Party spirit ran high at this time, and political articles were acrimonious. Libel suits were brought against the publisher of the “Argus,” which involved him in trouble and expense; and six years after its establishment it was sold for four thousand dollars to the same Francis Douglas who had come so near imposing his Christian name on the infant Willis. At Portland Nathaniel Willis came under the ministrations and influence of the Rev. Edward Payson, D. D.,--on whose death, many years after, his son composed some rather perfunctory verses,--and began henceforth to devote himself to the cause of religion. From 1810 to 1812 he sought to establish a religious newspaper in Portland, but met with no substantial encouragement. At the latter date he returned to Boston, where, after years of effort, during which he supported himself by publishing tracts and devotional books, he started, in January, 1816, the “Boston Recorder,” which he asserted to be the first religious newspaper in the world. It was in this periodical that the earliest lispings of Willis’s muse reached the ear of the public. The “Recorder” was conducted by his father down to 1844, in which year it was sold to the Rev. Martin Moore. It still lives as the “Congregationalist and Boston Recorder.” Nathaniel Willis also originated the idea of a religious paper for children. “The Youth’s Companion,” which he commenced in 1827 and edited for about thirty years, was the first, and remains one of the best, publications of the kind in existence. In a letter to his son he gave the following account of its inception: “He was in the habit of teaching his children, statedly, the Assembly’s Catechism, and to encourage them to commit to memory the answers, he rewarded them by telling them stories from Scripture history without giving names. The result was that the Catechism was all committed to memory by the children, and the idea occurred of a children’s department in the ‘Recorder.’ This department being much sought for by children, it suggested the experiment of having a paper exclusively for children.” Around the fireplace where Mr. Willis sat with his children were some old-fashioned Dutch tiles, representing scenes from the New Testament, and it was in answer to their questions about these that he began his narrations. One sees in this little domestic picture the beginnings of the young Nathaniel’s literary training and the germ of his “Scripture Sketches.” Years after, a college lad, when shaping into smooth blank verse the story of the widow of Nain or the healing of Jairus’s daughter, his memory must have gone back to their rude figures about his father’s hearth, seeming to move and stir in the flickering light of the wood fire; and the recollection of his father’s voice and the listening group of brothers and sisters gave tenderness to the strain.