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?—
'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:—
Lucy's Birthday.
Thick with silver flowers beset
In a fragrant coronet,
Lucy's servants this day bring.
Be it the birthday wreath she wears,
Fresh and fair and symbolling
The young number of her years,
The sweet blushes of her spring.
Friendly hearts, your mistress greet,
Be you ever fair and sweet,
And grow lovelier as you ope.
Gentle nursling, fenced about
With fond care, and guarded so,
Scarce you've heard of storms without,
Frosts that bite, and winds that blow!
And we pray that Heaven may send
To our floweret a warm sun,
A calm summer, a sweet end.
And where'er shall be her home,
May she decorate the place,
Still expanding into bloom,
And developing in grace.
To-day our birthday poets are limited—not in numbers, for the publishers of cards are inundated with verses—but in those of merit. One firm, indeed, during the last twelve or thirteen years has received no fewer than 150,000 compositions, of which number only some 5,600 have been found usable; not a very great number, when it is remembered that something between ten and twelve millions of cards pass between well-wishers in this country alone every year, and that a similar
