an do him much harm, so long as they let him be read at all.

Winthrop Mackworth was the third son of Serjeant Praed, Chairman of the
Board of Audit, and, though his family was both by extraction and by
actual seat Devonian, he was born in John Street, Bedford Row, on 26th
June 1802, the year of the birth of Victor Hugo, who was perhaps about
as unlike Praed in every conceivable point, except metrical mastery, as
two men possessing poetic faculty can be unlike one another. John Street
may not appear as meet a nurse for a poetic child as Besancon,
especially now when it has settled down into the usual office-and-chambers
state of Bloomsbury. But it is unusually wide for a London street; it
has trees--those of the Foundling Hospital and those of Gray's Inn--at
either end, and all about it cluster memories of the Bedford Row
conspiracy, and of that immortal dinner which was given by the Briefless
One and his timid partner to Mr. Goldmore, and of Sydney Smith's sojourn
in Doughty Street, and of divers other pleasant things. In connection,
however, with Praed himself, we do not hear much more of John Street. It
was soon exchanged for the more cheerful locality of Teignmouth, where
his father (who was a member of the old western family of Mackworth,
Praed being an added surname) had a country house. Serjeant Praed
encouraged, if he did not positively teach, the boy to write English
verse at a very early age: a practice which I should be rather slow to
approve, but which has been credited, perhaps justly, with the very
remarkable formal accuracy and metrical ease of Praed's after-work.
Winthrop lost his mother early, was sent to a private school at eight
years old, and to Eton in the year 1814. Public schools in their effect
of allegiance on public schoolboys have counted for much in English
history, literary and other, and Eton has counted for more than any of
them. But hardly in any case has it counted for so much with the general
reader as in Praed's. A friend of mine, who, while entertaining high
and lofty views on principle, takes low ones by a kind of natural
attraction, says that the straightforward title of _The Etonian_ and
Praed's connection with it are enough to account for this. There you
have a cardinal fact easy to seize and easy to remember. "Praed? Oh!
yes, the man who wrote _The Etonian_; he must have been an Eton man,"
says the general reader. This is cynicism, and cannot be too strongly
reprehended. But unluc