There are evidences in Willis’s private correspondence, about this time, of some coolness between himself and General Morris, which appears to have originated, or perhaps to have found expression in a series of three letters signed “Veritas,” written from London and printed in the “Mirror,” in the fall of 1838. These letters, after taking the “Mirror” to task for misleading the American public by the false pictures of London society given in the “Pencillings,” proceeded to set its readers right, in a series of the coarsest and most slanderous little biographies of English men and women of letters, retailing with unction all the gossip of the clubs about Lady Blessington, Count d’Orsay, the Bulwers, Disraeli, Mrs. Norton, Miss Landon, Fraser, and many others. Some of these had been Willis’s friends; others he had never met; but he wrote an indignant rejoinder to the “Mirror” of November 10th, denying, out and out, many of the lies in “Veritas’s” communication, and explaining away some of the misrepresentations and exaggerations. This letter Morris prefaced with an editorial note in which he said that he had been much censured on account of the “Pencillings,” and, therefore, “the object of these letters was to disabuse the public mind in this country of what seemed to the author a wrong and injurious impression with regard to the position in English society of certain distinguished but unworthy characters, whose example and many of whose writings are of a pernicious tendency. With one or two exceptions, we believe that our correspondent has merely stated well attested facts.” One of these exceptions was the slander upon Miss Landon, for printing which Morris apologized. This partial indorsement of “Veritas” by the editor naturally displeased Willis; and naturally, too, he was pleased by an answer to it by Dr. Porter, in the “Spirit of the Times,” which was then edited by his brother, William T. Porter, “the tall son of York,” and with which Dr. Porter himself was editorially connected. “The Skylight letter,” Willis writes to the latter, “was capitally done, and the ‘Mirror’ was touched on all its sore places to a charm. My brother was in New York just after and called at the office, and the fury the General was in will amuse him for the next six months. Morris called you a gallipot, said it was a poor article, and will hurt your paper, and all that; but sits down and writes _me_ a most affectionate letter of four foolscap pages, denying all possible thought of me in the London matter, and swearing he was my defender and best friend.” Elsewhere in his correspondence with Dr. Porter, Willis expresses some doubts as to the sincerity of Morris’s friendship, and seems to suspect that it was more than half policy and a desire to exploit him. It does not appear that this little misunderstanding ever came to a breach. The “Mirror” continued most courteous in its tone towards Willis, and its editor became and