After leaving Dalhousie, Willis spent a few days in Edinburgh, where he breakfasted with Professor Wilson, dined with Jeffrey, and danced till three o’clock in the morning at the Whig ball given in honor of Lord Grey. An attack of scrofula in his left leg, which he chose to describe in his correspondence with his English friends as “gout,” was aggravated by this last dissipation, and after two or three days more of poultices and plasters at Edinburgh, he took steamer to Aberdeen. “The loss of a wedding in Perthshire, by the way, a week’s deer-shooting in the forest of Athol, and a week’s fishing with a noble friend at Kinvara (long standing engagements all), I lay at the door of the Whigs.” He was laid up four days at Aberdeen, but finally recovered so far as to take coach seventy miles across country to Lochabers, a small town on the estates of the Duke of Gordon, to whom he brought a letter from Dalhousie. At Gordon Castle he found a distinguished company and passed ten days of unmixed enjoyment. There were thirty guests, among whom were Lord Aberdeen, who had been foreign secretary under Wellington; his son, Lord Claude Hamilton, a handsome young Cantab, who invited Willis to visit him at the university for a day’s hunt; Lord Aberdeen’s daughter, Lady Harriet Hamilton, “eighteen and brilliantly beautiful;” Lord and Lady Stormont, Lord Mandeville, Lord and Lady Morton, the Duchess of Richmond and her daughter, Lady Sophia Lennox, “the palest, proudest, and most high-born looking woman I ever saw.” This Lady Sophia Lennox was probably the original of Mildred Ashly, the disdainful beauty in “Paul Fane.” She seems to have impressed Willis as the type and embodiment of English aristocracy. In a letter to Lady Blessington, written from Gordon Castle and printed in Madden’s “Life of Lady Blessington,” he says, “There is a Lady Something, very pale, tall and haughty, twenty-three and sarcastic, whom I sat next at dinner yesterday,—a woman I came as near an antipathy for as is possible, with a very handsome face for an apology.” The same letter gives his opinion of his host and hostess more unreservedly than he could venture to do in “Pencillings.” The duke he describes as “a delightful, hearty old fellow full of fun and conversation.” Willis’s letters from Gordon Castle were perhaps more criticised than any other part of his “Pencillings” for their alleged violation of the sanctities of private life. They are, nevertheless, among the very best passages in his correspondence and, taken together, they present a brilliant picture of what is, doubtless, so far as material conditions go, the most perfect life lived by man; the life, namely, of a chosen party of guests, in late September, at the country seat of a great British noble.
From this pleasant province in the land of Cockayne, Willis departed toward the last of the month and, after a tour of the Highlands, returned October 6th to Dalhousie, where he passed a few days more and then set out for England. He had meant, on his way back to London, to call upon Wordsworth and Surrey, having letters to both of them, and to pass some days by appointment with Miss Mitford at Reading. But continued trouble with his ankle altered his plans, and, after spending a few weeks at the country house of a friend in Lancashire—whose acquaintance he had made in Italy—and of another in Cheshire, he returned hastily to London by way of Liverpool and Manchester, and on the 1st of November took up his quarters there for the winter. At this stage of his journeyings “Pencilling by the Way” come to an end. A number of supplementary letters descriptive of London life, of the Isle of Wight, of Stratford-upon-Avon, Charlecote, Kenilworth, Warwick Castle, etc., were published at irregular intervals in the “Mirror” under the general heading “Loiterings of Travel.” With letters from Washington and the paper on “The Four Rivers,” they make up the “Sketches of Travel” in their author’s collected works.
CHAPTER V.
1834-1836.
LIFE ABROAD (CONTINUED).
