“There’s Willis so _natty_ and jaunty and gay, Who says his best things in so foppish a way, With conceits and pet phrases so thickly o’erlaying ’em, That one hardly knows whether to thank him for saying ’em.… His prose had a natural grace of its own, And enough of it, too, if he’d let it alone, But he twitches and jerks so one fairly gets tired, And is forced to forgive where he might have admired. Yet whenever it slips away free and unlaced It runs like a stream with a musical waste, And gurgles along with the liquidest sweep. ’Tis not deep as a river, but who’d have it deep?… No volume I know to read under a tree More truly delicious than his À l’Abri, With the shadows of leaves flowing over your book, Like ripple-shades netting the bed of a brook; With June coming softly your shoulder to look over, Breezes waiting to turn every leaf of your book over, And Nature to criticise still as you read-- The page that bears that is a rare one indeed.… His nature’s a glass of champagne with the foam on ’t, As tender as Fletcher, as witty as Beaumont; So his best things are done in the flush of the moment: If he wait, all is spoiled: he may stir it and shake it, But, the fixed air once gone, he can never remake it.… He’d have been just the fellow to sup at the Mermaid, Cracking jokes at rare Ben, with an eye to the bar-maid, His wit running up as canary ran down,-- The topmost bright bubble on the wave of The Town.” One proof of popularity is parody. Until a statesman’s face is so familiar to the public that its caricature in the comic papers needs no label, and until an author’s style is so easily recognized that a travesty of it hits the sense of the reader, neither statesman nor author may consider himself as really popular. “Excelsior,” and “The Raven,” and “Abou ben Adhem” are by no means the best poems in the English tongue, but their currency is attested and doubtless kept up by the innumerable burlesque imitations of them that swarm the press. Willis had a share of these left-hand honors: his epistolary style in particular was often caricatured in the newspapers. In “Godey’s Lady’s Book” for December, 1849, he was selected together with Poe, Morris, Whittier, and John Neal for humorous imitation.