No breath of wind the heavy air
Of lazy summer quickens.
Hard by you see the castle tall,
The village nestles round the wall,
As round about the hen, its small
Young progeny of chickens.
The verses may be read in any edition of Thackeray’s ballads; but when we have hunted up the “pictured page” in a mouldy old “Keepsake,” and see an expressionless girl, a featureless boy, an indistinguishable castle, and no village, we are tempted to agree with Charles Lamb, who swore that he liked poems to explain pictures, and not pictures to illustrate poems. “Your woodcut is a rueful lignum mortis.”
There was a not unnatural ambition on the part of publishers and editors to secure for their annuals one or two names of repute, with which to leaven the mass of mediocrity. It mattered little if the distinguished writer conscientiously contributed the feeblest offspring of his pen; that was a reasonable reckoning,—distinguished writers do the same to-day; but it mattered a great deal if, as too often happened, he broke his word, and failed to contribute anything. Then the unhappy editor was compelled to publish some such apologetic note as this, from the “Amulet” of 1833. “The first sheet of the ‘Amulet’ was reserved for my friend Mr. Bulwer, who had kindly tendered me his assistance; but, in consequence of various unavoidable circumstances” (a pleasure trip on the Rhine), “he has been compelled to postpone his aid until next year.” On such occasions, the “reserved” pages were filled by some veteran annualist, like Mr. Alaric Attila Watts, editor of the “Literary Souvenir”; or perhaps Mr. Thomas Haynes Bailey, he who wrote “I’d be a Butterfly,” and “Gaily the Troubadour,” was persuaded to warble some such appropriate sentiment as this in the “Forget-Me-Not”:—
It is a book we christen thus,
Less fleeting than the flower;