From that time forth he shared the widow's vigils; he was to her an elder son—to the children, a loving brother. His heart, too, expanded in sympathy for his fellows, and under this genial influence his energies, previously cramped, expanded also. The best proof I can give of this, if proof be necessary, is that the picture which he shortly afterwards exhibited, entitled "The Two Angels," was the picture of the year, and brought to him the fame which had previously so persistently evaded him. One of the happiest moments in his life was when he took Dodo—now quite recovered—and Willie to view his "masterpiece."
THE birthday card, as we know it now, can scarcely have been with us more than fifty or fifty-five years, and there is very little doubt that the more ancient reminder of St. Valentine's Day suggested the idea of putting a verse, appropriate to a birthday, in the place of the often far-fetched sentiments of February the fourteenth. Nearly all our later poets have contributed to birthday literature, and we may presume that the delightful morceaux which came from their pens were written on a card or sheet of paper, and quietly dispatched to the recipient. Eliza Cook, Tom Moore, Burns, Cowper, Johnson, Tom Hood, Charles Lamb, and Mrs. Hemans have given to the world the most beautiful of thoughts within the limits of a four-line verse. Where is a more suggestive sentiment—considered by many the finest of all such verse—than that which Pope addressed to Martha Blount?—
Is that a birthday? 'Tis, alas! too clear
'Tis but the funeral of the former year.
Thackeray, too, could write delightful lines. His daughter—Mrs. Thackeray-Ritchie—sent the following to the writer, written by her father to Miss Lucy Batler in America:—