the pet treasures of the lady of the house, and we had all been indulged with a sight of it, in a choicely-bound manuscript copy; but it was hard to make him confess to any literary habits or standing.' It must have been harder upon poor Praed to have had the pertinacious American worrying him for such a confession. 'As a gentleman of ample means [O, N. P. W.!] and retired life, the kind of notice drawn upon him by the admiration of this poem seemed distasteful. His habits were very secluded. We only saw him at table and in the evening; and for the rest of the day he was away in the remote walks and woods of the extensive park around the mansion, apparently more fond of solitude than of anything else.' More fond of solitude, I doubt not, than of answering or evading the innumerable inquiries of the most inquisitive American that ever set foot in England. Praed was trying to enjoy some rest in the country, after a busy session; and it was hardly to be expected that he should entirely waste his holiday. As it was, he seems to have been rather ill-treated. 'Mr. Praed's mind was one of wonderful readiness— rhythm and rhyme coming to him with the flow of an improvisatore. The ladies of the party made the events of every day the subjects of charades, epigrams, sonnets, &c., with the design of suggesting inspiration to his ready pen; and he was most brilliantly complying, with treasures for each in her turn.' What a rascally shame! Why did not Lady Bellair defend him from Jane and Julia ? In these days we are more civilised. Every well-ordered countryhouse has smoking- and billiard-rooms, where a persecuted poet can take refuge from ladies too eager for his autograph. But there is no taking sanctuary from the questionings of a Willis.

That poem of Lillian, which Willis calls exquisitely beautiful,' was produced under circumstances of a similar kind. Praed was challenged by some ladies to write on this enigmatic theme:

'A dragon's tail is flay'd to warm

A headless maiden's heart.'

Not very promising, it must be admitted; but the poet did his work well. Of course such work is waste; poetry should never attempt to be ingenious. There are new theories about it just now: Professor Sylvester, indeed, fancies he has found a way of constructing it by the higher algebra. There is never any knowing, in these scientific times, what discovery will come next. There was a gentleman a good many years ago who invented a machine that made Latin hexameters: they were villanous in quality, but the quantity was undeniable. Perhaps Mr. Sylvester's algebraic lyrics will be something similar. Mr. Tomlinson (well known as a chess-player) maintains in Notes and Queries the possibility of constructing a machine to play chess, and to play it infallibly well.

next?

What

By the pleasant river Teign was the country seat of Praed's family, and in some of his poems he gives us glimpses of the happy Devonshire life. Here is the belle of Teignmouth imploring her cousin to come to the country ball:

'I've often been out upon Haldon

To look for a covey with Pup;
I've often been over to Shaldon
To see how your boat is laid up;
In spite of the terrors of Aunty,

I've ridden the filly you broke;

And I've studied your sweet little Dante
In the shade of your favourite oak:
When I sat in July to Sir Lawrence,

I sat in your love of a shawl;

And I'll wear what you brought me from Florence,
Perhaps, if you'll come to our ball.'

Another poet sojourned for a time at Teignmouth, Endymion Keats. He went over the hills to a fair at Dawlish, and records in some doggerel rhyme that the gingerbread-nuts were smallish.' In the days before the railway, Dawlish, which even now is charming, was one of the loveliest villages in England: the only others which seem to fascinate me in the same way are Troutbeck and Wetheral, the former of which I have recently mentioned as 'the most beautiful village in the world.' Wetheral is on the banks of the glorious river Eden, that swift and sparkling stream which tradition declares King Arthur's father strove vainly to turn from its course, and on whose banks is the haunted hall where fairies in forgotten days left a mystic goblet with magical powers.

De Quincey was there for a while, and wrote a weird wild story, the Stranger's Grave, which is not to be found in his collected works. As to Dawlish, it is an old-fangled village built around pleasant lawns, through which a stream runs shimmering to the sea. A railway-arch now crosses the estuary of this rippling rivulet; but in the old days, before Brunel had invaded Devon, those emerald lawns came right down to the smooth hard sands; and the lovely little bay, with its lofty rocks of blood-red sandstone on either hand, was divinely isolated, a shrine for the goddess of the bath. Such is one of the gems of Praed's country.

Our poet had wonderful capacity for sketching in the tersest language characters peculiar to Devonshire; the old-fashioned Devon parson to wit:

His sermons never said or show'd

That earth is foul, that heaven is gracious,

Without refreshment on the road

From Jerome or from Athanasius;

And sure a righteous zeal inspired

The hand and head that penn'd and plann'd them,

For all who understood admired,

And some who did not understand them.'

The old village bachelor:

'Though all the parish were at strife,

He kept his counsel and his carriage,
And laugh'd, and loved a quiet life,

And shrank from chancery suits-and marriage.

Sound was his claret-and his head;

Warm was his double ale-and feelings:

His partners at the whist-club said

That he was faultless in his dealings.

He went to church but once a week;

Yet Dr. Poundtext always found him
An upright man, who studied Greek,

And liked to see his friends around him.'

