hand a drinking-cup and in the other a bird. From this portrait-bust of Willis is taken the engraving by Halpin in the illustrated edition of Willis’s poems published by Clark, Austin & Smith, 1859. It was a fair likeness, but somewhat heavy and unideal. Its original had grown quite fat abroad. His inherited tendency to _embonpoint_ was counteracted in later life by the emaciation of long illness. Even as a young man his height gave him a look of slenderness, though his face was full. The “Autocrat,” apropos of dandies whose jaws could not fill out their collars, affirms that “Willis touched this last point in one of his earlier ambrotypes.” August found him at the Baths of Lucca, “The Saratoga of Italy,” flirting, and recuperating from the exhausting effects of an Italian summer. In a private letter dated on the 20th, he announces his intention of starting for England to-morrow by way of Switzerland and the Rhine, returning to Italy in a few months in time for the Roman season. “In London I mean to make arrangements with the magazines, and then live abroad altogether. It costs so little here and one lives so luxuriously too, and there is so much to fill one’s mind and eye, that I think of returning to naked America with daily increasing repugnance. I love my country, but the _ornamental_ is my vocation, and of this she has none. I shall pass the next summer, perhaps, in Germany at a university, and I mean to learn German thoroughly. You would be astonished at the facility of learning a language _in the country_. I speak French well and Italian passably, and you know how little I knew and how short a time I have been abroad.” This programme was altered for some reason. Instead of starting for England, he made a second visit to Venice, then returned to Florence, and when the autumn was far enough advanced to make it safe went on to Rome. In the letter just quoted he mentions that he has made the acquaintance of a young Mr. Noel, a cousin of Byron. The winter of 1832-33 and the spring of 1833 were spent between Florence, Rome, and Naples. Wherever he traveled he made friends. He was not without a title to his secretary’s button, for his whole progress through Europe was a ticklish feat of diplomacy. Few of the people whom he met in society suspected what thin ice he was skating on, or dreamed for an instant that the dashing young _attaché_ was dependent for his bread and butter on weekly letters to a newspaper. The failure of remittances from Morris sometimes put him in an awkward predicament, but he always managed to find a way out. In one of the letters which he made it a religion to write his mother on each recurring birthday--this one dated at Florence, January 20, 1833--he relates some of his experiences of the kind:--