For ten years Willis’s tall and elegantly dressed figure was a familiar sight on Broadway, and was often pointed out to strangers at public assemblages, or in private society, where his agreeable manners made him a general favorite. He was never what is called a brilliant conversationalist, but he was an easy talker and quick at an impromptu, many of his “good things” in which kind are remembered and quoted by his contemporaries. Thus, on one occasion, at a dinner party in Washington, a young lady who sat between Willis and a gentleman named Campbell was rather too partial in her attention to the former. Her mother sitting opposite, and considering Mr. Campbell a desirable _parti_, slipped her a note across the table, “Pay more attention to your other neighbor.” This being shown to Willis, he wrote on the back of it,-- “Dear Mamma don’t essay my flirtation to trammel: I but strain at a Nat while you swallow a Campbell.” When in Germany, he went with some gentlemen to visit a deaf and dumb asylum which had an inscription over the gate, _Stiftung_, etc. “Stifftongue,” said Willis, looking up; “very appropriate.” Like most men who overwork their pens, he was impatient of private correspondence. When in England, he excused his brevity on the plea that he was paid a guinea a page for everything he wrote, and could not afford to waste manuscript. “Private Letters,” he declared in a note to Edgar Poe, “are the ‘last ounce that breaks the camel’s back’ of a literary man.” And he once answered a friend who proposed a correspondence, that to ask him to write a letter after his day’s work was like asking a penny postman to take a walk in the evening for the pleasure of it. His letters to his family and friends have seldom any literary quality, though they contain, now and then, characteristically quaint or playful touches. “Kiss mother on her sad expression” is a message in one of them; and in another he refers to one of his little nieces as the most charming “copy of Willis” extant. Having been invited to sit on the stage, at the Commencement of Rutgers Female College, as “the author of ‘Absalom’ and ‘Hagar,’” he wrote, “I shall try to have the air of the Old Testament, but have my doubts as to success.”