[[rh||N. P. Willis.|427}}
There is 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;
Over-ornament ruins both poem and prose,
Just conceive of a muse with a ring in her nose!
Conception is a blessing, is Hamlet's general proposition. But here the poet will think its quality strained, not blessing him that gives and him that takes. Rather he will quote Hamlet's subsequent words, Slanders, sir ;for the satirical rogue says things
All which, interpose we old folks, we most powerfully and potently believe. Under protest, however, from a few missy admirers of the Penciller's flourishes—to whom his patron Muse would be in shabby déshabille without the nasal circlet ut suprà.
But it is to his prose that N. P. Willis owes, after all, the epigraph of Eminent. Who has not whiled away an hour in pleasant light reading of his purveying? Who has not heard of the amusement and eke the bad blood excited by his "Pencillings by the Way?" That "famous, and clever N. P. Willis," as Mr. Titmarsh calls him, "whose reminiscences have delighted so many of us, and in whose company one is always sure to find amusement of some sort or the other. Sometimes it is amusement at the writer's wit and smartness, his brilliant descriptions, and wondrous flow and rattle of spirits; sometimes it is wicked amusement, and, it must be confessed, at Willis's own expense—amusement at the immensity of N. P.'s blunders—amusement at the prodigiousness of his self-esteem." "There would be no keeping our wives and daughters in their senses," adds Mr. Titmarsh (in the sixth number of The Proser "were such fascinators to make frequent apparitions amongst us; but it is comfortable that there should have been a Willis; and (since the appearance of the Proser) a literary man myself, and anxious for the honour of the profession, I am proud to think that a man of our calling should have come, should have seen, should have conquered, as Willis has done." The illustrious stranger's resumés of the table-talk and drawing-room doings of his illustrious hosts and hostesses, were amazingly relished, notwithstanding the outcry elicited. Indeed it is curious to observe, to this day, how reviewers and critics, big, little, and middle-sized, after indignantly crying shame on those imitators of Mr. Willis, who jot down in their journals and books of travel personal anecdotes and descriptions touching the notables they may have dined withal,—proceed forthwith to select, for quotation, the raciest bits of domestic gossip, the very essential oil of the personality just denounced. This should never have been seen in print, they swear, in their first column. In their second, they give it, whole and entire, the benefit of their own extended circulation.
Not that we are pleading for Mr. Willis's achievements as Gossipry's "Own Correspondent" and envoy to the privacies of literary and fashionable life. On the contrary, in reading his reports of what he heard and
would willingly take a chance for immortality sandwiched between Cooper and Campbell." This was said apropos of his going to reside between Cooper's abode and poetic Wyoming.
