Still he kept his head fairly well. Fortunate in his introductions, he was the man to make the most of his chances. His talent for society and his easy assurance put him quickly _de niveau_ with his new acquaintances. He was not at all above owning that the English nobility, for example, impressed his imagination. He liked to stay at their houses; he enjoyed the wealth, the grandeur, the historic associations that surrounded them. His appetite for luxury was gratified by the perfection of all their appointments in the art of living. The fineness of their manners pleased his aristocratic tastes and he could not sufficiently admire the high-bred women and the simple, cordial, dignified gentlemen with whom he dined or drove through the cultivated landscapes. But Willis was no snob or vulgar tuft hunter. His enjoyment of his privileges was accompanied with an entire reserve of his self-respect. He liked the company of those whom Dr. Johnson was wont to call “the great.” But though he loved a lord, he preferred a commoner, if the commoner was preferable. The Duke of Richelieu, whom he had met at Lady Blessington’s, and previously at the French court, he described as “the inheritor of nothing but the name of his great ancestor, a dandy and a fool.” “What a star is mine!” he wrote in a letter to his sister Julia, three days after his landing in England. “All the best society of London exclusives is now open to me--_me!_ a sometime apprentice at setting types--_me!_ without a sou in the world beyond what my pen brings me, and with not only no influence from friends at home, but a world of envy and slander at my back. Thank heaven, there is not a countryman of mine, except Washington Irving, who has even the standing in England which I have got in _three days_ only. I should not boast of it if I had not been wounded and stung to the quick by the calumnies and falsehoods of every description which come to me from America. But let it pass! It reconciles me to my exile at least, and may drive me to adopt the mother country for my own. In a literary way, I have had already offers from the ‘Court Magazine,’ the ‘Metropolitan Monthly,’ and the ‘New Monthly’ of the first price for my articles. I sent a short tale, written in one day, to the ‘Court Magazine’ yesterday, and the publishers gave me eight guineas for it at once. They all pay in this proportion, and you can easily see, with my present resources of matter, how well I can live. I lodge in Cavendish Square, the most fashionable part of the town, paying a guinea a week for my lodgings, and am as well off as if I had been the son of the President, with as much as I could spend in the year. Except my family now, I have forgotten everybody in America. [Here follows the passage about Mary Benjamin already quoted in chapter III.] I never can return, however, till I can pay