And fortune, Frances, Whiten with your name!
of which conceit he was innocently proud.
Mrs. Moxon (Emma Isola) was herself an old and hardened offender. Her album, enriched with the spoils of a predatory warfare, travelled far afield, extorting its tribute of verse. We find Lamb first paying, as was natural, his own tithes, and then actually aiding and abetting injustice by sending the book to Mr. Procter (Barry Cornwall), with an irresistible appeal for support.
“I have another favour to beg, which is the beggarliest of beggings; a few lines of verse for a young friend’s album (six will be enough). M. Burney will tell you who I want ’em for. A girl of gold. Six lines—make ’em eight—signed Barry C——. They need not be very good, as I chiefly want ’em as a foil to mine. But I shall be seriously obliged by any refuse scraps. We are in the last ages of the world, when St. Paul prophesied that women should be ‘headstrong lovers of their own wills, having albums.’ I fled hither to escape the albumean persecution, and had not been in my new house twenty-four hours when a daughter of the next house came in with a friend’s album, to beg a contribution, and, the following day, intimated she had one of her own. Two more have sprung up since. ‘If I take the wings of the morning, and fly unto the uttermost parts of the earth, there will albums be.’ New Holland has albums. The age is to be complied with.”
“Ask for this little book a token of remembrance from friends, and from fellow students, and from wayfarers whom you may never see again. He who gives you his name and a few kind words, gives you a treasure which shall keep his memory green.”
So wrote Goethe—out of the abyss of German sentimentality—in his son’s album; and the words have a pleasant ring of good fellowship and unforced fraternity. They are akin to those gracious phrases with which the French monarchy—“despotism tempered by epigram”—was wont to designate the taxes that devoured the land. There was a charming politeness in the assumption that taxes were free gifts, gladly given; but those who gave them knew.
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS
U . S . A
FOOTNOTE:
[1] Beattie’s Minstrel.