasant, gossiping Letters from Under a Bridge for the New York Mirror. In these he prattled of his garden, his farm, his horses and dogs, and the strangers within his gates. Unfortunately, he was unable to devote much attention to his farm, which was said to grow nothing but flowers of speed, but was forced to spend more and more time in the editorial office, and to write hastily and incessantly for a livelihood. In 1839, owing to a temporary coolness with the proprietor of the Mirror, Willis accepted the proposal of his friend, Dr. Porter, that he should start a new weekly paper called the Corsair, one of a whole crop of pirate weeklies that started up with the establishment of the first service of Atlantic liners. In May 1839 the first steam-vessel that had crossed the ocean anchored in New York Harbour, and thenceforward it was possible to obtain supplies from the European literary markets within a fortnight of publication. It was arranged between Dr. Parker and Willis that the cream of the contemporary literature of England, France, and Germany should be conveyed to the readers of the Corsair, and of course there was no question of payment to the authors whose wares were thus appropriated.
The first number of the Corsair appeared in January 1839, but apparently piracy was not always a lucrative trade, for the paper had an existence of little more than a year. In the course of its brief career, however, Willis paid a flying visit to England, where he accomplished a great deal of literary business. He had written a play called The Usurer Matched, which was brought out by Wallack at the Surrey Theatre, and is said to have been played to crowded houses during a fairly long run, but neither this nor any of his other plays brought the author fame or fortune. During this season he published his Loiterings of Travel, a collection of stories and sketches, a fourth edition of the Pencillings, an English edition of Letters from Under a Bridge, and arranged with Virtue for works on Irish and Canadian scenery. In addition to all this, he was contributing jottings in London to the Corsair. As might be supposed, he had not much time for society, but he met a few old friends, made acquaintance with Kemble and Kean, went to a ball at Almack's, and was present at the famous Eglinton Tournament, which watery catastrophe he described for his paper. One of the most interesting of his new acquaintances was Thackeray, then chiefly renowned as a writer for the magazines. On July 26 Willis writes to Dr. Porter:--
'I have engaged a new contributor to the Corsair. Who do you think? The author of Yellowplush and Major Gahagan. 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. For myself, I think him the very best periodical writer alive. He is a royal, daring, fine creature too.' In his published Jottings, Willis told his readers that 'Mr. Thackeray, the author, breakfasted with me yesterday, and the Corsair will be delighted to hear that I have engaged this cleverest and most gifted of all the magazine-writers of London to become a regular correspondent of the Corsair.... Thackeray is a tall, athletic-looking man of about forty-five [he was actually only eight-and-twenty], with a look of talent that could never be mistaken. He is one of the most accomplished draughtsmen in England, as well as the most brilliant of periodical writers.' Thackeray only wrote eight letters for the Corsair, which were afterwards republished in his Paris Sketch-book. There is an allusion to this episode in The Adventures of Philip, the hero being invited to contribute to a New York journal called The Upper Ten Thousand, a phrase invented by Willis.
When the Corsair came to an untimely end, Willis had no difficulty in finding employment on other papers. He is said to have been the first American magazine-writer who was tolerably well paid, and at one time he was making about a thousand a year by periodical work. That his name was already celebrated among his own countrymen seems to be proved by the story of a commercial gentleman at a Boston tea-party who 'guessed that Goethe was the N.P. Willis of Germany.' The tales written about this time were afterwards collected into a volume called Dashes at Life with a Free Pencil. Thackeray made great fun of this work in the Edinburgh Review for October 1845, more especially of that portion called 'The Heart-book of Ernest Clay.' 'Like Caesar,' observed Thackeray, 'Ernest Clay is always writing of his own victories. Duchesses pine for him, modest virgins go into consumption and die for him, old grandmothers of sixty forget their families and their propriety, and fall on the neck of this "Free Pencil."' He quotes with delight the description of a certain Lady Mildred, one of Ernest Clay's numerous loves, who glides into the room at a London tea-party, 'with a step as elastic as the nod of a water-lily. A snowy turban, from which hung on either temple a cluster of crimson camellias still wet with the night-dew; long raven curls of undisturbed grace falling on shoulders of that indescribable and dewy coolness which follows a morning bath.' How naively, comments the critic, does this nobleman of nature recommend the use of this rare cosmetic!