Page:A happy half-century and other essays.djvu/217

 Rh butterflies twice the size of the rabbits. Coleridge, exempt by nature from an unserviceable sense of humour, executed this commission in three pages of painstaking verse, and was severely censured for mentioning "in terms not sufficiently guarded, one of the most impure and mischievous books that could find its way into the hands of an innocent female."

The system of first securing an illustration, and then ordering a poem to match it, seemed right and reasonable to the editor of the annual, who paid a great deal for his engravings, and little or nothing for his poetry. Sometimes the poet was not even granted a sight of the picture he was expected to describe. We find Lady Blessington writing to Dr. William Beattie,—the best-natured man of his day,—requesting "three or four stanzas" for an annual called "Buds and Blossoms," which was to contain portraits of the children of noble families. The particular "buds" whose unfolding he was asked to immortalize were the three sons of the Duke of Buccleuch; and it was gently hinted that "an allusion to the family would add interest to the subject";—in plain words,