Many a rare old crusty bachelor of this sort have I known, with quaint ideas and pungent humour, and an inveterate misogyny clinging to them. Old Townsend, who died the other day, vicar of Kingston-by-Sea, and who had been a great crony of Wordsworth and Rogers, was of this class. He liked children, but women he abominated. He was a shrewd epigrammatist, and thus consoled himself after some thieves had broken into his vicarage:

'They came and prigg'd my linen, my stockings, and my store;
But they couldn't prig my sermons, for they were prigg'd before.'

Praed's sketch of the Devonshire belle-a charming coquetteis excellent good:

'I saw her at the county ball:

There, when the sounds of flute and fiddle

Gave signal sweet in that old hall

Of hands across and down the middle,

Hers was the subtlest spell by far

Of all that set young hearts romancing;

She was our queen, our rose, our star;

And then she danced-O heaven, her dancing!

She sketch'd; the vale, the wood, the beach,
Grew lovelier from her pencil's shading:

She botanised; I envied each

Young blossom in her boudoir fading:

She warbled Handel; it was grand;

She made the Catalani jealous:

She touch'd the organ; I could stand

For hours and hours to blow the bellows.'

There is another country which I may call Praed's in a special sense-videlicet, America. Although he died in 1839, it was not till 1864 that an English edition of his poems was published. Meanwhile there had been at least four American editions, of the last of which, published in 1860, I possess one of the fifty copies printed for the editor, Mr. W. H. Whitmore of Boston, whose acquaintance I had the pleasure of making when he was in England. Doubtless

the popularity of Praed in the United States was at first in some measure due to his bearing his mother's name of Winthrop, an American patrician name. But it is clear that there is something in his scintillating social verse which commends itself specially to Transatlantic taste. He has found many imitators, Holmes and Saxe the most successful, but all immensely his inferiors. It is pleasant, at any rate, to think that while he was gradually dropping into oblivion in his native country, America had adopted him, and would not permit his sparkling rhyme to perish. This is one of the good turns for which I am grateful to our friends across the whalepool. Indeed, I have a great liking for the Americans, though some of our journals abuse them with stolid pertinacity. They are our best friends, our kinsmen, speaking our own language, sharing our great traditions, loving our immortal writers. Are we to quarrel with men who use the vernacular of Shakespeare? Verily, no.

The country wherein Coleridge reigned alone, supreme, was haunted by lady-witches, and traversed by ancient mariners who had shot sacred birds, and inhabited by wrathful old barons with delicious daughters, and occasionally visited by the devil when he wanted to see how his agricultural affairs prospered. But Praed's country is a land less visionary; a region populous with pretty girls of the bluest blood and dressed in the newest fashion. You know the kind:

The girls who are nice, and who know it;

The girls who are nicer, and don't;

The girls who will flirt with a poet;

The girls who are wiser, and won't.'

Of all these pretty pets Praed is perpetual poet laureate.

MORTIMER COLLINS.

THE HAUNTED BARONET

BY J. S. LE FANU,

AUTHOR OF UNCLE SILAS,' ETC.

CHAPTER XIX. MYSTAGOGus.

THE sail was loosed, the boat touched the stone step, and Feltram sprang out and made her fast to the old iron ring. The Baronet followed. So! he had ventured upon that water without being drowned. He looked round him as if in a dream. He had not been there since his boyhood. There were no regrets, no sentiment, no remorse; only an odd return of the associations and fresh feelings of boyhood, and a long reach of time suddenly annihilated.

The little hollow in which he stood; the three hawthorn trees at his right; every crease and undulation of the sward, every angle and crack in the lichen-covered rock at his, feet, recurred with a sharp and instantaneous recognition to his memory.

Many a time your brother and I fished for hours together from that bank there, just where the bramble grows. That bramble has not grown an inch ever since, not a leaf altered; we used to pick blackberries off it, with our rods stuck in the bank-it was later in the year than now till we stript it quite bare after a day or two. The steward used to come over-they were marking timber for cutting and we used to stay here while they rambled through the wood there, with an axe marking the trees that were to come down. I wonder whether the big old boat is still anywhere. I suppose she was broken up, or left to rot; I have not seen her since we came home. It was in the wood that lies at the right-the other wood is called the forest; they say in old times it was eight miles long, northward up the shore of the lake, and full of deer; with a forester, and a reeve, and a verderer, and all that. Your brother was older than you; he went to India, or the Colonies; is he living still?' I care not.'

'That's good-natured, at all events; but do you know?'

'Not I; and what matter? If he's living, I warrant he has his share of the curse, the sweat of his brow and his bitter crust; and if he is dead, he's dust or worse, he's rotten, and smells accordingly.'

Sir Bale looked at him; for this was the brother over whom, only a year or two ago, Philip used to cry tears of pathetic longing. Feltram looked darkly in his face, and sneered with a cold laugh. 'I suppose you mean to jest ?' said Sir Bale.

SECOND SERIES, VOL. II. F.S. VOL. XII.

GG