“Lady Ravelgold” is a tale of English high life. The hero is a young London banker, who proves in the end to be a count of the Russian Empire, and the inheritor of vast possessions in that conveniently indefinite country. Three high-born beauties are desperately enamored of him, among them a mother and daughter, the latter of whom ultimately gets him. As in “Ernest Clay,” and, in fact, in nearly all Willis’s stories of high life, it is the women who make love to the men. The scene of the garden party at “Rose Eden” was suggested by a _fête champêtre_ at Gore House, and the delicious picture of Lady Ravelgold’s boudoir was doubtless borrowed from the same mansion. The high-piled luxuriance of the upholstery in these “Romances of Travel,” their _nonchalant_ young heroes, their jeweled and embroidered heroines, with Aladdin-like resources in the way of palaces, gardens, retainers, and stalactite caverns, point to “Vivian Grey” and the other expensive fictions of the youthful Disraeli as Willis’s nearest models. Upon the whole, the best story in the book is “Pasquali, the Tailor of Venice,” which was more within the natural compass of Willis’s talent. It has a malicious irony that reminds one of “Beppo” and the “Decameron,” and it is not without an undercurrent of pathos. In spite of his other literary preoccupations he found time to write a series of weekly or fortnightly letters to the “Corsair,”--“Jottings down in London,”--a portion of which stand in his collected writings as “Passages from an Epistolary Journal.” They are naturally not as fresh as the earlier “Pencillings,” though very good foreign correspondence of an ephemeral sort. In search of matter for these letters, Willis went about a good deal in London. He visited the theatres and the House of Commons, looked up his old acquaintances of 1835, was present at a reception to the Persian ambassadors at Lady Morgan’s,--where he saw Mrs. Norton again,--dined with the Nawaub of Oude, went to a public dinner given to Macready at the Freemasons’ Tavern,--where he sat next Samuel Lover,--to a ball at Almack’s, and a tournament in St. John’s Wood. Disraeli walked home with him from a ball and said he was going to Niagara on his wedding trip. Willis noted some changes in England since his first visit. Among other things William IV. was dead and Victoria on the throne, and the London shops had increased greatly in splendor. One of the most interesting results of this second stay in England was his meeting with Thackeray--then a young and comparatively unknown writer--and his engaging him as a contributor to the “Corsair,” a stroke of journalistic enterprise which ought to have prolonged the life of that piratical journal, but did not. In a private letter to Dr. Porter, dated July 26th, Willis wrote:--