After leaving Dalhousie, Willis spent a few days in Edinburgh, where he breakfasted with Professor Wilson, dined with Jeffrey, and danced till three o’clock in the morning at the Whig ball given in honor of Lord Grey. An attack of scrofula in his left leg, which he chose to describe in his correspondence with his English friends as “gout,” was aggravated by this last dissipation, and after two or three days more of poultices and plasters at Edinburgh, he took steamer to Aberdeen. “The loss of a wedding in Perthshire, by the way, a week’s deer-shooting in the forest of Athol, and a week’s fishing with a noble friend at Kinvara (long standing engagements all), I lay at the door of the Whigs.” He was laid up four days at Aberdeen, but finally recovered so far as to take coach seventy miles across country to Lochabers, a small town on the estates of the Duke of Gordon, to whom he brought a letter from Dalhousie. At Gordon Castle he found a distinguished company and passed ten days of unmixed enjoyment. There were thirty guests, among whom were Lord Aberdeen, who had been foreign secretary under Wellington; his son, Lord Claude Hamilton, a handsome young Cantab, who invited Willis to visit him at the university for a day’s hunt; Lord Aberdeen’s daughter, Lady Harriet Hamilton, “eighteen and brilliantly beautiful;” Lord and Lady Stormont, Lord Mandeville, Lord and Lady Morton, the Duchess of Richmond and her daughter, Lady Sophia Lennox, “the palest, proudest, and most high-born looking woman I ever saw.” This Lady Sophia Lennox was probably the original of Mildred Ashly, the disdainful beauty in “Paul Fane.” She seems to have impressed Willis as the type and embodiment of English aristocracy. In a letter to Lady Blessington, written from Gordon Castle and printed in Madden’s “Life of Lady Blessington,” he says, “There is a Lady Something, very pale, tall and haughty, twenty-three and sarcastic, whom I sat next at dinner yesterday,--a woman I came as near an antipathy for as is possible, with a very handsome face for an apology.” The same letter gives his opinion of his host and hostess more unreservedly than he could venture to do in “Pencillings.” The duke he describes as “a delightful, hearty old fellow full of fun and conversation.” Willis’s letters from Gordon Castle were perhaps more criticised than any other part of his “Pencillings” for their alleged violation of the sanctities of private life. They are, nevertheless, among the very best passages in his correspondence and, taken together, they present a brilliant picture of what is, doubtless, so far as material conditions go, the most perfect life lived by man; the life, namely, of a chosen party of guests, in late September, at the country seat of a great British noble.