While at Florence, Willis had been introduced by Greenough to Walter Savage Landor, who was then living in his villa at Fiesole. Landor entertained him hospitably, and, at parting, made him a present of a Cuyp, for which Willis had expressed admiration, and gave him some valuable letters to people in England. One of these was to the Countess of Blessington, and with it Landor intrusted to his American guest the manuscript of his “Citation and Examination of William Shakespeare,” for delivery to the same lady, under whose superintendence it was duly published the following autumn. He also put into his hands a package whose temporary disappearance was the cause of some blame attaching to Willis. Landor’s own story of the transaction, told in an addendum to the first edition of “Pericles and Aspasia,” is as follows:—
“At this time an American traveler passed through Tuscany and favored me with a visit at my country seat. He expressed a wish to reprint in America a large selection of my ‘Imaginary Conversations,’ omitting the political. He assured me they were the most thumbed books on his table. With a smile at so energetic an expression of perhaps an undesirable distinction, I offered him unreservedly and unconditionally my only copy of the five printed volumes, interlined and interleaved in most places, together with my MS. of the sixth, unpublished. He wrote to me on his arrival in England, telling me that they were already on their voyage to their destination.”
It seems from Willis’s public explanation in “Letters from under a Bridge,” that he received the volumes, which were in a dilapidated condition, at the moment of starting, and not knowing how to add them to his baggage he—rather carelessly, perhaps—“sent them with a note to Theodore Fay, who was then in Florence, requesting him to forward them to America by ship from Leghorn.” Fay accordingly committed them to a Mr. Miles, an American straw-bonnet-maker, who did send them to New York, where Willis expected to follow in the course of the summer and take charge of them. Instead of doing this, he spent the next two years in England, and meanwhile wrote to Landor that the package had been left with Miles, to forward it to America. Landor “called in consequence at the shop of this person, who denied any knowledge of the books.” These, however, after a brief stay in New York, were consigned to Willis at London, “and Fay and Mr. Landor both happening there together, the explanation was made, and the books and manuscripts restored unharmed to the author,” but not in time to keep Willis from going down “to posterity astride the finis of ‘Pericles and Aspasia.’ I trust,” he continues, “that his [Landor’s] biographer will either let me slip off at Lethe’s wharf, by expurgating the book of me, or do me justice in a note.” In spite of which trust the biographers have been a little hard on Willis in the matter. Sidney Colvin, heartened, probably, by the “Quarterly’s” onslaught, denounces him as “that most assiduous of flatterers and least delicate of gossips,” and says that he gave Landor occasion to repent of his hospitality by consigning his books to America and then basely lingering on in England “in obsequious enjoyment of the great company among whom he found himself invited:” while Forster, after declaring that Willis’s “fuss and fury of boundless hero-worship found in Landor an easy victim,” adds that “Landor will perhaps be thought not without excuse for the way in which he always afterwards spoke of Mr. N. P. Willis.” But whatever inconvenience the latter may have caused in this business, he certainly made the amende honorable in the letter to Landor from which Mr. Forster quotes:—
“I have to beg,” he writes, “that you will lay to the charge of England a part of the annoyance you will feel about your books and manuscripts. I was never more flattered by a commission and I have never fulfilled one so ill. They went to America via Leghorn, and I expected fully to have arrived in New York a month or two after them.”
Landor was a man of noble courtesy and most generous nature, although, to put it mildly, often unreasonable. The delay and uncertainty about his precious manuscripts were certainly vexatious and may, very likely, as his biographer implies, have influenced “the way in which he always afterwards spoke” of the man who, innocently enough, made him the trouble. But up to the time of this little misunderstanding, his feelings toward Willis, as expressed in their correspondence, were exceedingly cordial; as will sufficiently appear from the following letter, undated, but written, probably, during the winter of 1834-35:—
Mr dear Sir,—By a singular and strange coincidence, I wrote this morning and put into the post office a letter directed to you at New York. And now comes Mr. Macquay, bringing me one from you, delightful in all respects. I know not any man in whose fame and fortunes I feel a deeper interest than in yours. Pardon me if I am writing all this illegibly in some degree, for certainly I shall scarcely be in time for the post with all the agility both of hand and legs. For I am resolved to transcribe an ode to your President in spite of the resistance his [MS. illegible] has met with,—indeed, the more am I resolved for this very reason. I envy you the evenings you pass with the most accomplished and graceful of all our fashionable world, my excellent friend, Lady Blessington. Do not believe that I have written any paper in the magazine. Whatever I write I submit to Lady B. My “Examination of Shakespeare” I published for a particular and private purpose, which, however, it has not answered. I should not be surprised if it procured me a hundred pounds or more within seven years. Had I known of your being in England I should have ordered a copy to have been sent to you. Pray tell Lady Blessington I have at last received her Byron from Colonel Hughes. It came a week ago. I think better of him than I did, and thank her for it. Nevertheless, I suspect she has given him powers of ratiocination which he never attained. I must now try to recollect my verses. So adieu, and believe me,
Ever yours most sincerely,
W. S. Landor.
Pray write to me when you find time.