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When the fierce mob, with clubs and knives,
All swore that nothing should prevent them,
But that their representatives
Should actually represent them,
He interposed the proper checks,
By sending troops, with drums and banners,
To cut their speeches short, and necks,
And break their heads, to mend their manners.

Occasionally in a sort of middle vein between politics and society he wrote in the “patter” style just noticed quite admirable things like “Twenty-eight and Twenty-nine.” Throughout the great debates on Reform he rallied the reformers with the same complete and apparently useless superiority of wit and sense which has often, if not invariably, been shown at similar crises on the losing side. And once, on an ever-memorable occasion, he broke into those famous and most touching “Stanzas on seeing the Speaker Asleep” which affect one almost to tears by their grace of form and by the perennial and indeed ever-increasing applicability of their matter.

Sleep, Mr. Speaker: it’s surely fair,
If you don’t in your bed, that you should in your chair:
Longer and longer still they grow,
Tory and Radical, Aye and No;
Talking by night and talking by day;
Sleep, Mr. Speaker; sleep, sleep while you may.

Sleep, Mr. Speaker: slumber lies
Light and brief on a Speaker’s eyes–
Fielden or Finn, in a minute or two,
Some disorderly thing will do;
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 anything: