Cousin Florence, or Tom Lascelles, or The Idle Man, an epicure and dandy, “who eats in summer with an amber-handled fork to keep his palm cool.” These amiable coxcombries of Willis gave dire offense to the critics, and especially to Joseph T. Buckingham, the veteran of the Boston press and editor of the “Courier,” then the most influential Whig newspaper in Massachusetts. He published epigrams on Willis, with very blunt points, administered fatherly rebukes to him for his affected English, and objected strongly to Ugolino, L. E. L., and the trulian. Willis retorted in kind, and a good-natured war raged between the “Courier” and the “American Monthly,” though their editors were privately the best of friends. In his “Specimens of Newspaper Literature,” Buckingham paid a glowing and, indeed, extravagant compliment to the talents of his young adversary. Willis’s experience in editing the “American Monthly” was of great advantage to him. He had a natural instinct for journalism, and he soon acquired by practice that personal, sympathetic attitude toward his readers, and that ready adjustment of himself to the public taste, which made him the most popular magazinist of his day and defined at once his success and his limitations. For its purposes Willis’s crisp prose was admirable: “delicate and brief like a white jacket,--transparent like a lump of ice in champagne,--soft-tempered like the sea-breeze at night.” It had an easy, conversational grace, the air of “the town,” the tone of good society. In his review of Lady Morgan’s “Book of the Boudoir,” he made a plea for that _negligé_ style which he practiced so daintily himself. “We love this rambling, familiar gossip. It is the undress of the mind. There are few people who possess the talent of graceful trifling, either in writing or conversation. Study may make anything but this. It is like _naïveté_ in character,--nature let alone.” There was a great deal of good writing in Willis’s “American Monthly” articles; bright thoughts expressed in exquisite English, here and there a page which Charles Lamb or Leigh Hunt might have been glad to claim. Some of these he rescued from the old files of the magazine and inserted in his later work. The chapter on “Minute Philosophies,” “A Morning in the Library,” and “The Substance of a Diary of Sickness” were used again in “Edith Linsey,” and a spirited description of Nahant in one of the “tables” did duty in “F. Smith.” But many a nice bit was too small for resetting and remained lost in the ephemeral context,--many such a scrap as this little picture of summer in town: “Was ever such intense, unmitigated sunshine? There is nothing on the hard, opaque sky but a mere rag of a cloud, like a handkerchief on a tablet of blue marble, and the edge of the shadow of that tall chimney is as definite as a hair, and the young elm that leans over the fence is copied in perfect and motionless leaves like a very painting on the broad sidewalk.”