charm and attraction of antiquity, coupled with a stubbornly conservative temperament, made him discover in England the elements which, because of its youth, his own country lacked. His criticism of England is, however, not especially significant, while his more purely journalistic and descriptive passages still retain a certain share of their appeal. The journalist-tourist in England was by this time a permanent factor in the current American literature of the day.

II

England's past had lived again in the mellow reminiscences of Irving; her future destiny had loomed threateningly in the denunciations of Cooper; but it was left to Nathaniel Parker Willis to make her scintillating present a reality to American readers.

The three editors of the New York Mirror and Ladies' Literary Gazette, George P. Morris, Theodore S. Fay, and Willis himself, are said to have hit upon the plan of sending a correspondent abroad when they were discussing policies one evening in Sandy Welsh's oyster saloon in New York City. Willis, who had, more than either of the others, established himself as a man of letters, was the logical one to go. With $500 in cash and a promise of ten dollars for each letter published, he left Philadelphia on October 10, 1831. The first of his Pencilings by the Way appeared in the Mirror of February 13th under the caption, First Impressions, or Notes by the Way, and they continued, more or less regularly, until January 14, 1836. They were not all collected until eight years later, although they were copied, according to Morris, in five hundred news1 H. A. Beers, Nathaniel Parker Willis, p. 103.

An engraving by F. C. Lewis, Engraver to Her Majesty, Queen Victoria, after a portrait by S. Lawrance.

papers, and parts of them were issued in book form almost immediately. The complete collection (1844) numbers one hundred and thirty-nine letters, and many of them were reprinted by their author in later volumes and under different titles. Famous Persons and Places (1854), for example, is more than half made up of literal reprints of the Penciling letters. With his A l'Abri, or the Tent Pitched (1839), published in the Mirror and in the English edition as Letters from Under a Bridge, they constitute the best of the essay writing in which their author indulged. He also used some of the same material as the background for stories such as Lady Ravelgold and Brown's Day with the Mimpsons, as well as for the satirical poem, Lady Jane. His trips in 1839-40 furnished part of the material for these later essays, stories, and poems.

Everything conspired to make Willis a perfect social dilettante and an excellent journalist. He is said to have been fond of quoting from Godwin: "A judicious and limited voluptuousness is necessary to the cultivation of the mind, to the polishing of the manners, to the refining of the sentiment, and to the development of the understanding." This profound thought admirably expresses the lack of profundity in Willis himself. He was epicurean in his belief in the senses and sensibilities, as well as in his moderation and highly tempered restraint. Enjoyment was his religion-so much so that the horrified members of the Park Street Church, of which his father was Deacon, solemnly excommunicated him on April 29, 1829, for absence from communion and attendance at the theater as a spectator. Yet he had a serious side as well, for he never became wholly a skeptic and there is a very marked sense of reverence in his more thoughtful utterances.

When we read Willis to-day, we can scarcely avoid the

feeling that his contemporaries were entirely too much worried about his soul and his reputation to be able to appreciate him fully. The "quicksilver spirit," which he inherited from his mother, found little sympathy in the heavy and dutiful atmosphere of Puritan Boston. His social ambition was similarly misunderstood, and rumors were circulated about him which finally forced him to seek the haven of New York's more cosmopolitan atmosphere. Willis came from plain substantial people and they were not the sort to sympathize with his flair for fashionable society, already manifested in his attendance upon Mrs. Harrison Gray Otis, the "lady autocrat" of the Puritan capital.

Samuel Goodrich, the publisher, has left a sympathetic portrait of the Willis of these days. "It must be remembered," he says, "that before he was five-and-twenty he was more read than any other American poet of his time; and besides, being possessed of an easy and captivating address, he became the pet of society and especially of the fairer portion of it. As to his personal character, I need only say that, from the beginning, he has had a larger circle of steadfast friends than almost any man within my knowledge. . . . Willis was slender, his hair sunny and silken, his cheek ruddy, his aspect cheerful and confident. He met society with a ready and welcome hand and was received readily and with welcome." 2

The plan which brought forth the Pencilings was wholly suited to Willis's temperament and came at a time when he was by age, popularity, and skill best prepared for it. "I love my country," he writes from Italy in 1831, "but the ornamental is my vocation, and of this she has none."

The public to which he addressed himself in the Mirror was equally prepared to hear what he had to say. Very 2 Recollections of a Lifetime, 11, 264-69.