“The Token” belonged to the class of illustrated publications known as Annuals. It was the age of Annuals, Gift Books, Boudoir Books, Books of Beauty, Flowers of Loveliness, and Leaflets of Memory. The taste for these ornate combinations of literature and art was imported from England, where the Ackermans had published “The Forget-Me-Not,” the earliest specimen of the kind, in 1823. Carey & Lea of Philadelphia brought out the first American Annual, “The Atlantic Souvenir,” for which Willis had been asked to write, when in college, and to which he actually did contribute a copy of birthday verses, “I’m twenty-two--I’m twenty-two,” in the volume for 1829. These were written, he affirmed, “in a blank leaf of a barber’s Testament, while waiting to be shaved.” They were also inserted in the “London Literary Souvenir” for the same year, by Alaric A. Watts, a copious editor of Annuals, whose middle initial was cruelly asserted by Lockhart to stand for _Attila_. The rage for Annuals soon became general and lasted for about twenty years. Goodrich enumerates some forty of them, bearing such fantastic titles as The Gem, The Opal, The Wreath, The Casket, The Rose, The Amulet, The Keepsake, Pearls of the West, Friendship’s Offering. And these are probably not half the list. There were religious Annuals, juvenile Annuals, oriental, landscape, botanic Annuals. Most rummagers among the upper shelves of an old library have taken down two or three of them, blown the dust from their gilt edges, ruffled the tissue papers that veil “The Bride,” “The Nun,” “The Sisters,” and “The Fair Penitent,” and wondered in what age of the world these remarkable “embellishments” and the still more remarkable letterpress which they embellish could have reflected American life. There is a faded elegance about them, as of an old ball dress: a faint aroma, as of withered roses, breathes from the page. Those steel-engraved beauties, languishing, simpering, insipid as fashion plates, with high-arched marble brows, pearl necklaces, and glossy ringlets--not a line in their faces or a bone in their bodies: that Highland Chieftain, that Young Buccaneer, that Bandit’s Child, all in smoothest _mezzotint_,--what kind of a world did they masquerade in? It was a needlework world, a world in which there was always moonlight on the lake and twilight in the vale; where drooped the willow and bloomed the eglantine, and jessamine embowered the cot of the village maid; where the lark warbled in the heavens and the nightingale chanted in the grove ’neath the mouldering ivy-mantled tower; where vesper chimes and the echoes of the merry bugle-ugle-ugle horn were borne upon the zephyr across the yellow corn; where Isabella sang to the harp (with her hair down) and the tinkling guitar of the serenader under her balcony made response; a world in which there were fairy isles, enchanted grottoes, peris, gondolas, and gazelles. All its pleasantly