boudoir, and delights in the soft shades of a glen;” and whose works were only fit to “make the papillotes of ladies’ chambermaids.” Willis had an unaffected disrelish for Paulding’s writings, which he thought coarse and pointless. But the Secretary of the Navy was an old man, whose books belonged already to the past, and it was ungracious to disturb his age with taunts about their obsoleteness. One suspects, in reading this review, that its writer had some personal grudge against the author of “The Dutchman’s Fireside.” Willis also contributed to the “Corsair” “A Story Writ for the Beautiful,” which he described as a “gay, off-hand tale,” and never reprinted. It is a rather nonsensical yarn, but has one pretty passage in it descriptive of the end of a ball,--perhaps at Devonshire House?--where the servants raise the balcony awnings to let in the dawn, and the ladies walk in the garden, “sprinkling their gloves with picking wet roses.” On May 20, 1839, Willis sailed for England on the packet ship Gladiator. His wife accompanied him, and, on landing, they were met by the news that her father, General Stace, had died a week before their arrival. This made their stay in England, which was protracted to April, 1840, a sad one in many respects, and of course a quiet one. They passed most of the time with relatives of Mrs. Willis at Old Charlton, Kent, after a short visit to her sister Anne, who was married to the Rev. William Vincent, son of the vicar of Bolney Priory, in Sussex. Willis had his hands full of literary business which required his presence frequently in London, Ireland, and elsewhere. Among other things, he had contracted with Virtue to furnish the letterpress for an illustrated work on Canada, and another on Ireland, uniform with the “American Scenery.” He was to write 240 pages for each, and to be paid in all £950. By some five or six weeks of hard work he finished the Canadian book in August, and then started for a tour in Ireland preparatory to writing up its scenery. He left Mrs. Willis at Dublin, while he recrossed to Scotland, and took in the famous tournament at Eglintoun Castle, which filled the land for months with its noise of preparation, and ended in fizzle and rain-water. Of this he gave a capital description in his letter to the “Corsair,” “My Adventures at the Tournament.” Mrs. Willis remained with some kinsfolk of her mother, at Borrmount Lodge, near Enniscorthy, County Wexford, while her husband spent a fortnight in doing the Lakes of Killarney and other show places in the south of the island. He wrote to her there from Tarbert-on-the-Shannon, September 13th:--