In point of fact—if the item is not below the dignity of biography—this threat of Lowell’s to mind Willis’s P’s for him was without terror for the latter, who favored his middle initial at the expense of his scriptural and baptismal prænomen, and used to figure on the title-pages of his later books as N. Parker Willis. He disliked to be called Nathaniel; respecting which prejudice, his wife and brothers and sisters, as well as his intimate friends, were accustomed to address him simply as Willis. “Truly one’s sponsors,” said he, “have much to answer for.” In Lowell’s smart pasquinade, “A Fable for Critics,” published in 1848, which contains not only headlong fun, but good poetry and just criticism, there is a passage on Willis, from which I venture to quote a few lines,—in spite of its familiarity to many readers,—because its spirit is kindly and it is one of the best estimates of Willis ever written:—
“There’s Willis so natty and jaunty and gay,
Who says his best things in so foppish a way,
With conceits and pet phrases so thickly o’erlaying ’em,
That one hardly knows whether to thank him for saying ’em.…
His prose had a natural grace of its own,
And enough of it, too, if he’d let it alone,
But he twitches and jerks so one fairly gets tired,
And is forced to forgive where he might have admired.
Yet whenever it slips away free and unlaced