Town talk sums up much of Willis, both what he was and what he wrote. He lived in the public eye; he wrote of the hour, for the hour. Naturally, therefore, his work was dying while he was yet alive. Now he is hardly more than a name. Of Andover and Yale what little impress he received was soon rubbed away by a life in which the daily cultivation of eminent society was industriously made to yield the daily crop of journalism. Indeed, a man so quick to take every new impression was hardly the man to bear the marks of many old ones. And of course the happy fluency that gave him even in youth a current popularity could dispense with that other and more deliberate merit of form. Form, since he had no native sense of it, and could get on swimmingly without it, he never seriously pursued. Few story-writers have spoiled so many good plots. Not only is he chatty, digressive, episodic, but he rarely has any clear solution and he never culminates. Such merit as _The Inlet of Peach Blossoms_ has in this aspect is quite exceptional. Piquant, even vivid sometimes, in sketchy description, he has no composition. This, doubtless, is why of the hundred tales that pleased his public not one is read by ours. _Pencillings by the Way_ were supplied from Paris and London in the early ’30’s to the New York _Mirror_, and in collective form entertained both Britons and Americans. The characteristic title would serve as well for his subsequent collections. A list is appended to the biography in the American Men of Letters series by Professor Beers, who has also edited a volume of selections. A New York editor for many years, Willis touched at so many points the literary life of his time that this biography has been made admirably significant of its main social aspects. In fact, the life of Willis has more enduring interest than his works. THE INLET OF PEACH BLOSSOMS [_From “Dashes at Life with a Free Pencil,” 1845. The story was first published between 1840 and 1845, probably in the “New Mirror” of New York._] The Emperor Yuentsoong, of the dynasty Chow, was the most magnificent of the long-descended succession of Chinese sovereigns. On his first accession to the throne, his character was so little understood, that a conspiracy was set on foot among the yellow-caps, or eunuchs, to put out his eyes, and place upon the throne the rebel Szema, in whose warlike hands, they asserted, the empire would more properly maintain its ancient glory. The gravity and reserve which these myrmidons of the palace had construed into stupidity and fear, soon assumed another complexion, however. The eunuchs silently disappeared; the mandarins and princes whom they had seduced from their allegiance were made loyal subjects by a generous pardon; and, in a few days after the period fixed upon for the consummation of the plot, Yuentsoong set forth in complete armor at the head of his troops to give battle to the rebel in the mountains.