It is unnecessary for the biographer to follow him step by step in his saunterings through Europe. These are fully recorded in his letters to the “Mirror,” which covered a period of four years, the first appearing in the issue of February 13, 1832, and the last on January 14, 1836. He began them on the voyage out, as soon as he had recovered from his first seasickness, and he continued them until about six months before his return home. The title “Pencillings by the Way,” he had used before, but he retained it and added the sub-caption, “First Impressions of Europe.” Both described well the character of these letters, which were written hastily, often on the wing, and sent off in many cases without revision, to catch the next packet for America; in which, moreover, the writer aimed to “record impressions, not statistics.” There were one hundred and thirty-nine of them in all, and they were designed to appear weekly so far as possible. But by reason of irregular postal facilities, they averaged less than one a fortnight, and sometimes a month or more elapsed between two of them. They were read with eagerness in America, and Morris asserted that they were copied into five hundred newspapers. Their popularity is explained in part by the fact that Europe was much farther off from us in those days than it is now. The voyage by sailing-vessel was tedious, and few Americans went abroad for pleasure. Willis, to be sure, professed himself astonished by the numbers of his countrymen whom he met in Italy and elsewhere, but these were but a handful compared with the annual horde of tourists who rush back and forth in the steamers, and do Great Britain and the continent in three months. It is also true that the literature of travel was not then so abundant. The time has gone by for first impressions of countries. The reader now demands a more minute and authoritative study of some single corner of the map. Yet this does not serve to account altogether for Willis’s success in his “Pencillings.” There were already plenty of books by American travelers in Europe, such as they were, which have long been obsolete. Who ever hears nowadays of James’s “Travels,” for instance, published in 1820; or of Austin’s “Letters from London,” 1804; or of “A Journal of a Tour in Italy by an American,” 1824; to say nothing of innumerable “Americans in Paris,” and “Americans in London,” of later dates? The truth is that Willis’s rapid sketches were capital writing of their kind, and the work of a born “foreign correspondent.” He was a quick and sympathetic, though not a subtle observer, had an eye for effect, and a journalist’s instinct for seizing the characteristic features of a scene and leaving out the lumber. Few of his letters are in the least guide-bookish. His raptures in stated places for admiration, such as galleries, palaces, and cathedrals, are sometimes conventional, and doubtless his passing judgments on famous