This paragraph was enough to account for the “Quarterly” article; but the personal grievance was kept well out of sight, and Willis was taken to task for his alleged abuse of the rights of hospitality in reporting for a public journal private conversations at gentlemen’s tables. The article was a very offensive one, written with ability and with that air of cold contempt of which Lockhart was master. It sneered at Willis as a “Yankee poetaster,” and a “sonneteer of the most ultra-sentimental delicacy;” intimated that his surprise and delight at the manners of the English aristocracy came from his not having been familiar with the usages of the best society at home, and accused him of “conceited vulgarity” and “cockneyism” (an awful word, under which the Scotch Tories connoted all possible offenses against sound politics and good literature). The passages that seem to have given most offense to the critic were the report of the conversation with Lord Aberdeen at Gordon Castle and the remarks of Moore about O’Connell at Lady Blessington’s. “It is fortunate in this particular case,” wrote Lockhart, “that what Lord Aberdeen said to Mr. Willis might be repeated in print without paining any of the persons his lordship talked of; but what he did say, he said under the impression that the guest of the Duke of Gordon was a gentleman, and there are abundance of passages in Mr. Willis’s book which can leave no doubt that, had the noble earl spoken in a different sense, it would not, at all events, have been from any feeling of what was due to his lordship, or to himself, that Mr. Willis would have hesitated to report the conversation with equal freedom.” The article concludes as follows: “This is the first example of a man creeping into your home and forthwith printing,--accurately or inaccurately, no matter which,--before your claret is dry on his lips,--unrestrained _table-talk on delicate subjects, and capable of compromising individuals_.” Lockhart, as usual, contrived to insult Willis’s country, through her representative. “We can well believe,” he said, “that Mr. Willis has been depicting the sort of society that most interests his countrymen. ‘Born to be slaves and struggling to be lords,’ their servile adulation of rank and title, their stupid admiration of processions and _levées_, and so forth, are leading features in almost all the American books of travels that we have met with.”