rtherism and Byronism, a light but
gallant champion of cheerfulness and the joy of living. Although there
is about him absolutely nothing artificial--the curse of the lighter
poetry as a rule--and though he attains to deep pathos now and then, and
once or twice (notably in "The Red Fisherman") to a kind of grim
earnestness, neither of these things is his real _forte_. Playing with
literature and with life, not frivolously or without heart, but with no
very deep cares and no very passionate feeling, is Praed's attitude
whenever he is at his best. And he does not play at playing as many
writers do: it is all perfectly genuine. Even Prior has not excelled
such lines as these in one of his early and by no means his best poems
(an adaptation too), for mingled jest and earnest--

But Isabel, by accident,
Was wandering by that minute;
She opened that dark monument
And found her slave within it;
_The clergy said the Mass in vain,
The College could not save me:
But life, she swears, returned again
With the first kiss she gave me._

Hardly, if at all, could he have kept up this attitude towards life
after he had come to forty year; and he might have become either a
merely intelligent and respectable person, which is most probable, or an
elderly youth, which is of all things most detestable, or a
caterwauler, or a cynic, or a preacher. From all these fates the gods
mercifully saved him, and he abides with us (the presentation being but
slightly marred by the injudicious prodigality of his editors) only as
the poet of Medora's musical despair lest Araminta should derogate, of
the Abbot's nightmare sufferings at the hands of the Red Fisherman, of
the plaintive appeal after much lively gossip--

And you'll come--won't you come?--to our Ball,

of all the pleasures, and the jests, and the tastes, and the studies,
and the woes, provided only they are healthy and manly, of Twenty-five.
Unhappy is the person of whom it can be said that he neither has been,
is, nor ever will be in the temper and circumstances of which Praed's
verse is the exact and consummate expression; not much less unhappy he
for whom that verse does not perform the best perhaps of all the offices
of literature, and call up, it may be in happier guise than that in
which they once really existed, the many beloved shadows of the past.

FOOTNOTES:

[19] 1. _The Poems of Winthrop Mackworth Praed, with a Memoir by the
Rev