The verses accompanying this letter were the rough draft of the ode “To Andrew Jackson,” numbered CCLXXXVIII. in Landor’s miscellaneous poems. On his side Willis could not thank Landor enough for his introduction to Lady Blessington. “She is my lode star and most valued friend,” he writes, “for whose acquaintance I am so much indebted to you that you will find it difficult in your lifetime to diminish my obligations.”
In England Willis fell at once upon his feet. While traveling on the Continent, his intimacies had been principally among Englishmen and Americans, and though well received in the native society of Florence by virtue of his diplomatic credentials, he had remained, after all, a stranger and a looker-on. A foreign language imperfectly learned is a barrier to complete intercourse even in the most cosmopolitan society. In France and Italy he had made acquaintances; in England he made friends and formed domestic ties which bound him to the country as long as he lived. He did not fancy the French and Italians, though he found their cities interesting to visit; but he liked the English and they treated him well. No American author except Irving and Cooper had received from them a tithe of the attentions which they accorded to Willis; and Cooper, though personally well liked, had offended British prejudices by his pugnacious writings and was more popular in Paris than in London. The next two years of Willis’s life were perhaps the acme of his social and literary career, and he always looked back to them as the brightest spot in his memory. The experience was not altogether healthy for him, though it was stimulating at the time. He was not spoiled by success, but he was naturally a little intoxicated by it, and a little dazzled by the courtly splendors of the circles to which he was now admitted. When he went back to America, he did so reluctantly, and with the hope of returning soon to make his home in England. He found the change to the plainer conditions of American life a chilling one, and he had acquired habits and standards which did not fit in easily with the requirements of a journalist’s career in a new country.
As soon as he reached Dover he began to have that feeling of being at home once more which is familiar to American travelers who make their first entrance to England by way of the Channel. Everything was new, and yet nothing was strange. The blazing coal fires—it was June—the warm carpets, the quiet coffee-room with the London newspapers on the table, the subdued, respectful servants, the mother-tongue again, the plain richness of the furnishings, the snugness and comfort,—the Anglo-Saxon knows by these that he is once more in Anglo-Saxondom. Arrived at London, he lost no time in delivering his note of introduction from Landor to Lady Blessington, who immediately asked him to dinner and presented him to the beaux esprits who frequented Seamore Place. For this charming woman her young protégé conceived at once the strongest admiration, tinctured, it may be, by a tenderer sentiment. Her wit and beauty, her cordiality and social graces, had drawn about her a court of statesmen, authors, and notabilities of all kinds, over whom she presided like the queen of a Parisian salon. It was natural that Willis should have formed, or at least should have politely expressed, an exaggerated estimate of her literary gifts. To posterity, who have not the advantage of her personal acquaintance, Lady Blessington’s writings seem of very little importance, with the possible exception of her “Conversations with Lord Byron,” whose subject lends it a certain claim to remembrance. At her house Willis met Bulwer, Moore, Lord Durham, Disraeli, James Smith, Galt, Procter, Fonblanque of the “Examiner,” and many other distinguished men whose portraits he has given in the “Pencillings” with a sharpness of outline which makes them increasingly valuable as their figures recede into history. It is not at all strange that an enthusiastic and fanciful young American, without antecedents, ushered all at once into a roomful of people about whom all the world was talking, should have been a little imposed upon by these exalted personages. He was not in a critical mood, and it may be freely conceded that he had too high an opinion of Barry Cornwall’s poetry, and of the electroplated novels of the authors of “Pelham” and “Vivian Grey;” and that he exclaimed more than was necessary over the varied accomplishments of that gorgeous dandy—Byron’s Cupidon déchainé—the Count d’Orsay.
