FullReads

Notwithstanding his reputation as an “inspired schoolboy,” I do not know that sober criticism would call him a really precocious writer, especially in verse. The pieces by which he is best known and which have most individuality, date in no case very early, and in almost all cases after his five-and-twentieth year. What does date very early (and unluckily it has been printed with a copiousness betokening more affection than judgment, considering that the author had more sense than to print it at all) is scarcely distinguishable from any other verses of any other clever boy. It is impossible to augur any future excellence from such stuff as

Emilia often sheds the tear
But affectation bids it flow,

or as

From breasts which feel compassion’s glow
Solicit mild the kind relief;

and, for one’s own part, one is inclined to solicit mild the kind relief of not having to read it. Even when Praed had become, at least technically, a man, there is no very great improvement as a whole, though here and there one may see, looking backwards from the finished examples, faint beginnings of his peculiar touches, especially of that pleasant trick of repeating the same word or phrase with a different and slightly altered sense which, as Mr. Austin Dobson has suggested, may have been taken from Burns. The Cambridge prize poems are quite authentic and respectable examples of that style which has received its final criticism in

Ply battleaxe and hurtling catapult:
Jerusalem is ours! Id Deus vult,–

though they do not contain anything so nice as that, or as its great author’s more famous couplet respecting Africa and the men thereof. The longer romances of the same date, “Gog,” “Lilian,” “The Troubadour,” are little more than clever reminiscences sometimes of Scott, Byron, Moore, and other contemporaries, sometimes of Prior and the vers de societe of the eighteenth century. The best passage by far of all this is the close of “How to Rhyme with Love,” and this, as it seems to me, is the only passage of even moderate length which, in the poems dating before Praed took his degree, in the least foretells the poet of “The Red Fisherman,” “The Vicar,” the “Letters from Teignmouth,” the “Fourteenth of February” (earliest in date and not least charming fruit of the true vein), “Good-night to the Season,” and best and most delightful of all, the peerless “Letter of Advice,” which is as much the very best thing of its own kind as the “Divine Comedy.”

In prose Praed was a little earlier, but not 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.