contributed frequently to magazines and periodicals. In 1829 he started the American Monthly Magazine, which was continued from April of that year to August 1831, but failed to achieve success. On its discontinuance he went to Europe as foreign editor and correspondent of the New York Mirror. To this journal he contributed a series of letters, which, under the title Pencillings by the Way, were published at London in 1835 (3 vols.; Philadelphia, 1836, 2 vols.; and first complete edition, New York, 1841). Their vivid and rapid sketches of scenes and modes of life in the old world at once gained them a wide popularity; but he was censured by some critics for indiscretion in reporting conversations in private gatherings. Notwithstanding, however, the small affectations and fopperies which were his besetting weaknesses as a man as well as an author, the grace, ease and artistic finish of his style won general recognition. His “Slingsby Papers,” a series of magazine articles descriptive of American life and adventure, republished in 1836 under the title Inklings of Adventure, were as successful in England as were his Pencillings by the Way in America. He also published while in England Melanie and other Poems (London, 1835; New York, 1837), which was introduced by a preface by Barry Cornwall (Procter). After his marriage to Mary Stace, daughter of General William Stace of Woolwich, he returned to America, and settled at a small estate on Oswego Creek, just above its junction with the Susquehanna. Here he lived off and on from 1837 to 1842, and wrote Letters from under a Bridge (London, 1840; first complete edition, New York, 1844), the most charming of all his works. During a short visit to England in 1839-1840 he published Two Ways of Dying for a Husband. Returning to New York, he established, along with George P. Morris, a newspaper entitled the Evening Mirror. On the death of his wife in 1845 he again visited England. Returning to America in the spring of 1846, he married Cornelia Grinnell, and established the National Press, afterwards named the Home Journal. In 1845 he published Dashes at Life with a Free Pencil, in 1846 a collected edition of his Prose and Poetical Works, in 1849 Rural Letters, and in 1850 Life Here and There. In that year he settled at Idlewild on the Hudson river, and on account of failing health spent the remainder of his life chiefly in retirement. Among his later works were Hurry-Graphs (1851), Outdoors at Idlewild (1854), Ragbag (1855), Paul Fane (1856), and the Convalescent (1859), but he had survived his great reputation. He died on the 20th of January 1867, and was buried in Mount Auburn, Boston.
The best edition of his verse writings is The Poems, Sacred, Passionate and Humorous, of N. P. Willis (New York, 1868); 13 volumes of his prose, Complete Prose Works, were published at New York (1849-1859), and a Selection from his Prose Writings was edited by Henry A. Beers (New York, 1885). His Life, by Henry A. Beers, appeared in the series of “American Men of Letters” the same year. See also E. P. Whipple, Essays and Reviews (vol. i., 1848); M. A. de Wolfe Howe, American Bookmen (New York, 1898).
WILLIS, THOMAS (1621–1675), English anatomist and physician, was born at Great Bedwin, Wiltshire, on the 27th of January 1621. He studied at Christ Church, Oxford; and when that city was garrisoned for the king he bore arms for the Royalists. He took the degree of bachelor medicine in 1646, and applied himself to the practice of his profession. In 1660, shortly after the Restoration, he became Sedlerian professor of natural philosophy in place of Joshua Cross, who was ejected, and the same year he took the degree of doctor of physic. In 1664 he discovered the medicinal spring at Astrop, near Brackley in Northamptonshire. He was one of the first members of the Royal Society, and was elected an honorary fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 1664. In 1666, after the fire of London, he took a house in St Martin’s Lane, and there rapidly acquired an extensive practice, his reputation and skill marking him out as one of the first physicians of his time. He died in St Martin’s Lane on the 11th of November 1675 and was buried in Westminster Abbey.
