at church
Stares wistfully over the pew.'

Agreeably descriptive of rural pleasures is Lord Chesterfield's 'Advice
to a Lady in Autumn.' Of recent years the subject has been treated by a
versifier who has at least a measure of the neatness of Praed, and who
enumerates among the typical guests at a country house

'A sporting parson, good at whist,
A preaching sportsman, good at gateways;'

and, again:

'A lady who once wrote a book,
And one of whom a book's been written...
One blonde whose fortune is her face,
And one whose face caught her a fortune.'

As for the daily round:

'We dance, we flirt, we shoot, we ride,
Our host's a veritable Nimrod:
We fish the river's silver tide,'

and so on. There are, of course, the county balls, and the fancy balls,
and the private theatricals, and what not, all of them celebrated by the
inevitable Praed. It was at the county ball that he saw 'the belle of
the ballroom':

'There, when the sounds of flute and fiddle
Gave signal sweet in that old hall
Of hands across and down the middle.'

It was to the county ball, as well as to the theatricals at Fustian
Hall, that Praed's 'Clarence' was so prettily invited. As for fancy
balls:

'Oh, a fancy ball's a strange affair!
Made up of silks and leathers,
Light heads, light heels, false hearts, false hair,
Pins, paint, and ostrich feathers.'

Of inland watering-places, Bath and Cheltenham have been perhaps most
often poetized. Bath found its _vates sacer_ in the author of the 'New
Bath Guide'; it has rarely found one since; its glories have virtually
departed. It was at Cheltenham--

'Where one drinks one's fill
Of folly and cold water'--

that Praed met his 'Partner.' And C. S. Calverley has told us how

'Year by year do Beauty's daughters
In the sweetest gloves and shawls
Troop to taste the Chattenham waters,
And adorn the Chattenham balls.

'_Nulla non donanda lauru_
Is that city: you could not,
Placing England's map before you,
Light on a more favoured spot.'

Praed has a poem called 'Arrivals at a Watering-Place,' but it is not
one of the most successful of his efforts. Nor have seaside places in
general been made the subject of very excellent verse. Brighton is the
one exception. Of that 'favoured spot,' James Smith, of 'Rejected
Addresses' fame, was, perhaps, the first to write flatteringly. 'Long,'
he declared--