Dying when fair things are fading away."


The place in which the deathless strains welled from the singer's
heart was henceforth known as "Butterfly Bower." He now wrote a
novel, "The Aylmers," which has gone where the old moons go, and he
became rather a literary lion, and made the acquaintance of Theodore
Hook. The loss of a son caused him to write some devotional verses,
which were not what he did best; and now he began to try comedies.
One of them, Sold for a Song, succeeded very well. In the stage-
coach between Wycombe Abbey and London he wrote a successful little
lever de rideau called Perfection; and it was lucky that he opened
this vein, for his wife's Irish property got into an Irish bog of
dishonesty and difficulty. Thirty-five pieces were contributed by
him to the British stage. After a long illness, he died on April
22nd, 1829. He did not live, this butterfly minstrel, into the
winter of human age.

Of his poems the inevitable criticism must be that he was a Tom
Moore of much lower accomplishments. His business was to carol of
the most vapid and obvious sentiment, and to string flowers, fruits,
trees, breeze, sorrow, to-morrow, knights, coal-black steeds,
regret, deception, and so forth, into fervid anapaestics. Perhaps
his success lay in knowing exactly how little sense in poetry
composers will endure and singers will accept. Why, "words for
music" are almost invariably trash now, though the words of
Elizabethan songs are better than any music, is a gloomy and
difficult question. Like most poets, I myself detest the sister
art, and don't know anything about it. But any one can see that
words like Bayly's are and have long been much more popular with