“That famous and clever N. P. Willis of former days, whose reminiscences have delighted so many of us, and in whose company one is always sure to find amusement of one sort or the other. Sometimes it is amusement at the writer’s wit and smartness, his brilliant descriptions and wondrous flow and rattle of spirits, and sometimes it is wicked amusement, and, it must be confessed, at Willis’s own expense.… To know a duchess, for instance, is given to very few of us. He sees things that are not given to us to see. We see the duchess pass by in her carriage and gaze with much reverence on the strawberry leaves on the panels and her Grace within; whereas the odds are that the lovely duchess has had, at one time or the other, a desperate flirtation with Willis the conqueror.… He must have whole mattresses stuffed with the blonde or raven or auburn memories of England’s fairest daughters. When the female English aristocracy reads this title of ‘People I have Met,’ I can fancy the whole female peerage of Willis’s time in a shudder: and the melancholy marchioness, and the abandoned countess, and the heart-stricken baroness trembling, as each gets the volume, and asking of her guilty conscience, ‘Gracious goodness! Is the monster going to show up _me_?’” Especially does he chaff Willis about his story of “Brown’s Day with the Mimpsons,” the hero of which adventure, an American who is hand in glove with noble dukes, etc., is asked home to dinner by Mimpson, a plain, blunt British merchant, whose wife snubs Mr. Brown, mistaking him for a plebeian person. The latter avenges himself by a somewhat cavalier deportment, and by obtaining, through his dear friend Lady X., a ticket to Almack’s for Mrs. M.’s companion, the pretty Miss Bellamy; while the matron herself and her haughty daughter, who are dying for a ticket, are left out in the cold. Thackeray remonstrates as follows with Mr. Brown, under whose modest mask he fancies that he sees the “features of an N. P. W. himself:”-- “There’s a rascal for you! He enters a house, is received coolly by the mistress, walks into chicken-fixings in a side room, and, not content with Mimpson’s sherry, calls for a bottle of champagne--not for a glass of champagne, but for a bottle. He catches hold of it and pours out for himself, the rogue, and for Miss Bellamy, to whom Thomas (the butler) introduces him. Come, Brown, you are a stranger and on the dinner list of most of the patricians of May Fair, but isn’t this _un peu fort_, my boy? If Mrs. Mimpson, who is described as a haughty lady, fourth cousin of a Scotch earl, and marrying M. for his money merely, had suspicions regarding the conduct of her husband’s friends, don’t you see that this sort of behavior on your part, my dear Brown, was not likely to do away with Mrs. M.’s little prejudices?”