“‘Why so severe on Willis?’ Julia cries (Who reads _De Trobriand_ in an English guise). Why so severe? Because my muse must make Example stern for injured Poesy’s sake. Not that Nat Willis curls his yellow hair-- Not that his sense can breathe but perfumed air-- Not that he plays the ape or ass I mourn, For ape and ass are worth not even my scorn. But that, with mind, and soul, and haply heart, He yet hath stooped to act the fopling’s part; Trifled with all he might have been to be The _blasé_ editor--at forty-three; Flung off the chaplet which his boyhood won, To wear the fool’s cap of a ‘man of ton,’ I lash not Willis even for this his crime-- Through him I strike the bastard tribe of rhyme; The race o’er whom, in his own native power, Jove-like mid satyrs might this Willis tower!” Another young poet whose career Willis watched with interest was J. R. Lowell. There was a friendly correspondence between the two in 1843-44, the younger writer thanking the older for his encouragement, sending him his new volume of verse, and promising to contribute to the “Mirror,” but remonstrating with him upon his declared intention--in a very appreciative review of Lowell’s poems in the “Mirror”--to omit the _James_ from his “musical surname” and call him simply Russell Lowell:-- “Suppose I, dropping the ‘N.,’ should call you by that mysterious middle letter--whose signification, without reference to the Parish Register (or perhaps Griswold’s equally entertaining bead-roll) no man can fathom--and call you ‘P. Willis.’ Under such painful circumstances you could imagine how I feel, when you amputate one sound limb of my name. “However, it is too cold to say any more about it. What I have left unsaid shall be frozen up in me like the tune in Munchausen’s bugle, and thaw out eloquently and startlingly when I meet you in the warmer atmosphere of New York--as I shall before long.”[10] In point of fact--if the item is not below the dignity of biography--this threat of Lowell’s to mind Willis’s P’s for him was without terror for the latter, who favored his middle initial at the expense of his scriptural and baptismal _prænomen_, and used to figure on the title-pages of his later books as N. Parker Willis. He disliked to be called Nathaniel; respecting which prejudice, his wife and brothers and sisters, as well as his intimate friends, were accustomed to address him simply as Willis. “Truly one’s sponsors,” said he, “have much to answer for.” In Lowell’s smart pasquinade, “A Fable for Critics,” published in 1848, which contains not only headlong fun, but good poetry and just criticism, there is a passage on Willis, from which I venture to quote a few lines,--in spite of its familiarity to many readers,--because its spirit is kindly and it is one of the best estimates of Willis ever written:--