—an argument which would have carried conviction to Huxley’s soul, had he been more than eight years old when it was written. Poor Coleridge, always in need of a guinea or two, was bidden to write some descriptive lines for the “Keepsake,” on an engraving by Parris of the Garden of Boccaccio; a delightful picture of nine ladies and three gentlemen picnicking in a park, with arcades as tall as aqueducts, a fountain as vast as Niagara, and butterflies twice the size of the rabbits. Coleridge, exempt by nature from an unserviceable sense of humour, executed this commission in three pages of painstaking verse, and was severely censured for mentioning “in terms not sufficiently guarded, one of the most impure and mischievous books that could find its way into the hands of an innocent female.”
The system of first securing an illustration, and then ordering a poem to match it, seemed right and reasonable to the editor of the annual, who paid a great deal for his engravings, and little or nothing for his poetry. Sometimes the poet was not even granted a sight of the picture he was expected to describe. We find Lady Blessington writing to Dr. William Beattie,—the best-natured man of his day,—requesting “three or four stanzas” for an annual called “Buds and Blossoms,” which was to contain portraits of the children of noble families. The particular “buds” whose unfolding he was asked to immortalize were the three sons of the Duke of Buccleuch; and it was gently hinted that “an allusion to the family would add interest to the subject”;—in plain words, that a little well-timed flattery might be trusted to expand the sales. Another year the same unblushing petitioner was even more hardy in her demand.
“Will you write me a page of verse for the portrait of Miss Forester? The young lady is seated with a little dog on her lap, which she looks at rather pensively. She is fair, with light hair, and is in mourning.”
Here is an inspiration for a poet. A picture, which he has not seen, of a young lady in mourning looking pensively at a little dog! And poor Beattie was never paid a cent for these effusions. His sole rewards were a few words of thanks, and Lady Blessington’s cards for parties he was too ill to attend.
More business-like poets made a specialty of fitting pictures with verses, as a tailor fits customers with coats. A certain Mr. Harvey, otherwise lost to fame, was held to be unrivalled in this art. For many years his “chaste and classic pen” supplied the annuals with flowing stanzas, equally adapted to the timorous taste of editors, and to the limitations of the “innocent females” for whom the volumes were predestined. “Mr. Harvey embodies in two or three lines the expression of a whole picture,” says an enthusiastic reviewer, “and at the same time turns his inscription into a little gem of poetry.” As a specimen gem, I quote one of four verses accompanying an engraving called Morning Dreams,—a young woman reclining on a couch, and simpering vapidly at the curtains:—
She has been dreaming, and her thoughts are still
On their far journey in the land of dreams;
The forms we call—but may not chase—at will,
And sweet low voices, soft as distant streams.
This is a fair sample of the verse supplied for Christmas annuals, which, however “chaste and classic,” was surely never intended to be read. It is only right, however, to remember that Thackeray’s “Piscator and Piscatrix” was written at Lady Blessington’s behest, to accompany Wattier’s engraving of The Happy Anglers; and that Thackeray told Locker he was so much pleased with this picture, and so engrossed with his own poem, that he forgot to shave for the two whole days he was working at it. To write “good occasional verse,” by which he meant verse begged or ordered for some such desperate emergency as Lady Blessington’s, was, in his eyes, an intellectual feat. It represented difficulties overcome, like those wonderful old Italian frescoes fitted so harmoniously into unaccommodating spaces. Nothing can be more charming than “Piscator and Piscatrix,” and nothing can be more insipid than the engraving which inspired the lively rhymes: