Willis’s English had many excellent qualities. It was crisp, clean cut, pointed, nimble on the turn. He was good at a quotation, deftly brought in, unhackneyed, and never too much of it, a single phrase or sentence or half a line of verse maybe. There is a perpetual twinkle or ripple over his style, like a quaver in music, which sometimes fatigues. Is the man never going to forget himself and say a thing plainly? the reader asks. But the verbal prettinesses and affectations which disfigured his later prose do not abound in his earlier and better work. He had at all times, however, a feminine fondness for italics and exclamations, and his figures had a daintiness which displeased severe critics. Thus: “The gold of the sunset had glided up the dark pine-tops and disappeared, like a ring taken slowly from an Ethiop’s finger.” “As much salt as could be tied up in the cup of a large water-lily” is an instance of his superfine way of putting things. He likened Daniel Webster’s forehead, among the heads at a Jenny Lind concert, to “a massive magnolia blossom, too heavy for the breeze to stir, splendid and silent amid fluttering poplar leaves.” The “crushed orange blossom, clinging to one of the heels” of Ernest Clay’s boots, was a touch which greatly amused Thackeray. And others have been amused by the fantastic headings which he invented for certain columns in the “Home Journal”: “Sparklings of Tenth Waves: or Bits Relished in Recent Readings,” “Breezes from Spice Islands, passed in the Voyage of Life,” and the like, which read like the title of a sixteenth century pamphlet. An old lady in Hartford used to say that “Nat Willis ought to go about in spring, in sky-blue breeches, with a rose-colored bellows to blow the buds open.” It is remarkable with what consent all who have had occasion to characterize Willis’s diction hit upon the metaphor of champagne. “The wine of Bacon’s writings,” said Dr. Johnson, “is a dry wine.” The wine of Willis’s writings was certainly a _Schaumwein_. It had not the rich, still glow of burgundy, but a fizz and an up-streaming of golden bubbles, and when the spirit had effervesced the residue, as in his later writings, was rather flat.