Miss Porter and Miss Pardoe were both domesticated at Shirley Park, and he met there at different times, as fellow guests, Lady Franklin, Lady Sidney Morgan, author of once popular French and Italian travels, and the brilliant young orator, poet, and wit, Winthrop Mackworth Praed. Of the latter Willis wrote in the “Home Journal” many years later: “We were followers together in the train of the admired belle (a visitor under the same hospitable roof) whom I afterward brought home with me to Glenmary.” Willis attributed to his religious poetry the honor of his first acquaintance with Joanna Baillie, Jane Porter, and the Byrons. For the authoress of “The Scottish Chiefs,” especially, he formed an enduring attachment, and she regarded him with an almost motherly affection. A lifelong correspondence was kept up between them, and at the death of Admiral Robert Ker Porter at St. Petersburg in 1842, among the MSS. found in his sea-chests were ninety letters from Willis to his sister. The letters from Miss Porter, among Willis’s private papers, show that she was an equally indefatigable, through a not very legible correspondent. Willis encountered Ada Byron at an evening party in London, and thought her “earnest and sweet.” Lady Byron, who was a Unitarian, was much interested by the spirited sketch of Dr. Channing in a series of papers on American literature which Willis had contributed to the “Athenæum,” and she expressed her favorable opinion of them in a letter to Miss Baillie, as also her pleasure that her daughter had made the author’s acquaintance. Miss Baillie gave this note to Willis for his autograph book. Byron’s sister, Augusta Leigh, he also met in London society. She gave him an autograph letter of Byron, and on the appearance of “Melanie and Other Poems,” in March 1835, he sent her a copy, and received an acknowledgment in which she said that the book contained “some of the most touching and exquisite lines I ever read.” The venerable Joanna Baillie wrote him, on the same occasion, a letter filled with the most graceful compliments. Among other London acquaintances of Willis’s at this time were John Leech, the artist, and Martin Farquhar Tupper, the proverbial philosopher, who afterwards visited him in America. A few extracts from a manuscript diary irregularly kept by Willis from June, 1835, to March, 1836, will serve to show the nature of his daily engagements and occupations:-- “June 30. Breakfasted with Samuel Rogers. Met Dr. Delancey, of Philadelphia, and Corbin, _ditto_. Talked of Mrs. Butler’s book, and Rogers gave us suppressed passages. Talked of critics, and said that ‘as long as you cast a shadow, you were sure you possessed _substance_.’ Coleridge said of Southey: ‘I never think of him but as mending a pen.’ Southey said of Coleridge: ‘Whenever anything presents itself to him in the shape of a duty, that moment he finds himself incapable of looking at it.’