Willis was admired for his piety and charity, for his deep insight into natural and experimental philosophy, anatomy and chemistry, and for the elegance and purity of his Latin style. Among his writings were Cerebri anatome nervorumque description et usus (1664), in which he described what is still known, in the anatomy of the brain, as the circle of Willis, and Pharmaceutice rationalis (1674), in which he characterized diabetes mellitus. He wrote in English A Plain and Easy Method for Preserving those that are Well from the Infection of the Plague, and for Curing such as are Infected. His Latin works were printed in two vols. 4to at Geneva in 1676, and at Amsterdam in 1682. Browne Willis (1682–1760), the antiquarian, author of three volumes of Surveys of the cathedrals of England, was his grandson.
See Munk, Roll of the Royal College of Physicians, London (2nd ed., vol i., London, 1878).
WILLMORE, JAMES TIBBITTS (1800–1863), English line engraver, was born at Bristnall’s End, Handsworth, near Birmingham, on the 15th of September 1800. At the age of fourteen he was apprenticed to William Radcliffe, a Birmingham engraver, and in 1823 he went to London and was employed for three years by Charles Heath. He was afterwards engaged upon the plates of Brockedon's Passes of the Alps and Turner's England and Wales. He engraved after Chalon, Leitch, Stanfield, Landseer, Eastlake, Creswick and Ansdell, and especially after Turner, from whose “Alnwick Castle by Moonlight,” “The Old Téméraire,” “Mercury and Argus,” “Ancient Rome,” and the subjects of the rivers of France, he executed many admirable plates. He was elected an associate engraver of the Royal Academy in 1843. He died on the 12th of March 1863.
WILLOBIE (or Willoughby), HENRY (1575?-1596?), the supposed author of a poem called Willobie his Avisa, which derives interest from its possible connexion with Shakespeare's personal history. Henry Willoughby was the second son of a Wiltshire gentleman of the same name, and matriculated from St John's College, Oxford, in December 1591, at the age of sixteen. He is probably identical with the Henry Willoughby who graduated B.A. from Exeter College early in 1595, and he died before the 30th of June 1596, when to a new edition of the poem Hadrian Dorrell added an “Apologie” in defence of his friend the author “now of late gone to God,” and another poem in praise of chastity written by Henry's brother, Thomas Willoughby. Willobie his Avisa was licensed for the press on the 3rd of September 1594, four months after the entry of Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece, and printed by John Windet. It is preceded by two commendatory poems, the second of which, signed “Contraria Contrariis; Vigilantius; Dormitanus,” contains the earliest known printed allusion to Shakespeare by name:—
“Yet Tarquyne pluckt his glistering grape.
“And Shakespeare paints poore Lucrece rape.”
In the poem itself, Avisa, whose name is explained in Dorrell's “Epistle to the Reader” as Amans Uxor Inviolata Semper Amanda, takes up the parable alternately with her suitors, one of whom is introduced to the reader in a prose interlude signed by the author H. W., as Henrico Willobego Italo Hispalensis. This passage contains a reference which may fairly be applied to the sonnets of Shakespeare. It runs:
“H. W. being sodenly infected with the contagion of a fantasticall fit, at the first sight of A … bewrayeth the secresy of his disease unto his familiar frend W. S. who not long before had tried the curtesy of the like passion, and was now newly recouered … he determined to see whether it would sort to a happier end for this new actor, then it did for the old player.”
Then follows a dialogue between H. W. and W. S., in which W. S., “the old player,” a phrase susceptible of a double sense, gives somewhat commonplace advice to the disconsolate wooer.
Dorrell alleges that he found the MS. of Willobie his Avisa among his friend's papers left in his charge when Willoughby departed from Oxford on her majesty's service. There is no trace of any Hadrian Dorrell, and the name is probably fictitious; there is, indeed, good reason to think that the pseudonym, if such it is, covers the personality of the real author of the work. Willobie his Avisa proved extremely popular, and passed through numerous editions, and Peter Colse produced in 1596 an imitation named Penelope's Complaint.
See Shakspere Allusion-Books, part i., ed. C. M. Ingleby (New Shakspere Society, 1874); A. B. Grosart's “Introduction” to his reprint of Willobie his Avisa (1880).
