And when I’m dead and in my grave,
This piece of work I trust you’ll save.
If the little girl who embodied her high hopes in the painful precision of cross-stitch could but know of their splendid fulfilment!
THE ALBUM AMICORUM
She kept an album too, at home,
Well stocked with all an album’s glories,
Paintings of butterflies and Rome,
Patterns for trimmings, Persian stories.
Praed.
Modern authors who object to being asked for their autographs, and who complain piteously of the persecutions they endure in this regard, would do well to consider what they have gained by being born in an age when commercialism has supplanted compliment. Had they been their own great-grandfathers, they would have been expected to present to their female friends the verses they now sell to magazines. They would have written a few playful and affectionate lines every time they dined out, and have paid for a week’s hospitality with sentimental tributes to their hostess. And not their hostess only. Her budding daughters would have looked for some recognition of their charms, and her infant son would have presented a theme too obvious for disregard. It is recorded that when Campbell spent two days at the country seat of Mr. James Craig, the Misses Craig kept him busy most of that time composing verses for their albums,—a pleasant way of entertaining a poet guest. On another occasion he writes to Mrs. Arkwright, lamenting, though with much good-humour, the importunities of mothers. “Mrs. Grahame has a plot upon me that I should write a poem upon her boy, three years old. Oh, such a boy! But in the way of writing lines on lovely children, I am engaged three deep, and dare not promise.”