Still he kept his head fairly well. Fortunate in his introductions, he was the man to make the most of his chances. His talent for society and his easy assurance put him quickly de niveau with his new acquaintances. He was not at all above owning that the English nobility, for example, impressed his imagination. He liked to stay at their houses; he enjoyed the wealth, the grandeur, the historic associations that surrounded them. His appetite for luxury was gratified by the perfection of all their appointments in the art of living. The fineness of their manners pleased his aristocratic tastes and he could not sufficiently admire the high-bred women and the simple, cordial, dignified gentlemen with whom he dined or drove through the cultivated landscapes. But Willis was no snob or vulgar tuft hunter. His enjoyment of his privileges was accompanied with an entire reserve of his self-respect. He liked the company of those whom Dr. Johnson was wont to call “the great.” But though he loved a lord, he preferred a commoner, if the commoner was preferable. The Duke of Richelieu, whom he had met at Lady Blessington’s, and previously at the French court, he described as “the inheritor of nothing but the name of his great ancestor, a dandy and a fool.”
“What a star is mine!” he wrote in a letter to his sister Julia, three days after his landing in England. “All the best society of London exclusives is now open to me—me! a sometime apprentice at setting types—me! without a sou in the world beyond what my pen brings me, and with not only no influence from friends at home, but a world of envy and slander at my back. Thank heaven, there is not a countryman of mine, except Washington Irving, who has even the standing in England which I have got in three days only. I should not boast of it if I had not been wounded and stung to the quick by the calumnies and falsehoods of every description which come to me from America. But let it pass! It reconciles me to my exile at least, and may drive me to adopt the mother country for my own. In a literary way, I have had already offers from the ‘Court Magazine,’ the ‘Metropolitan Monthly,’ and the ‘New Monthly’ of the first price for my articles. I sent a short tale, written in one day, to the ‘Court Magazine’ yesterday, and the publishers gave me eight guineas for it at once. They all pay in this proportion, and you can easily see, with my present resources of matter, how well I can live. 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, with as much as I could spend in the year. Except my family now, I have forgotten everybody in America. [Here follows the passage about Mary Benjamin already quoted in chapter III.] I never can return, however, till I can pay my debts, and it will take me long to lay up three thousand dollars. When I can do it, I shall, and make America a farewell visit for years.”
Willis followed up his advantages assiduously. He went constantly to Lady Blessington’s, exchanged calls with Moore, breakfasted with Procter and also with that entertaining diarist, Henry Crabb Robinson, to whom he brought a letter from Landor, and in whose rooms in the Temple he met Charles and Mary Lamb. His Parisian acquaintance, Dr. Bowring, was back in London and introduced him to a number of people. At an evening party at the Bulwers’ he met Sir Leicester Stanhope, who had been with Byron in Greece, and with whose beautiful wife Willis became quite a favorite, composing his verses “Upon the Portrait of the Hon. Mrs. Stanhope” to accompany an engraving of her in Lady Blessington’s “Book of Beauty.” At the Stanhopes’ he met that famous pair of beauties, “the Sheridan girls,” Mrs. Norton and her sister, Lady Dufferin, to the former of whom he had addressed a poem written at Paris in 1832 and printed in the “Mirror” of July 7, 1834.
It was the height of the London season, and the opera was in full blast, with Grisi singing and Fanny Elssler in the ballet. Willis was admitted to the Alfred Club, and invitations to dinners and parties began to pour in upon him. All these gayeties he described in his letters to Morris, which, losing somewhat, it may be, in picturesqueness, gained greatly in personal interest during his stay in England. It was in the course of this first summer in London that he got acquainted with Mary Russell Mitford, who invited him to spend a week at Reading, and with whom he maintained for some time a friendly correspondence. A letter to Miss Jephson, July 23, 1834, gives her first impression of him:—
“I also liked very much Mr. Willis, an American author, whose ‘Unwritten Poetry’ and ‘Unwritten Philosophy’ you may remember in my American book,[2] and who is now understood to be here to publish his account of England. He is a very elegant young man, and more like one of the best of our peers’ sons than a rough republican.”