kily, as in other cases, a kind of critical
deduction or reaction from this view has also taken place, and there are
persons who maintain that Praed's merit is a kind of coterie-merit, a
thing which Eton men are bound, and others are not bound but the
reverse, to uphold. This is an old, but apparently still effective
trick. I read not long ago a somewhat elaborate attempt to make out that
the people who admire Mr. Matthew Arnold's poems admire them because
they, the people, are Oxford men. Now this form of "ruling out" is
undoubtedly ingenious. "You admire Mr. Arnold's poems?"--"Yes, I
do."--"You are an Oxford man?"--"Yes, I am."--"Ah! I see." And it is
perfectly useless for the victim to argue that his admiration of the
poet and his allegiance to the University have nothing to do with each
other. In the present case I, at least, am free from this illogical but
damaging disqualification. I do not think that any one living admires
Praed more than I do; and neither Eton nor Cambridge, which may be said
to have divided influence on him, claims any allegiance from me. On
Praed himself, however, the influence of Eton was certainly great, if
not of the greatest. Here he began in school periodicals ("Apis Matina"
a bee buzzing in manuscript only, preceded _The Etonian_) his prose and,
to some though a less extent, his verse-exercises in finished
literature. Here he made the beginnings of that circle of friends
(afterwards slightly enlarged at Cambridge by the addition of
non-Etonians and including one or two Oxford men who had been at Eton)
which practically formed the staff of _The Etonian_ itself and of the
subsequent _Knight's Quarterly_ and _Brazen Head_. The greatest of them
all, Macaulay, belonged to the later Trinity set; but the Etonians
proper included divers men of mark. There has been, I believe, a
frequent idea that boys who contribute to school-magazines never do
anything else. Praed certainly could not be produced as an instance. He
was not a great athlete, partly because his health was always weak,
partly because athletics were then in their infancy. But he is said to
have been a good player at fives and tennis, an amateur actor of merit,
expert at chess and whist, and latterly a debater of promise, while, in
the well-known way of his own school and University, he was more than a
sufficient scholar. He went to Trinity in October 1821, and in the three
following years won the Browne Medals for Greek verse four time