_North_. ALBUMS! James--these compendiums of wit and wisdom have become
the greatest nuisances of all civilized society----
_Shepherd_. Tuts, man--what ails ye at Allbums?
_North_. They have broken that confidence between man and woman, which,
in our young day, used to form the delight of an acquaintance with an
amiable and accomplished female. In those happy times, how often have we
sat in a bright circle of the fair and young, and talked, and laughed,
in the gaiety of our careless hearts, without fear or apprehension! But
now we are afraid, in the presence of ladies, to give utterance to any
thing beyond a remark upon the weather. It is long since we have drilled
ourselves to attribute smiles and whispers, and even squeezes of the
hand, to their true source. We see an album lurking in every dimple of a
young maiden's cheek, and a large folio common-place book, reposing its
alexandrine length, in every curve of a dowager's double chin.
_Shepherd_. Tuts, man! What ails ye at Allbums?
_North_. No age is free from the infection. We go to a house in the
country where there are three unmarried daughters, two aunts, and a
grandmother. Complain not of a lack of employment on a rainy morning,
in such a domicile and establishment as this. You may depend upon it,
that the first patter of rain upon the window is the signal for all the
vellum and morocco bound scrap-books to make a simultaneous rush upon
the table. Forth comes the grandmother, and pushes an old dingy-coloured
volume into your hands, and pointing out a spare leaf, between a recipe
for curing corns, and a mixture for the hooping-cough, she begs you to
fill it up--with any thing you please.
_Shepherd_. Weel, weel, man--why canna you oblege the auld body?
_North_. What right has an old woman, with silver spectacles on her
long, thin nose, to enlist any man among the awkward squad which compose
her muster roll? Who can derive inspiration from the boney hand, which
is coaxingly laid on your shoulder, and trembles, not from agitation or
love, but merely from the last attack of the rheumatism?
_Shepherd_. But young leddies hae their Allbums, too, as weel's auld
anes.
_North_. And even the young ladies, James, presume too much upon their
power. Is there no way of getting into their books, but by writing in
their albums? Are we to pay for smiles at the rate of so many lines a
dimple? If the fair creatures are anxious to shew they can read, let
them discover it by the tenor of their conversation, and not by large
folios of quotations from books which every body knows; or if they are
anxious to shew that they can write, we can tell them they are very
wrong in having any such wish. I will put it to any man--are not the
pleasantest women of his acquaintance, those to whose handwriting he is
the greatest stranger? Did they not think their adored enslaver, who at
one time was considered, when they were musing on her charms, beneath
some giant tree, within the forest shade, "too fair to worship, too
divine to love,"--did they not think her a little less divine, without
being a bit more loveable, when they pored over, in her autograph, a
long and foolish extract from some dunderhead's poems, with the points
all wrong placed, and many of the words misspelt?
_Shepherd_. Neither points nor spellin's o' the smallest consequence in
a copy o' verses.
_North_. Think of the famous lovers of antiquity, James. Do you think
Thisbe kept a scrap-book, or that Pyramus slipped "Lines on Thisbe's
Cat" through the celebrated hole-in-the-wall? No such thing. If he had,
there would have been as little poetry in his love as in his verses. No
man could have had the insolence, not even a Cockney poetaster, to kill
himself for love, after having scribbled namby-pambys in a pale-blue,
gilt-edged album.
_Shepherd_. Faith--that's rather a lauchable idea.
_North_. In every point of view, scrap-books are the death of love. Many
a very sensible man can "whisper soft nonsense in a lady's ear," when
all the circumstances of the scene are congenial. We ourselves have
frequently descended to make ourselves merely the most agreeable man in
the world, till we unfortunately discovered that the blockheads who
could not comprehend us when we were serious, were still farther from
understanding the ineffable beauty of our nonsense; so that in both
cases we were the sufferers. They took our elegant badinage for our
sober and settled opinions, and laughed in the most accommodating manner
when we delivered our real and most matured sentiments.
_Blackwood's Magazine_.
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