“At this time an American traveler passed through Tuscany and favored me with a visit at my country seat. He expressed a wish to reprint in America a large selection of my ‘Imaginary Conversations,’ omitting the political. He assured me they were the most _thumbed_ books on his table. With a smile at so energetic an expression of perhaps an undesirable distinction, I offered him unreservedly and unconditionally my only copy of the five printed volumes, interlined and interleaved in most places, together with my MS. of the sixth, unpublished. He wrote to me on his arrival in England, telling me that they were already on their voyage to their destination.” It seems from Willis’s public explanation in “Letters from under a Bridge,” that he received the volumes, which were in a dilapidated condition, at the moment of starting, and not knowing how to add them to his baggage he--rather carelessly, perhaps--“sent them with a note to Theodore Fay, who was then in Florence, requesting him to forward them to America by ship from Leghorn.” Fay accordingly committed them to a Mr. Miles, an American straw-bonnet-maker, who did send them to New York, where Willis expected to follow in the course of the summer and take charge of them. Instead of doing this, he spent the next two years in England, and meanwhile wrote to Landor that the package had been left with Miles, to forward it to America. Landor “called in consequence at the shop of this person, who denied any knowledge of the books.” These, however, after a brief stay in New York, were consigned to Willis at London, “and Fay and Mr. Landor both happening there together, the explanation was made, and the books and manuscripts restored unharmed to the author,” but not in time to keep Willis from going down “to posterity astride the finis of ‘Pericles and Aspasia.’ I trust,” he continues, “that his [Landor’s] biographer will either let me slip off at Lethe’s wharf, by expurgating the book of me, or do me justice in a note.” In spite of which trust the biographers have been a little hard on Willis in the matter. Sidney Colvin, heartened, probably, by the “Quarterly’s” onslaught, denounces him as “that most assiduous of flatterers and least delicate of gossips,” and says that he gave Landor occasion to repent of his hospitality by consigning his books to America and then basely lingering on in England “in obsequious enjoyment of the great company among whom he found himself invited:” while Forster, after declaring that Willis’s “fuss and fury of boundless hero-worship found in Landor an easy victim,” adds that “Landor will perhaps be thought not without excuse for the way in which he always afterwards spoke of Mr. N. P. Willis.” But whatever inconvenience the latter may have caused in this business, he certainly made the _amende honorable_ in the letter to Landor from which Mr. Forster quotes:--