mind us from what deep waters of the imagination even light poetry comes.

It is open to any one reading Praed's poems of love and sentiment to term them artificial, - but this is to miss his essential quality and charm. He wrote, it is true, among an artificial people, in a highly artificial age, but he wrote with a sincerity, an authentic poetic impulse, that makes the result anything but artificial. Of all the English poets, Praed has the best right to be styled "the bard of the ball-room," but it is a ball-room idealized, its lights curiously interpenetrated with the glamour of romance.

I love a ball! there's such an air
Of magic in the lustres' glare,
And such a spell of witchery

In all I hear and all I see,

That I can read in every dance

Some relic sweet of old romance.

So Praed sings in "The County Ball.” In “Love at a Rout," he has a still clearer profession of faith.

OF TH

I own fair faces not more fair

In Ettrick than in Portman Square,
And silly danglers just as silly
In Sherwood as in Piccadilly.

Soft tones are not the worse, no doubt,
For having harps to help them out;
And smiles are not a ray more bright
By moonbeams, than by candle-light;
I know much magic oft reposes
On wreaths of artificial roses,

And snowy necks,—I never found them
Quite spoilt by having cameos round them.

But love and sentiment in Praed's poetry are by no means altogether an affair of the ballroom. If the reader will read in order the poems as I have ventured to arrange them, following a rough chronological order, he will feel a steady deepening of the note, as he passes from the songs of light love and easy laughter, urbane yearning and mild regret, to the pieces embodying Praed's affection for his sister, and finally to the series "To Helen," and the last brave poem, written only a week before his death, full of the poet's tender, constant heart.

There is, too, a group of his pieces quite different in flavor, and containing his most characteristic and enduring work, which show a broader outlook and a deeper insight. The poems of life and manners give us Praed at his very best, and in this kind, who is better? Take the series of "Every-day Characters,”—take in particular "The Vicar," -for what other character described in light verse do we have such a peculiar feeling of humorous affection, such an enduring regard ?

But if Praed was more than "the bard of the ball-room," a kind of Cantabrigian Tom Moore, he was, nevertheless, in a fine and permanent way, essentially that. Even in the poems of life and manners, the point of view is distinctly a social one in the narrower sense. This is the secret of his piquancy and of his permanence. The manners depicted are those of other days, yet of days that have come, perhaps in part because of their portrayal by such poets as Praed, to be typical of certain enduring phases of civ

ilized life. When we speak of vers de société, the "society" that comes into our minds is precisely his, the society of harp and candlelight, of "diamonds and French bonnets."