cism would call him a really precocious writer,
especially in verse. The pieces by which he is best known and which have
most individuality, date in no case very early, and in almost all cases
after his five-and-twentieth year. What does date very early (and
unluckily it has been printed with a copiousness betokening more
affection than judgment, considering that the author had more sense
than to print it at all) is scarcely distinguishable from any other
verses of any other clever boy. It is impossible to augur any future
excellence from such stuff as

Emilia often sheds the tear
But affectation bids it flow,

or as

From breasts which feel compassion's glow
Solicit mild the kind relief;

and, for one's own part, one is inclined to solicit mild the kind relief
of not having to read it. Even when Praed had become, at least
technically, a man, there is no very great improvement as a whole,
though here and there one may see, looking backwards from the finished
examples, faint beginnings of his peculiar touches, especially of that
pleasant trick of repeating the same word or phrase with a different and
slightly altered sense which, as Mr. Austin Dobson has suggested, may
have been taken from Burns. The Cambridge prize poems are quite
authentic and respectable examples of that style which has received its
final criticism in

Ply battleaxe and hurtling catapult:
Jerusalem is ours! _Id Deus vult_,--

though they do not contain anything so nice as that, or as its great
author's more famous couplet respecting Africa and the men thereof. The
longer romances of the same date, "Gog," "Lilian," "The Troubadour,"
are little more than clever reminiscences sometimes of Scott, Byron,
Moore, and other contemporaries, sometimes of Prior and the _vers de
societe_ of the eighteenth century. The best passage by far of all this
is the close of "How to Rhyme with Love," and this, as it seems to me,
is the only passage of even moderate length which, in the poems dating
before Praed took his degree, in the least foretells the poet of "The
Red Fisherman," "The Vicar," the "Letters from Teignmouth," the
"Fourteenth of February" (earliest in date and not least charming fruit
of the true vein), "Good-night to the Season," and best and most
delightful of all, the peerless "Letter of Advice," which is as much the
very best thing of its own kind as the "Divine Comedy."

In prose Praed was a little earlier, but not