“Romance of Travel” was a collection of seven stories contributed to the “Mirror,” the “New Monthly,” and the “Corsair.” They were crowded with duels, intrigues, disguises, escapades, assassinations, masked balls, lost heirs, and all the stock properties of the romancer’s art. The view of life which they presented was unreal to the verge of the fantastic, but they abounded in descriptions of great elegance and even beauty, and the narrative went trippingly along. Willis had many of the gifts of the born _raconteur_. He lacked a large constructiveness, but in the minor graces of the story-teller he was always happy. He was skillful in managing the _callida junctura_, good at a start, a transition, or a finish. One must not look in these artificial fictions for truthful delineation of character, or expect to have his emotions deeply stirred. The tragic incidents, especially, fail in the time-honored Aristotelian requirement. They are exciting enough, in a way, but move neither pity nor terror. The high spirits of the narrator carry his readers buoyantly along over the bloodiest passages with scarcely an abatement of their cheerfulness. Willis did not take room enough to develop character and motive to the extent required in order to give his thick-coming events an air of _vraisemblance_. “This tale of many tails,” he said of “Violanta Cesarini,” “should have been a novel. You have in brief what should have been well elaborated, embarrassed with difficulties, relieved by digressions, tipped with a moral, and bound in two volumes, with a portrait of the author.” From this defect and from the author’s light way of telling his stories, it followed that the more serious of these carried no conviction of reality to the reader’s mind. “Violanta Cesarini” is the history of a humpbacked artist, who turns out to be the heir to the estates of a Roman noble, thereby supplanting his sister, but enabling her to marry his chum, a poor artist, with whom she was secretly in love. The outlines of the plot were from a true story told him by Lady Blessington, but he added the love passages and, of course, all the particulars in the development of the tale. “Paletto’s Bride” was the legend of a Venetian gondolier, who made--and as suddenly lost--a fortune in a single night’s play, figured as a mysterious unknown in the high society of Florence, and carried off a titled beauty to share his home among the lagoons. “The Bandit of Austria” was a modification of a story related to Willis by D’Orsay. The heroine was a Hungarian countess, who had run off with a famous outlaw. The latter having been killed by the Austrian police, the lady, without wasting much time in unavailing regrets, falls in love with the narrator’s handsome English page (a glorified William Michell?), and is wedded to him after a series of extraordinary adventures. Willis worked in here a striking description of the grotto of Adelsberg, in which the most effective scene of the story takes place.