Album verses date from the old easy days, when rhyming was regarded as a gentlemanly accomplishment rather than as a means of livelihood. Titled authors, poets wealthy and well-born—for there were always such—naturally addressed themselves to the ladies of their acquaintance. They could say with Lord Chesterfield that they thanked Heaven they did not have to live by their brains. It was a theory, long and fondly cherished, that poetry was not common merchandise, to be bought and sold like meal and malt; that it was, as Burns admirably said, either above price or worth nothing at all. Later on, when poets became excellent men of business, when Byron had been seduced by Murray’s generosity, when Moore drove his wonderful bargains, and poetic narrative was the best-selling commodity in the market, we hear a rising murmur of protest against the uncommercial exactions of the album. Sonneteers who could sell their wares for hard cash no longer felt repaid by a word of flattery. Even the myrtle wreaths which crowned the victors of the Bath Easton contests appeared but slender compensation, save in Miss Seward’s eyes, or in Mrs. Hayley’s. When Mrs. Hayley went to Bath in 1781, and witnessed the solemn ceremonies inaugurated by Lady Miller; when she saw the laurels, and myrtles, and fluttering ribbons, her soul was fired with longing, and she set to work to persuade her husband that the Bath Easton prize was not wholly beneath his notice. The author of “The Triumphs of Temper” was naturally fearful of lowering his dignity by sporting with minor poets; and there was much wifely artifice in her assumption that such playfulness on his part would be recognized as true condescension. “If you should feel disposed to honour this slight amusement with a light composition, I am persuaded you will oblige very highly.” The responsive Hayley was not unwilling to oblige, provided no one would suspect him of being in earnest. He “scribbled” the desired lines “in the most rapid manner,” “literally in a morning and a half” (Byron did not take much longer to write “The Corsair”), and sent them off to Bath, where they were “admired beyond description,” and won the prize, so that the gratified Mrs. Hayley appeared that night with the myrtle wreath woven in her hair. The one famous contributor to the Bath Easton vase who did not win a prize was Sheridan. He, being entreated to write for it some verses on “Charity,” complied in these heartless lines:—
THE VASE SPEAKS
For heaven’s sake bestow on me
A little wit, for that would be
Indeed an act of charity.
Complimentary addresses—those flowery tributes which seem so ardent and so facile—were beginning to drag a little, even in Walpole’s day. He himself was an adept in the art of polite adulation, and wrote without a blush the obliging comparison between the Princess Amelia and Venus (greatly to the disparagement of Venus), which the flattered lady found in the hand of the marble Apollo at Stowe. “All women like all or any praise,” said Lord Byron, who had reason to know the sex. The Princess Amelia, stout, sixty, and “strong as a Brunswick lion,” was pleased to be designated as a “Nymph,” and to be told she had routed Venus from the field. Walpole also presented to Madame de Boufflers a “petite gentillesse,” when she visited Strawberry Hill; and it became the painful duty of the Duc de Nivernois to translate these lines into French, on the occasion of Miss Pelham’s grand fête at Esher Place. The task kept him absorbed and preoccupied most of the day, “lagging behind” while the others made a cheerful tour of the farms, or listened to the French horns and hautboys on the lawn. Finally, when all the guests were drinking tea and coffee in the Belvidere, poor Nivernois was delivered of his verselets, which were received with a polite semblance of gratification, and for the remaining hours his spirit was at peace. But it does seem a hard return to exact for hospitality, and must often have suggested to men of letters the felicity of staying at home.
Miss Seward made it her happy boast that the number and the warmth of Mr. Hayley’s tributes—inserted duly in her album—raised her to a rivalry with Swift’s Stella, or Prior’s Chloe. “Our four years’ correspondence has been enriched with a galaxy of little poetic gems of the first water.” Nor was the lady backward in returning compliment for compliment. That barter of praise, that exchange of felicitation, which is both so polite and so profitable, was as well understood by our sentimental ancestors as it is in this hard-headed age. Indeed, I am not sure that the Muse did not sometimes calculate more closely then than she ventures to do to-day. We know that Canon Seward wrote an elegiac poem on a young nobleman who was held to be dying, but who—perversely enough—recovered; whereupon the reverend eulogist changed the name, and transferred his heartfelt lamentations to another youth whose death was fully assured. In the same business-like spirit Miss Seward paid back Mr. Hayley flattery for flattery, until even the slow-witted satirists of the period made merry over this commerce of applause.
Miss Seward. Pride of Sussex, England’s glory,
Mr. Hayley, is that you?
Mr. Hayley. Ma’am, you carry all before you,