saw said and done there, we find it indispensable to have in remembrance the caution of that high literator,[1] whom, of all others, Mr. Willis seemingly hates with most perfect hatred,—viz., that to report conversations fairly, it is a necessary prerequisite that we should be completely familiar with all the interlocutors, and understand thoroughly all their minutest relations, and points of common knowledge and common feeling, with each other; and that he who is not thus qualified, must be in perpetual danger of misinterpreting sportive allusion into serious statement; and may transmute what was some jocular phrase or half-phrase, intelligible only to an old companion, into a solidified opinion which the talker had never framed, or if he had, would never have given words to in any mixed assemblage—"not even among what the world calls friends at his own board." But again, we fancy that a vast deal of the abuse showered down on the American attaché's head, was sham sentiment, and that he was made something like the scapegoat in this matter. Somebody, however, behoved to be the scapegoat; and while the hapless individual suffered, the general public benefited by the protest thus uttered, whether on the whole sincerely or not, against what was tending to become an intolerable nuisance. Accordingly, when it was last announced that N. P. Willis had again arrived in England, that vigilant wag Punch thought it a duty to say as much:— "We mention this fact for the benefit of those would-be literary gentlemen who are anxious to appear in print, as an invitation to Mr. Willis for dinner will be certain to secure them the advantages of publication without any risk or expense. Literary gentlemen are cautioned, however, against speaking too freely in their conversation after dinner, as mistakes have been known to occur in the best-regulated memories—even in Mr. N. P. Willis's. For testimonials, apply to the editor of the Quarterly, or any one mentioned in Mr. Willis's American works, when he was last in England." Happily, Mr. Willis is a lively rattle, not easily abashed, or liable to be put out of spirits by the dull jokes of British malcontents. They will not put him, out of countenance by allusions to brass, or his nose out of joint by piercing a ring through it. A liberal public has been found to patronise his lucubrations; and so he has gone on writing, and re-writing, and patching together odds and ends, and dressing up faded beauties with new cuffs and collars, and cramming crambe repetita into new spicilegia, and entertaining easy souls with a rapid succession of "People I have Met," " Hurrygraphs," "Summer Excursions in the Mediterranean," "Life Here and There," "A Health Trip to the Tropics," and many another excursus, related with what Theseus calls
The rattling tongueOf saucy and audacious eloquence.
Seneca is a great deal too heavy for Mr. Willis, but Plautus not a whit too light. He is effervescent with animal spirits, and dashes you off a gay, buoyant aphorism with the bonhommie of Harold Skimpole himself. Trifles light as air float beamingly through his volumes—the flimsy texture whereof almost justifies at times the satire of Tom Moore, on book-making tactics:
- ↑ "This reptile of criticism," Mr. Willis calls him: adding, "He has turned and stung me. Thank God! I have escaped the slime of his approbation." That Deo gratias is a masterstroke in its way.
