A remark of mine which, though of no value, is however rather a curious one, I cannot omit—namely, that every man who has been in the habit of scribbling rhyme of any description, involuntarily betrays his age and decline by the nature of his composition. The truth of this observation I will endeavour to illustrate by quotations from some jingling couplets written at different periods of life by a friend of mine, merely to show the strange though gradual transitions and propensities of the human mind from youth to maturity, and from maturity to age. I was brought up at a school where poetry was cultivated, whether the soil would bear a crop or not: I early got, however, somehow or other, an idea of what it was, which boys in general at that age never think of. But I had no practical genius, and never set up for it. Our second master, the son of the principal one, was a parson, and, as he thought, a poet, and wrote a thing called “The Tears of the British Muse,” which we were all obliged to purchase, and repeat once a month. In fact, of all matters, prosody was most assiduously whipped into us.
Love is the first theme of all the poets in the world. Though the French do not understand that matter a bit better than other folks, yet their language certainly expresses amatory ideas far more comprehensively than ours. In talking of love they do not speak of refinement: I never knew a Frenchwoman tie them together fast: their terms of gradation are—L’AMOUR naturel, bien sensible, très fort, à son goût, superbe: finishing the climax with pas nécessaire encore. (There certainly is a touch of despondency in the last gradation.) This classing of the passion with the palate is a very simple mode of defining its varieties.
However, the state of the feelings and propensities of men is much regulated by the amount of their years (ladies in general stick to their text longest). In early youth, poetry flows from natural sensation; and at this period verses in general have much modesty, much feeling, and a visible struggle to keep in with refinement.
In the next degree of age, which runs quite close upon the former, the scene nevertheless sadly alters. We then see plain amatory sonnets turning poor refinement out of company, and showing that it was not so very pure as we had reason to suppose. Next comes that stage wherein sensualists, wits, ballad-singers, gourmands, experienced lovers, and most kinds of poetasters, male and female, give their varieties. All the organs of craniology swell up in the brain and begin to prepare themselves for development: this is rather a lasting stage, and gently glides into, and amalgamates with the final one, filled by satirists, psalmists, epigrammatists, and other specimens of antiquity and ill-nature. But I fancy this latter must be a very unproductive line of versification for the writer, as few ladies ever read such things till after they begin to wear spectacles. Few persons like to see themselves caricatured; and the moment a lady is convinced that she ceases to be an object of love, she fancies that, as matter of course, she at once becomes an object of ridicule: so that she takes care to run no chance of reading to her own mortification till she feels that it is time to commence devotee.
I recollect a friend of mine writing a poem of satire so general, that every body might attribute it to their neighbours, without taking it to themselves. The first edition having gone off rapidly, he published a second, announcing improvements, and giving as a motto the words of Hamlet:—
“To hold the mirror up to Nature.”
This motto was fatal; the idea of holding up the mirror condemned the book: nobody would venture to look into it; and the entire impression is, I dare say, in the act of dry-rotting at the present moment.
One short period is the true Paradise of mortals, that delicious dream of life, when age is too far distant to be seen, and childhood fast receding from our vision!—when Nature pauses briefly between refinement and sensuality—first imparting to our wondering senses what we are and what we shall be, before she consigns us to the dangerous guardianship of chance and of our passions!
That is the crisis when lasting traits of character begin to bud and blossom, and acquire sap; and every effort should then be made to crop and prune, and train the young shoots, while yet they retain the principle of ductility.
During that period the youth is far too chary to avow a passion which he does not fully comprehend, satisfied with making known his feelings by delicate allusions, and thus contriving to disclose the principle without mentioning its existence. All sorts of pretty sentimentalities are employed to this end:—shepherds and shepherdesses are pressed into the service; as are likewise tropes of Arcadian happiness and simplicity, with abundance of metaphorical roses with thorns to them—perfumes and flowers.