very much. _The Etonian_
itself was, even in its earliest numbers, written at an age when many,
perhaps most, men have already left school; and the earlier numbers are
as imitative, of the _Spectator_ and its late and now little read
followers of the eighteenth century, as is the verse above quoted. The
youthful boisterousness of _Blackwood_ gave Praed a more congenial
because a fresher cue; and in the style of which Maginn, as Adjutant
O'Doherty, had set the example in his Latinisings of popular verse, and
which was to be worked to death by Father Prout, there are few things
better than the "Musae O'Connorianae" which celebrates the great fight of
Mac Nevis and Mac Twolter. But there is here still the distinct
following of a model the taint of the school-exercise. Very much more
original is "The Knight and the Knave:" indeed I should call this the
first original thing, though it be a parody, that Praed did. To say that
it reminds one in more than subject of _Rebecca and Rowena_, and that it
was written some twenty years earlier, is to say a very great deal. Even
here, however, the writer's ground is rented, not freehold. It is very
different in such papers as "Old Boots" and "The Country Curate," while
in the later prose contributed to _Knight's Quarterly_ the improvement
in originality is marked. "The Union Club" is amusing enough all
through: but considering that it was written in 1823, two years before
Jeffrey asked the author of a certain essay on Milton "where he got that
style," one passage of the speech put in the mouth of Macaulay is
positively startling. "The Best Bat in the School" is quite delightful,
and "My First Folly," though very unequal, contains in the introduction
scene, between Vyvian Joyeuse and Margaret Orleans, a specimen of a kind
of dialogue nowhere to be found before, so far as I know, and giving
proof that, if Praed had set himself to it, he might have started a new
kind of novel.

It does not appear, however, that his fancy led him with any decided
bent to prose composition, and he very early deserted it for verse;
though he is said to have, at a comparatively late period of his short
life, worked in harness as a regular leader-writer for the _Morning
Post_ during more than a year. No examples of this work of his have been
reprinted, nor, so far as I know, does any means of identifying them
exist, though I personally should like to examine them. He was still at
Cambridge when he drifted int