an" and the "Letter of Advice" I fear I must
peremptorily disable their judgment. But this appearance of levity is in
great part due exactly to the perfect modulation and adjustment of his
various notes. He never shrieks or guffaws: there is no horse-play in
him, just as there is no tearing a passion to tatters. His slight
mannerisms, more than once referred to, rarely exceed what is justified
by good literary manners. His points are very often so delicate, so
little insisted on or underlined, that a careless reader may miss them
altogether; his "questionings" are so little "obstinate" that a careless
reader may think them empty.

Will it come with a rose or a brier?
Will it come with a blessing or curse?
Will its bonnets be lower or higher?
Will its morals be better or worse?

The author of this perhaps seems to some a mere jesting Pilate, and if
he does, they are quite right not to even try to like him.

I have seen disdainful remarks on those critics who, however warily,
admire a considerable number of authors, as though they were coarse and
omnivorous persons, unfit to rank with the delicates who can only relish
one or two things in literature. But this is a foolish mistake. "One to
one" is not "cursedly confined" in the relation of book and reader; and
a man need not be a Don Juan of letters to have a list of almost _mille
e tre_ loves in that department. He must indeed love the best or those
among the best only, in the almost innumerable kinds, which is not a
very severe restriction. And Praed is of this so fortunately numerous
company. I do not agree with those who lament his early death on the
ground of its depriving literature or politics of his future greatness.
In politics he would most probably not have become anything greater than
an industrious and respectable official; and in letters his best work
was pretty certainly done. For it was a work that could only be done in
youth. In his scholarly but not frigidly correct form, in his irregular
sallies and flashes of a genius really individual as far as it went but
never perhaps likely to go much farther, in the freshness of his
imitations, in the imperfection of his originalities, Praed was the most
perfect representative we have had or ever are likely to have of what
has been called, with a perhaps reprehensible parody on great words,
"the eternal undergraduate within us, who rejoices before life." He is
thus at the very antipodes of We