MY DEAR MR. WILLIS,--Yours of the 16th has been forwarded to me here, and I lose not an hour in replying to it. I congratulate you with my whole heart on your approaching marriage, and wish you all the happiness you so well deserve, and which a marriage well assorted will alone bestow. I predict the happiness I wish you, for you would not, I am sure, make an unworthy choice, and the distaste which the scenes you have gone through during the last year must have engendered in your mind will have taught you still more highly to appreciate the society and affection of a pure-minded and amiable woman, on whom your future happiness will depend. I think you have acted most wisely, and am sure that the rational plans you have laid down will insure your felicity. A residence _near_ London, which gives you the opportunity of enjoying its numerous advantages, without weakening your mind by a too frequent contact with its dissipations, is, of all others, the one I would select for a literary man, and I shall look forward with pleasure to seeing you at Seamore Place in your new and more respectable character of a Domestic Man, which, be assured, will bestow more happiness on you than all the futile successes ever acquired in the heartless maze of fashion and folly, in whose vortex you have been whirled during so many months. A Man of Genius is out of his natural sphere in such a circle; he loses his identity and blunts the fine edge of his sensibility. You have retired in time, and will, I am persuaded, have reason to bless the gentle and benign influence that has attracted you from it to the pure and healthy atmosphere of domestic life. Be assured, my dear Mr. Willis, that out of the circle of your immediate family you have no friend more truly interested in your welfare or more anxious to promote it than I am, of which no proof in my power shall ever be wanting. I shall be in London on the 22d, and shall have great pleasure in seeing you. Your secret shall be safe with me, you may be sure. I hope the little tale will be sent for your correction in a day or two. Pray have “Ion” left at my house. Mr. Talfourd requested that it might not leave my possession, so that in lending it to you I disobeyed his request. The old Earl of Dalhousie wrote a letter of hearty congratulation. “Wherever you go or sit down at last,” it said, “think of us as being with you in our minds’ eye at least, and if it shall please God that, in the course of time, we ever meet again, it will be truly a day of joy here, for from hence I move no more.” His son, the young Lord Ramsay, had jestingly promised to be Willis’s groomsman some day at Niagara, and the former now reminded him of it, and asked him to stand up with him, and Ramsay sent the following excuses some three weeks after the wedding:--