Friendship's Offering for 1827, which he, Knight, edited for Smith & Elder. Praed contributed the "Red Fisherman," the only one of his legendary ballads that has achieved any lasting popularity. Praed's original title for this poem was "The Devil's Decoy," which " some blockhead in the confidence of the publishers" thought fit, on his own responsibility, to alter to "The Red Fisherman." Praed was very angry, and was disposed to regard Charles Knight as responsible, and it was with difficulty that another rupture between the old friends was averted. "The Red Fisherman" has been frequently quoted, and it has been the fashion to regard it as Praed's happiest effort in ballad writing, although in what respect it can be deemed superior to “The Bridal of Belmont," "The Haunted Tree," “The Teufelhaus,”—which is even more weirdly powerful-it is impossible to say. "The Troubadour," Praed's longest poem, contains much that is very charming. The first two cantos of it were published in Knight's Quarterly. Praed's secession from the Magazine interrupted the continuation. Only a portion of the third canto was ever written. The poem is very indeterminate in character, and might have been carried on indefinitely, as each canto brings the hero into a new field of adventure, and supplies a tale or episode complete in itself. The poem, even as far as it was published, is too

lengthy for insertion in extenso, but selected lyrics from it will be found in this volume.

Praed's claim to distinction, however, rests entirely upon his Poetry of Life and Manners. As a writer of what, for want of a better name, we call Vers de Société, he was in his time unapproachable, and has hardly, at any time, been surpassed. Verse-writing of this class in Praed's early days had sunk to a very low ebb. Neither Canning's wit nor Moore's gay fancy inspired the vapid scribblers who filled albums and keepsakes with "Lines to Ladies' Portraits,"

"Soft songs to Julia's cockatoo,

Fierce odes to Famine and to Slaughter."

Praed taught his contemporaries to be natural. He had a remarkable fluency of expression. He was humorous, witty, and good-natured; he was a man of the world, and knew his world well, gauged its weaknesses with accuracy, and judged them with the leniency of a good-humoured worldly philosopher, contriving, meanwhile, not to forfeit his own character for honesty and healthiness of mind. There is nothing very deep about Praed's poetry, yet is it not entirely superficial. He had keen insight and plenty of discrimination, but for great passion or sustained power he had no capa. bilities. Lightly and gracefully he skated over the

thin surface ice of sentiment, not ignorant of, yet with little desire to fathom, the unknown depths of passion and suffering that lay beneath. "The genius of gentleman" claimed for Horace by the late Lord Lytton, belonged to Praed in no common degree. No man equally witty and brilliant was ever more perfectly well-bred in his writings: without prudery, affectation, or cant, he was never slangy, suggestive, or irreverent: he even achieved the difficult art of writing political satires that lost none of their point from the fact of their being free from coarseness or personality. He was a typical society poet, compounded of wit, scholar, and gentleman. His world was not a very serious or a very earnest world, and he wrote of it pretty much as he found it, with some slight touches of half-sad, half-cynical, but never unkindly moralising; yet with all its faults it was a pleasant world to those whom it treated well, and a man laden with society's favours, as was Praed, was not likely to develop into a Democritus. Few poets have been better treated by the world than he was the paths of literature and politics were never thorny ones to him; his talents brought him reputation before he had ever struggled to attain it. Helping hands were freely held out to him from the hour of his first schoolboy success; he was popular in society, fortunate in friendship, and, above all things,

happy in his family and domestic affections. Mr. Locker remarks of the qualities of his poetry, that "his fancy is less wild than Moore's, while his sympathies are narrower than Thackeray's." Both statements (qualified by the further expression of opinion that has already been quoted) may be accepted without much demur. With regard to the latter remark, there are indeed few writers of the century of whom it might not, with equal justice, have been made. Admitting that his sympathies were neither very deep nor very wide, they are at least essentially and uniformly healthy and pure. Whatever might have been Praed's matter, his manner, although not versatile, is always good. His fluency of expression is remarkable, and must have even been a source of weakness, since a man who wrote so much, so constantly, and with so little effort, must almost inevitably have perpetrated a good deal of inferior work in his time. What Praed published formed only a portion of what he wrote, for he was always ready to scribble verse on slight temptation; and that "inquisitive man with the note book," Nathaniel Parker Willis, who met Praed at a country house, has left it on record that he was ever open to furnish contributions to the inevitable album that every fair one cherished in those days. Praed's style, as has been said, is not versatile :

he never hazarded possible harshness by metrical experiments, and the measures that he particularly affected have become intimately associated with the general characteristics of his style; his rhyme and rhythm are both perfect, and apparently instinctive, as if writing in metre were as effortless an exercise to him as writing in prose.

To conclude in the words of the Rev. Derwent Coleridge, "Not unknown, nor without mark in the arena of political conflict, the name of Praed is still remembered as at least that of a forward pupil in the school of statesmanship; and though his literary honours, won in earliest manhood, and sustained by the casual productions of a leisure hour, were worn carelessly, while he was preparing for more serious duties, yet now that years have gone by, and we have to audit the past with no expectation of any future account, we find that he has left behind him a permanent expression of wit and grace, refined and tender feeling, of inventive fancy and acute observation, unique in character, and his own by an undisputed title."

FREDERICK COOPER.