T. O. Porter and N. P. Willis propose to issue weekly, in the city of New York, a paper of the above designation and character. It is their design, as editors, to present as amusing a paper as can be made from the current wit, humor, and literature of the world; to give dramatic criticisms without fear or favor; to hold up the age in its fashions, its eccentricities, and its amusements; to take advantage, in short, of the privilege assured to us by our piratical law of copyright; and in the name of American authors (for our own benefit) “convey” to our columns, for the amusement of our readers, the cream and spirit of everything that ventures to light in France, England, and Germany. As to original American productions, we shall, as the publishers do, take what we can get for nothing (that is good), holding, as the publishers do, that while we can get Boz and Bulwer for a thank-ye or less, it is not pocket-wise to pay much for Halleck and Irving.
“If anybody says the name is undignified,” writes Willis, “tell them there are very few dignified people in the world, and still fewer lovers of dignity, and by the Lord, we must live by the many. Then again we want a root, a reason, a rail, a runner to start upon, and this bloody copyright will answer the purpose. People will say, ‘Why, damme, Willis can’t get paid for his books because the law won’t protect him, so he has hauled his wind, and joined the people that robbed him.’”
Willis felt very bitterly the absence of an international copyright. By the act of 1838, the English Parliament, acting in self-defense, had refused to protect any longer the literary property of American authors, until America should have the decency to reciprocate. This cut double upon the American author. It deprived him of any gain from the circulation of his writings in England, and it discouraged native literature by flooding this country with cheap reprints of English books, for the copy of which the American publisher paid nothing. The former loss would not have been serious to many American writers at that date, possibly not to so very many even now. But England had been Willis’s best market, literary work in America was wretchedly paid, and he saw starvation staring him in the face.
The “Pirate” was finally toned down into the “Corsair,” and a prospectus which was a modification of the one drafted by Willis in the above letter was printed and circulated in January, 1839. He sent one to Henry Clay, and begged him to mention the “Corsair” in his argument on the copyright, as a good comment on the state of the law. Mr. Clay replied in a very polite letter, giving his views upon the copyright question, and inclosing his subscription. The office of the “Corsair” was in the Astor House, No. 8 Barclay Street. The first number was published March 15, 1839, and the last (No. 52) March 7, 1840. At the head of the sheet was a rakish looking craft under full sail, and Willis led off with a truculent editorial, “The Quarter Deck” proclaiming the policy of the new paper. To the earlier numbers he contributed art notes and miscellaneous chat, “The Pencil,” “The Gallery,” “The Divan,” etc.; two papers on autographs; a “Letter from Under a Bridge,” a generic name that he gave to much correspondence about this time, not comprised in the original “Letters”; some reminiscences of Miss Landon as “The Departed Improvisatrice,” and a very harsh review, “Paulding the Author Disinterred.” This last was unlike Willis, who was almost always kind in his notices of brother authors, and it provoked much unfavorable comment, particularly a rejoinder in the “Courier and Enquirer,” by Colonel James Watson Webb, a gentleman who afterwards fell foul of Willis in various ways. In this article he held him up to scorn as a writer “who revels on the cut of a coat or the ottomans of a lady’s boudoir, and delights in the soft shades of a glen;” and whose works were only fit to “make the papillotes of ladies’ chambermaids.” Willis had an unaffected disrelish for Paulding’s writings, which he thought coarse and pointless. But the Secretary of the Navy was an old man, whose books belonged already to the past, and it was ungracious to disturb his age with taunts about their obsoleteness. One suspects, in reading this review, that its writer had some personal grudge against the author of “The Dutchman’s Fireside.”
Willis also contributed to the “Corsair” “A Story Writ for the Beautiful,” which he described as a “gay, off-hand tale,” and never reprinted. It is a rather nonsensical yarn, but has one pretty passage in it descriptive of the end of a ball,—perhaps at Devonshire House?—where the servants raise the balcony awnings to let in the dawn, and the ladies walk in the garden, “sprinkling their gloves with picking wet roses.”
On May 20, 1839, Willis sailed for England on the packet ship Gladiator. His wife accompanied him, and, on landing, they were met by the news that her father, General Stace, had died a week before their arrival. This made their stay in England, which was protracted to April, 1840, a sad one in many respects, and of course a quiet one. They passed most of the time with relatives of Mrs. Willis at Old Charlton, Kent, after a short visit to her sister Anne, who was married to the Rev. William Vincent, son of the vicar of Bolney Priory, in Sussex. Willis had his hands full of literary business which required his presence frequently in London, Ireland, and elsewhere. Among other things, he had contracted with Virtue to furnish the letterpress for an illustrated work on Canada, and another on Ireland, uniform with the “American Scenery.” He was to write 240 pages for each, and to be paid in all £950. By some five or six weeks of hard work he finished the Canadian book in August, and then started for a tour in Ireland preparatory to writing up its scenery. He left Mrs. Willis at Dublin, while he recrossed to Scotland, and took in the famous tournament at Eglintoun Castle, which filled the land for months with its noise of preparation, and ended in fizzle and rain-water. Of this he gave a capital description in his letter to the “Corsair,” “My Adventures at the Tournament.” Mrs. Willis remained with some kinsfolk of her mother, at Borrmount Lodge, near Enniscorthy, County Wexford, while her husband spent a fortnight in doing the Lakes of Killarney and other show places in the south of the island. He wrote to her there from Tarbert-on-the-Shannon, September 13th:—
“The poverty on this side Ireland makes me sick at the stomach. Such a God-and-man-abandoned collection of disease and misery I never believed possible. Death and disease seem clutching their victims away in your very sight, and you see them struggle and go through their last agony in the streets—unpitied. How people can ride in carriages and wear white gloves and smile and look happy, in this great lazar-house, is beyond my conception. I keep my great cloak pocket full of pence, and shut my eyes while I give them into their skinny hands,—poor devils!”
Madden sings the wrath of Campbell over this literary undertaking of Willis: “What could he know of Ireland? How could any American know anything about it? Fourteen days! All the knowledge he possesses of Ireland might have been acquired in fourteen hours.” Willis might have retorted by asking what a Scotchman could know about the Valley of Wyoming. Or he might have pointed out that, even as early as 1839, Americans had fuller sources of information about Ireland than they found altogether comfortable. After three weeks more of touring in that ragged commonwealth, he returned with his wife to England.
Bolney was but twelve miles from Brighton, where the Wallacks were staying, and while visiting at the former place Willis had run across country and taken dinner with them. In November he spent a few days at Brighton, where he lodged at the Ship Hotel, found several old acquaintances,—Lady Stepney and Lady Georgiana Fane among them,—and made some new ones. At a dinner at Lady Macdonald’s he met Charles Kemble, the actor, and Horace Smith, of the “Rejected Addresses,” whose brother James he had known at Lady Blessington’s four years ago. One of Willis’s cherished plans had been to spend the winter in Spain, a country rich in matter for future pencillings, but this scheme he had to forego, Ireland proving a longer job than he had anticipated. The last day of 1839 found him still at Charlton, working four hours a day on the book, and in January and February he had to make another trip to Ireland, visiting the Giant’s Causeway and other celebrated bits of scenery in the north. Lady Georgiana Fane had procured him a letter from her father, the old Earl of Westmoreland, to Lord Ebrington, the lord lieutenant of Ireland, in which Willis was described as “a gentleman of fortune, likely to attain to the presidency”! He dined with Lord Ebrington at Dublin, and, happening to be there at the time of the ball given in honor of the queen’s wedding, he made a letter of it for the “Corsair,” afterwards included in “Sketches of Travel.”