That only treads on flowers!
—lines which all our grandmothers had by heart—may still be found in compilations of English verse. Their dexterous allusions to the diamond sparks in Time’s hour-glass, and to the bird-of-paradise plumage in his grey wings, their veiled and graceful flattery, contrast pleasantly with Moore’s Hibernian boldness, with his offhand demand to be paid in kisses for his songs—
That rosy mouth alone can bring
What makes the bard divine;
Oh, Lady! how my lip would sing,
If once ’twere prest to thine.
A discreet young woman might have hesitated to show this album page to friends.
Byron’s “tributes,” when he paid them, were singularly chill. He may have buried his heart at Mrs. Spencer Smith’s feet; but the lines in her album which record this interment are eloquent of a speedy resurrection. When Lady Blessington demanded some verses, he wrote them; but he explained with almost insulting lucidity that his heart was as grey as his head (he was thirty-one), and that he had nothing warmer than friendship to offer in place of extinguished affections. Moore must have wearied painfully of albums and of their rapacious demands; yet to the end of his life he could be harassed into feigning a poetic passion; but Byron stood at bay. He was a hunted creature, and the instinct of self-preservation taught him savage methods of escape.
There are people who, from some delicacy of mental fibre, find it exceedingly difficult to be rude; and there are people who—like Charles Lamb—have a curious habit of doing what they do not want to do, and what they know is not worth doing, for the sake of giving pleasure to some utterly insignificant acquaintance. The first class lacks a valuable weapon in life’s warfare. The second class is so small, and the motives which govern it are so inscrutable, that we are apt to be exasperated by its amiability. It is easy to sympathize with Thackeray, who, being badgered to write in an album already graced by the signatures of several distinguished musicians, said curtly: “What! among all those fiddlers!” This hardy British superciliousness commends itself to our sense of humour, no less than to our sense of self-protection. A great deal has been said, especially by Frenchmen, about the wisdom of polite denials; but a rough word, spoken in time, is seldom without weight in England.
Yet, for a friend, Thackeray found no labour hard. The genial tolerance of “The Pen and the Album” suggests something akin to affection for these pillaging little books when the right people owned them,—when they belonged to “Chesham Place.” Locker tells a pleasant story of meeting Thackeray in Pall Mall, on his way to Kensington, and offering to join him in his walk. This offer was declined, Thackeray explaining that he had some rhymes trotting through his head, and that he was trying to polish them off in the course of a solitary stroll. A few days later they met again, and Thackeray said, “I finished those verses, and they are very nearly being very good. I call them ‘Mrs. Katherine’s Lantern.’ I did them for Dickens’s daughter.”