POET LAUREATE OF THE VALENTINE

Dominion, Volume 9, Issue 2758, 29 April 1916, Page 12

POET LAUREATE OF THE VALENTINE

MR. SEPTIMUS J. GOGGS RETIRES

Precisely at 3 o'clock on a February afternoon, Sir. Septimus J. Goggs, nf Goose Green, S.E., laid down his pen and definitely retired from business. The fact that :>t was St. Valentine's Day and that there were no valentines adds a certain amount of bitter poignancy to the old man's decision to retire, for he was, until yesterday, the poet-iu-cliiof of the valentine market. For six and fifty years his gentle muse has enriched with a fragrance entirely its own theso sentimental, Islightly scented messages of love and friendship which used to cause so much fluttering in suburban and rural households in the glad and glamorous days, now, alas! gone (like the valentine) for ever. Mr. Goggs. who is a mild-featured old man well past the allotted span, lives in a snug little house—Jasmine ViJla—in the most select quarter of Goose Green. Ho has a long, white beard;- his high, domed head is completely bald; he fixes you w.ith a mild though luminous blue eye; and his voice, like his muse, is soft and gentle. He is comfortably off—which is more than most poets can say—and he i s the owner, among other treasures, of tho most complete sot of Georgian and Early Victorian tea cosies possessed by any collector in these islands. Of this warm and comforting collection he' is naturally proud; in tho presence of them it is difficult to get him to talk of his art, for his rnodo3ty is almost painful. But when he \is steered into the vein his talk is pleasantly reminiscent .of , the ago of Felicia Hemans, sal volatile, and samplers. "Several years ago," said Mr. Goggs to a "Daily Mail" representative, "1 decided to retire from my post as Poet Laureate in the.valentine and birthday card business. The valentine, as a commercial speculation, was entirely killed by the sudden and altogether unaccountable boom of the frivolous and foolish game of ping-pong. When pingpong died—as suddenly as it was born —the valentine raised its drooping head once more, and I had so many requests from publishers to supply them with sentimental couplets and quatrains that I resumed once again tho quill—l can never compose ivifJi anything but a quill pen—to rotravcrso tho pleasant paths of poesy. "For a time all went well again. Orders flowed in, and it was as much as I could do to cope with them and to carry on at the ,saine time my contract as official anonymous poet to Mr. William Harris, the Sausage King. 'Da mortuis, nil nisi bonum' notwithstanding, I may here divulge a secret. It was generally understood, in the higher literary circles, that the late Mr. Harris always composed his own poetry in praise of his famous sausages. It is not so. It was I who wrote the bulk of his ballads, and mine were the verses uoginuing, as you no doubt remember; 'It is not'mine in halting verse to sing The glowing praises of the Sausage

King.' ''Mr. Harris was so pleased with that poom that he sent mo six pounds of sausages in addition to my fee . and for months afterwards I could never look ..a sausage in the face. "My distinguished patron offered ma £10 if I could find a suitable rhyme to the word 'sausage.' But he died before I could find one, and his successor having different views as to the commercial relations between pork and poetry, I did not think it worth while to continue my philological researches. "Well, well " the old man sighed. "Mr. Harris is dead; the war has killed the valentine; Othello's occupation's gone! So I'm subsiding quietly into retirement, quite happy among my small treasures and my tea cosies, though naturally pained that after so many years' close poetic intimacy with Cupi'ds and hearts and true-lovers' knots, the sweet-scented valentine today lies dead and buried. I see that you arc gazing upon that oil painting over tho mantelpiece. That is one of Hofmeycr's masterpieces in portraiture —my * great-great-grandfather, Jeremiah Goggs, who was the original author of that famous valentine couplet- ' She rose is red, the 'violet's blue, Carnation's sweet—and so are you. "A great man, Jeremiah!"