In Willis’s later writings his verbal affectations gained upon him to an intolerable extent. “Mr. N. P. Willis,” says Bartlett in his “Dictionary of Americanisms,” “has the reputation of inventing many new words, some of which, though not yet embodied in our dictionaries, are much used in familiar language.” One of the phrases which Bartlett accredits to him is, “the upper ten,”--originally and in full, “the upper ten thousand of New York city.” This seems likely to keep its place in the language. “Japonicadom” took at the time, but has now gone out. He had a fondness for agglutinations. “Come-at-able” is a convenient word which is traced to his mint; and Professor George P. Marsh, in his “Origin and History of the English Language,” lends the weight of his authority to Willis’s “Stay-at-home-itiveness,” as a synonym for the Greek οἰκουρία, and the early English _studestapelvestnesse_. But such philological monsters as re-June-venescence, worthwhile-ativeness, fifty-per-centity, with which some of his books are strewn, have a painfully forced effect, and the trick became, from repetition, a tedious mannerism. Punning, likewise, was a habit which grew upon him, though both of these offenses are commoner in his private correspondence than in his published work. At the outbreak of the civil war in the spring of 1861, there was a rush of newspaper men to Washington. It was decided that the “Home Journal,” too, should have its war correspondent, and accordingly Willis, bidding good-by to Idlewild, flung himself into the tide of journalists, soldiers, politicians, office-seekers, contractors, and speculators of all sorts, setting toward the seat of government. At Baltimore he stayed over a day with his friend Kennedy, who was prominently mentioned for the secretaryship of the navy, and who went on to Washington with Willis, where the latter introduced him and Reverdy Johnson to Mrs. Lincoln. The feeding of the “Home Journal” press with “Lookings-on at the War” proved a longer job than Willis had anticipated. It kept him in Washington for over a year, with occasional furloughs for a hurried visit home. He had always been curiously indifferent to politics. His opinions had been Whiggish, and he was, of course, a Union man. But he retained a secret sympathy with the South, and a liking for “those chivalrous, polysyllabic Southerners, incapable of a short word or a mean action,” whom he had known at Saratoga years before. Nevertheless, he dropped his light plummet of observation into the boiling sea of the civil war, where it was tossed about at no great depth below the surface. It is interesting to compare his letters from the capital with the patriotic fervor and swing of such martial sketches as Theodore Winthrop’s “Washington as a Camp.” The war, indeed, may be said to have made Willis and the kind of literature which he cultivated obsolete for a time. A more earnest generation of writers