ent do
the two little fat volumes which were ushered into the world by Derwent
Coleridge in 1864, and the one little thin volume which appeared in
1887 under Sir George Young's name with no notes and not much
introduction, and the very creditable edition of the political poems
which appeared a year later under the same care but better cared for,
agree together. But this, though a nuisance to those who love not a set
of odd volumes, would matter comparatively little if the discrepancies
were not equally great in a much more important matter than that of mere
externals. Only the last of the four volumes and three books just
enumerated can be said to have been really edited, and though that is
edited very well, it is the least important. Sir George Young, who has
thus done a pious work to his uncle's memory, was concerned not merely
in the previous cheap issue of the prose, but in the more elaborate
issue of the poems in 1864. But either his green unknowing youth did not
at that time know what editing meant, or he was under the restraint of
some higher powers. Except that the issue of 1864 has that well-known
page-look of "Moxon's," which is identified to all lovers of poetry with
associations of Shelley, of Lord Tennyson, and of other masters, and
that the pieces are duly dated, it is difficult to say any good thing of
the book. There are no notes; and Praed is an author who is much in need
of annotation. With singular injudiciousness, a great deal of album and
other verse is included which was evidently not intended for
publication, which does not display the writer at his best, or even in
his characteristic vein at all, while the memoir is meagre in fact and
decidedly feeble in criticism. As for the prose, though Sir George Young
has prefixed an introduction good as far as it goes, there is no index,
no table even of contents, and the separate papers are not dated, nor is
any indication given of their origin--a defect which, for reasons to be
indicated shortly, is especially troublesome in Praed's case.
Accordingly anything like a critical study of the poet is beset with
very unusual difficulties, and the mere reading of him, if it were less
agreeable in itself, could not be said to be exactly easy. Luckily Praed
is a writer so eminently engaging to the mere reader, as well as so
interesting in divers ways to the personage whom some one has politely
called "the gelid critic," that no sins or shortcomings of his editors
c