but the antithetical pun is excised in the 1893 edition, where the lines are:
“The pilgrim sees an empty chair
Where Pamela once sat:
It may be she had found her grave,
It might be worse than that.”
So in “Bramble-Rise”
“My bank of early violets
Is now a bank of savings”
(“you mark the paronomasia, play ’pon words”?) does not continue to please the taste of the pun-despising fin-de-siècle public or of Locker himself: the corresponding stanza in the poem as published in 1893 is purified of such tricks. These alterations are characteristic of Locker’s literary method. He was keenly critical of himself—“never,” says Mr Birrell, “could mistake good verses for bad”—and was therefore always changing and polishing his work, adding here, pruning there. Thus
only eight poems from the 1857 volume form part of the “London Lyrics” of 1893, and only five of these—“Bramble-Rise,” “Piccadilly,” “The Pilgrims of Pall Mall,” “Circumstance,” “The Widow’s Mite”—have maintained their footing throughout in all intervening editions: the three others are, as it were, “rusticated” from the very severely edited selection of 1881. The variety of forms under which his verses appear at different periods will probably make the poet’s works a happy hunting-ground for the future commentator, who will no doubt assign this “lay” (as he will probably call it) to Locker, that to Lampson, that again to the Lockeridae or the Lampsonschule. The method is familiar. No one, probably, ever was so careful of the “limae labor.” “He took,” we are told, “great pains with his verses,” always aiming at a more perfect finish, with no loss of that naturalness which, as has been said, characterises all his work. According to the saying quoted by Matthew Arnold of Joubert, he “s’inquiétait de perfection.” Perfection, to him, implied an appearance of spontaneity: what looked laboured or artificial must be elaborated till it looked spontaneous—as it was in thought
if not altogether in development. His critical sense seems to have grown keener with his interest in the making of verses: “he was a great student of verse,” Mr Birrell says, and a student especially of that kind of verse of which he was himself one of the masters. In 1867 he published the well-known collection “Lyra Elegantiarum,” assisted by Mr Kernahan: the preface, written by Locker, contains some excellent rules for “light verse,” from which the selections are made. This anthology ranges over the whole field of English poetry, and, like everything else of Locker’s, it shows the man. “Its charm,” writes the editor’s collaborator, “is entirely of the editor’s individuality”—at least, from his favourites in literature, one may make a very fair guess at some part of his character. So, too, “Patchwork”—a kind of scrap-book, a collection of miscellaneous anecdotes, mostly humorous, but not as a rule broadly or farcically funny—illustrates his delicate and subtle perception of the laughable.
Locker married Lady Charlotte Bruce in 1850, and soon after left the service of Government. Thenceforward he appears to have led a very placid life, happy in his family, seeing
much of his large circle of friends, devoted to poetry and book-collecting. “Lyra Elegantiarum” was published in 1867, “Patchwork” in 1879. In 1886 Locker published a catalogue of what he called the “Rowfant Library”—his collection of rare and valuable books (mostly the poetry of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries) and autographs—of which Mr Andrew Lang has sung:
“The Rowfant books, how fair they shew,
The Quarto quaint, the Aldine tall,
Print, autograph, portfolio!
Back from the outer air they call
The athletes from the Tennis ball,
This Rhymer from his rod and hooks,
Would I could sing them, one and all,
The Rowfant books!”