trip on the Rhine), "he has been compelled to postpone his aid until next year." On such occasions, the "reserved" pages were filled by some veteran annualist, like Mr. Alaric Attila Watts, editor of the "Literary Souvenir"; or perhaps Mr. Thomas Haynes Bailey, he who wrote "I'd be a Butterfly," and "Gaily the Troubadour," was persuaded to warble some such appropriate sentiment as this in the "Forget-Me-Not":—
It is a book we christen thus,
Less fleeting than the flower;
And 't will recall the past to us
With talismanic power;
which was a true word spoken in rhyme. Nothing recalls that faded past, with its simpering sentimentality, its reposeful ethics, its shut-in standards, and its differentiation of the masculine and feminine intellects, like the yellow pages of an annual.
Tom Moore, favourite of gods and men, was singled out by publishers as the lode-star of their destinies, as the poet who could be best trusted to impart to the "Amethyst" or the "Talisman" (how like Pullman cars they
