Riot will chase repose away;
Sleep, Mr. Speaker; sleep, sleep while you may.

Sleep, Mr. Speaker; Cobbett will soon
Move to abolish the sun and moon;
Hume, no doubt, will be taking the sense
Of the House on a saving of thirteen-pence;
Grattan will growl or Baldwin bray;
Sleep, Mr. Speaker; sleep, sleep while you may.

Sleep, Mr. Speaker: dream of the time
When loyalty was not quite a crime,
When Grant was a pupil in Canning's school,
And Palmerston fancied Wood a fool.
Lord, how principles pass away!
Sleep, Mr. Speaker; sleep, sleep while you may.

Sleep, Mr. Speaker; sweet to men
Is the sleep that comes but now and then;
Sweet to the sorrowful, sweet to the ill,
Sweet to the children who work in a mill.
You have more need of sleep than they,
Sleep, Mr. Speaker; sleep, sleep while you may.

But the chief merit of Praed's political verse as a whole seems to me to
be that it kept his hand in, and enabled him to develop and refine the
trick, above referred to, of playing on words so as to give a graceful
turn to verse composed in his true vocation.

Of the verse so composed there are more kinds than one; though perhaps
only in two kinds is the author absolutely at his best. There is first a
certain class of pieces which strongly recall Macaulay's "Lays" and may
have had some connexion of origin with them. Of course those who are
foolish enough to affect to see nothing good in "The Battle of the Lake
Regillus," or "Ivry," or "The Armada," will not like "Cassandra," or
"Sir Nicholas at Marston Moor," or the "Covenanter's Lament for Bothwell
Brigg," or "Arminius." Nevertheless they are fine in their way.
"Arminius" is too long, and it suffers from the obvious comparison with
Cowper's far finer "Boadicea." But its best lines, such as the
well-known

I curse him by our country's gods,
The terrible, the dark,
The scatterers of the Roman rods,
The quellers of the bark,

are excellent in the style, and "Sir Nicholas" is charming. But not here
either did Apollo seriously wait for Praed. The later romances or tales
are far better than the earlier. "The Legend of the Haunted Tree" shows
in full swing that happy compound and contrast of sentiment and humour
in which the writer excelled. And "The Teufelhaus" is, except "The Red
Fisherman" perhaps, the best thing of its kind in English. These lines
are good enough for any