many colors look as if they must have been thrown in for nothing; and West’s brawny Lear tearing his clothes to pieces.  But why go on with the catalogue, when most of these pictures can be seen either at the Athenaeum building in Beacon Street or at the Art Gallery, and admired or criticised perhaps more justly, certainly not more generously, than in those earlier years when we looked at them through the japanned fish-horns?

If one happened to pass through Atkinson Street on his way to the Athenaeum, he would notice a large, square, painted, brick house, in which lived a leading representative of old-fashioned coleopterous Calvinism, and from which emerged one of the liveliest of literary butterflies.  The father was editor of the “Boston Recorder,” a very respectable, but very far from amusing paper, most largely patronized by that class of the community which spoke habitually of the first day of the week as “the Sahbuth.”  The son was the editor of several different periodicals in succession, none of them over severe or serious, and of many pleasant books, filled with lively descriptions of society, which he studied on the outside with a quick eye for form and color, and with a certain amount of sentiment, not very deep, but real, though somewhat frothed over by his worldly experiences.

Nathaniel Parker Willis was in full bloom when I opened my first Portfolio.  He had made himself known by his religious poetry, published in his father’s paper, I think, and signed “Roy.”  He had started the “American Magazine,” afterwards merged in the “New York Mirror.”  He had then left off writing scripture pieces, and taken to lighter forms of verse.  He had just written

     “I’m twenty-two, I’m twenty-two,
        They idly give me joy,
     As if I should be glad to know
        That I was less a boy.”

He was young, therefore, and already famous.  He came very near being very handsome.  He was tall; his hair, of light brown color, waved in luxuriant abundance; his cheek was as rosy as if it had been painted to show behind the footlights; he dressed with artistic elegance.  He was something between a remembrance of Count D’Orsay and an anticipation of Oscar Wilde.  There used to be in the gallery of the Luxembourg a picture of Hippolytus and Phxdra, in which the beautiful young man, who had kindled a passion in the heart of his wicked step-mother, always reminded me of Willis, in spite of the shortcomings of the living face as compared with the ideal.  The painted youth is still blooming on the canvas, but the fresh-cheecked, jaunty young author of the year 1830 has long faded out of human sight.  I took the leaves which lie before me at this moment, as I write, from his coffin, as it lay just outside the door of Saint Paul’s Church, on a sad, overclouded winter’s day, in the year 1867.  At that earlier time, Willis was by far the most prominent young American author.  Cooper, Irving, Bryant, Dana, Halleck, Drake, had all done their best work.