had a certain poverty of imagery and allusion which belonged to the school, a recurrence of stock properties, such as roses, stars, and bells. He was ridiculed by the critics, in particular, for his constancy to the Pleiades, which would almost seem to have been the only constellation in his horizon. Toward the last of November, 1835, the first edition of “Pencillings by the Way” was published. It was an imperfect one, made up hastily for the London market from a broken set of the “Mirror,” and gave only seventy-nine out of the one hundred and thirty-nine letters since printed in the complete editions. From this imperfect copy the first American impression (1836) was taken, and all in fact down to 1844. The book reached a second English edition in March, 1836, and a seventh in 1863. For this first edition Willis received £250. He afterwards testified, that from the republication of the original “Pencillings,” for which Morris had paid him $500 a year, he had made, all told, about $5,000. Their appearance in book form had been anticipated by a severe criticism of the original “Mirror” letters, written by Lockhart for the “London Quarterly” of September, 1835. This was echoed by the Tory press generally, and it was their attacks which led to the issue of the London edition and greatly stimulated its sale. There were several reasons why the Tory papers were “down on” Willis. In the first place he was an American. In the next place he had been admitted and made much of in English social circles, where English men of letters, who were merely men of letters, did not often go. And, finally, he had spoken disrespectfully in these letters of the editor of the “Quarterly” himself. “Do you know Lockhart?” Wilson is made to ask in Willis’s report of their conversation at Edinburgh. “No, I do not,” replies his interlocutor. “He is almost the only literary man in London I have not met; and I must say, as the editor of the ‘Quarterly,’ and the most unfair and unprincipled critic of the day, I have no wish to know him. I never heard him well spoken of. I probably have met a hundred of his acquaintances, but I have not yet seen one who pretended to be his friend.”