If “Paul Fane, or Parts of a Life Else Untold” was a response to this artistic craving for unity in a sustained work, its author had waited too late. It was, in effect, a poor novel; and--what was unusual with Willis, even at his thinnest--it was dull. The story is told in the first person, and the hero is a young American artist, who, feeling his social equality challenged by a look in the eyes of a cold English girl of high birth, is driven abroad by a restless determination to put himself on a level with any nobility that hereditary rank can bestow. He brings the haughtiest daughters of Albion to his feet. Three or four women fall in love with him, including the original offender and her aunt, but he will none of them. It is Willis’s old theme of nature’s nobleman versus caste. The novel was an experiment, before the times were ripe, in that field of international manners which has since been so cleverly occupied by Henry James. It tries to deal with the perplexities and real miseries, which arise not so much from the deeper conflicts of character as from the attempt to adjust hostile social standards. Mr. James has made a very interesting story out of the simple episode of a young English lady marrying an American, coming to America to live, and then, not finding American ways to her taste, taking her husband back to England with her. But Willis was not well equipped for success in this field. He could not keep his fancy in check; there must be a dash of romance, of exaggeration in his tale. And he was a quick observer rather than a patient student of manners, as of other things. He lacked the sober, truthful vigilance of James and Howells. Miss Firkin, in this book, an overdone Daisy Miller, and Blivins, an American type once rumored to have existed, but inconceivable at this distance of time, show how far his execution fell below the fine and solid work of our contemporary realists. There are passages of vulgarity in “Paul Fane” which are a surprise in any book of Willis’s, but which came rather from the weakness and failure of his hand in its attempt to execute scenes of broad humor, than from any crudity of feeling. This kind of violent and assumed indelicacy on the part of naturally refined writers, when they are trying to put on the healthy coarseness of a Hogarth or Teniers, is a not uncommon phenomenon; daintiness mistaking coarseness for the strength of which it is often a sign or an accompaniment. In “The Convalescent” were included narratives of a trip to the Rappahannock, to Nantucket, and to the horse fair at Springfield, Massachusetts. In July, 1860, Willis accompanied Mr. Grinnell on a journey to the West,--reported for the “Home Journal” as a “Three Weeks’ Trip to the West,”--going to Yellow Springs, Ohio, and Chicago, and as far as Madison, Wisconsin; then descending the Mississippi in a steamboat to St. Louis, and returning East by way of Cincinnati and Pittsburgh.