about everybody, should have excited so much wrath, not only at this time, but all through his life, by his harmless literary fopperies and foibles, did we not remember that he was successful, that he was a favorite in society, and, above all, that he wore conspicuously good clothes. There was also something about his airy way of writing and the personality it suggested that was and is peculiarly exasperating to a certain class of serious-minded people who resent all attempts to entertain them on the part of any one whom they cannot entirely respect. Willis carried it off lightly enough, though, of course, it must have stung him. He knew, he said, “how easy it is to despise the ungentlemanly critic and forget the poor wrong of his criticism.” In intervals of work on the “American Monthly” he contributed frequently to the “Boston Statesman,” having been engaged, together with Lunt and Dawes, to write something for it every week, “short or long, prose or verse,” at the rate of five dollars an article, an arrangement that lasted for some months. This seems now beggarly pay, but Nathaniel Greene of the “Statesman” was, according to Willis, the only editor in the country who, as early as 1827, paid anything at all for verse. During these early years of journalistic life Willis sojourned awhile in the pleasant land of Bohemia. He was a member of a supper club, which included two representatives of each profession. Washington Allston and Chester Harding were the artists; Willis and Dawes the men of letters; Horace Mann and five or six more completed the tale. Willis was a frequent lounger in Harding’s studio, and some years after he was delighted to come across his tracks at Gordon and Dalhousie castles, where Harding was known. Willis was fond of fast horses, and used to drive his friends out to Nahant, for a spin on the hard beach along the edge of the surf. This was the scene of “F. Smith,” one of his most perfect and characteristic stories. With Dawes and others he resorted, not seldom, for a game supper, to an ancient and once somewhat stately hostelry, known as the “Stackpole House,” where the wines were excellent and the landlord good-humored and disposed to trust,--the original, doubtless, of Gallagher in “The Female Ward,” a story written long afterwards, but whose incidents and descriptions are assignable to this period.