WILLIS, Nathaniel Parker (1806-1867), American author, was descended from George Willis, described as a “Puritan of considerable distinction,”who arrived in New England about 1630 and settled in Cambridge, Mass. Nathaniel Parker was the eldest son and second child of Nathaniel Willis, a newspaper proprietor in Boston, and was born in Portland, Maine, 20th January 1806. After attending Boston grammar school and the academy at Andover, he entered Yale College in October 1823. Although he did not specially distinguish himself as a student, university life had considerable influence in the development of his character, and furnished him with much of his literary material. Immediately after leaving Yale he published in 1827 a volume of Poetical Sketches, which attracted some attention, although the critics found in his verses more to blame than to praise. It was followed by Fugitive Poetry (1829) and Poems (1831). He also 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 ...