Willis took lodgings at No. 2 Vigo Street. During the next ten months, which he spent in London and its vicinity, he found himself something of a lion. His articles in the English magazines had begun to be talked about in the clubs, and society people who had known him abroad or in London only as a dandy attaché were surprised to learn that “that nice, agreeable Mr. Willis” was identical with “Slingsby,” the brilliant American raconteur of the “New Monthly.” He had contributed in the summer and autumn of 1834 a number of sketches—“By a Here and Thereian”—to the “Court Magazine:” “Love and Diplomacy,” “Niagara and So On;” to Captain Marryat’s “Metropolitan:” an episode of Italian travel, “The Madhouse of Palermo;” and to Colburn’s “New Monthly:” “Incidents on the Hudson,” “Tom Fane and I,” “Pedlar Karl,” “The Lunatic,” and “My Hobby—Rather” (the same as “The Mad Senior” in “Scenes of Fear”). The nom de plume of Philip Slingsby he borrowed from the luckless wanderer in Irving’s “Sketch-Book.” He followed these up during 1835-36 with “F. Smith,” “Love in the Library” (“Edith Linsey”), “The Gypsy of Sardis,” “The Cherokee’s Threat,” “The Revenge of the Signor Basil,” and “Larks in Vacation.” For his “Slingsby” papers Willis got double pay: Colburn gave him a guinea a page, and Morris, in his contract with whom he had reserved the right to print twelve sketches a year in the English magazines, published them simultaneously in the “Mirror,” and paid for them at the same rate as for original articles. They were forwarded to him in proof-sheets or in duplicate MSS., so as to arrive in advance of the English periodicals, which sometimes, however, reached America first, because of the uncertainties of the mail-carriage by sailing packet. To the “New Monthly” Willis also contributed a number of short poems, “Thoughts in a Balcony at Daybreak,” “The Absent,” “Chamber Scene,” and “To ——” (“Were I a star,” etc.). He wrote for it after his return to America and after it was united with “The Humorist” in 1837, under the editorship of Theodore Hook. His last contribution to it was “The Picker and Piler,” in the April number for 1839.
Lady Blessington’s kindness continued after his return to London, and he was taken up by other fashionable bluestockings, dined and wined, fêted and caressed to a degree that may well have made him giddy. The two rival salons to Lady Blessington’s were Holland House and the residence of the Dowager Lady Charleville in Cavendish Square. It does not appear that Willis was invited to the former, but he went to the reunions at Charleville House, though not so constantly as to Seamore Place. Through Lady Blessington’s influence he was admitted to the Travellers’ Club, which was the resort of the ultra fashionable; and, on Sir George Staunton’s nomination, to the Athenæum, which had more of a literary tinge than the Alfred or the Travellers’. Sir George Staunton also presented him at court, a favor which Mr. Vail, the American minister, who disliked Willis for some reason, had declined to render. Another friend gave him a perpetual ticket to the opera. Among his patronesses were the Countess of Arundel and Lady Stepney, who wrote bad novels but gave good dinners. Lady Blessington’s biographer, Madden, who saw a great deal of him in those days, has recorded his recollections of him as follows:—
“I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Willis on many occasions at Gore House, to which reference is made in the rather too celebrated ‘Pencillings by the Way,’ and also at the soirées of the late Lady Charleville in Cavendish Square. Mr. Willis was an extremely agreeable young man in society, somewhat overdressed and a little too demonstratif, but abounding in good spirits, pleasing reminiscences of Eastern and Continental travel and of his residence there for some time as attaché to a foreign legation. He was observant and communicative, lively and clever in conversation, having the peculiar art of making himself agreeable to ladies, old as well as young, dégagé in his manner, and on exceedingly good terms with himself and with the élite of the best society, wherever he went.”
The secret of Willis’s agreeableness to ladies lay in his unfailing deference. It is extraordinary how many women much older than himself cherished a warm affection for him. He had considered the meaning of Bacon’s saying, “No Youth can be comely, but by Pardon,” and several of his stories are studies on the thesis that there is a beauty in age which may inspire passion. One in particular, not found among his collected writings, deals with this speculation: “Poyntz’s Aunt,” published in “The Ladies’ Companion” of December, 1842, where the hero falls violently in love with a woman of sixty, to whose niece the family expected him to pay his court.