which runs
With rapid change from rocks to roses:
It slipped from politics to puns,
It passed from Mahomet to Moses;
Beginning with the laws which keep
The planets in their radiant courses,
And ending with some precept deep
For dressing eels, or shoeing horses.

Three of the Vicar's companion "Everyday Characters" are good, but I
think not so good as he; the fifth piece, however, "The Portrait of a
Lady," is quite his equal.

You'll be forgotten--as old debts
By persons who are used to borrow;
Forgotten--as the sun that sets,
When shines a new one on the morrow;
Forgotten--like the luscious peach
That blessed the schoolboy last September;
Forgotten--like a maiden speech,
Which all men praise, but none remember.

Yet ere you sink into the stream
That whelms alike sage, saint, and martyr,
And soldier's sword, and minstrel's theme,
And Canning's wit, and Gatton's charter,
Here, of the fortunes of your youth,
My fancy weaves her dim conjectures,
Which have, perhaps, as much of truth
As passion's vows, or Cobbett's lectures.

Here, and perhaps here first, at least in the order of the published
poems, appears that curious mixture of pathos and quizzing, sentiment
and satire, which has never been mastered more fully or communicated
more happily than by Praed. But not even yet do we meet with it in its
happiest form: nor is that form to be found in "Josephine" which is much
better in substance than in manner, or in the half-social,
half-political patter of "The Brazen Head," or in "Twenty-eight and
Twenty-nine." It sounds first in the "Song for the Fourteenth of
February." No one, so far as I know, has traced any exact original[20]
for the altogether admirable metre which, improved and glorified later
in "The Letter of Advice," appears first in lighter matter still like
this:

Shall I kneel to a Sylvia or Celia,
Whom no one e'er saw, or may see,
A fancy-drawn Laura Amelia,
An _ad libit_ Anna Marie?
Shall I court an initial with stars to it,
Go mad for a G. or a J.,
Get Bishop to put a few bars to it,
And print it on Valentine's Day?

But every competent critic has seen in it the origin of the more
gorgeous and full-mouthed, if not more accomplished and dexterous,
rhythm in which Mr. Swinburne has written "Dolores," and the even more
masterly dedication of th