BOOKS.

PRAED'S POEMS.* Tills is a disappointing both, published probably too late even for popularity, much too late for critical sympathy. That Praed was an able man and a thoughtful politician Mr. Cohnidge's simple and interesting memoir, no less than Parliamentary tradi- tions, sufficiently proves, and that these light and sprightly verses might have gained a considerable share of admiration had they been first known as the amusements of a great statesman's leisure hours we can well imagine. But they are only lively verses, not poems. Even as vers de societe they have been equalled if not surpassed by recent imitators ; and to compare them, as Mr. Cole- ridge's personal attachment to his friend excuses him for com- paring them, with Hood's, is like comparing a manufactured with a natural beauty, or the vivacity of a French salon with the overflow of deep individual humour. Even Hood is only a minor poet. His best poems both grave and gay are works of true imagina- tion, but of imagination not very wide in its sweep, and rarely kindled to the lyrical point. Now and then the "lyrical cry," as

• The Poems of Winthrop. Ilfaelcworth Praed. With a Memoir by the R3V. Dement Coleridge. Two volumes. London; hioxoo. Mr. Matthew Arnold happily terms it, may be heard in his poems; but it is a rare and solitary note. Oftener his imagination is heated jot up to the picturesque and not to the lyrical point, us in "The Haunted House" or "Eugene Aram." But his poems of humour, to which we suppose Praed's would rather be compared, overflow with vitality and that deep sense of the ludicrous contra- dictions of life that is not unfrequently, like all true humour, less conaic than tragic,. This is never so with Praed. His verses tickle the understanding at first with their grotesque mixture of opposite associations ; but it soon becomes- evident that this is • rather a verbal trick than an inward sense of moral contrast and contradiction, and soon it fatigues the attention so much as to become positively annOying. Both Praed and Hood pun mercilessly. But Hood's puns are constantly wrapt up in some deeper contrast that redeems the pun and gives it a kind of meaning beneath the surface, while Praed'a are mere 'verbal capers. For example, let us take. a string of them from

different parts of these volumes, and they will almost all be found

to consist in ordinary plays upon words with no subtle play of thought beneath them. Thus we read in "The Red Fisherman," when the Abbot first sees the fiend :—

"Twas a sight to make the hair uprise, And the life-blood colder run; The startled priest struck both his thighs, And Me Abbey clock struck one."

Or these in the "Troubadour,"--.

"The mighty barons of the land Brought pain in heart and four in hand; And village maids with looks of woe Turned out their mourning and their toe."

Or again in the same,— " His bonnet he drew his eyelids o'er,

For tears were like to blind him ; And he spurred Sir Guy o'er mount and moor, With a long dull journey all before,

And a short gay squire behind him."

"Like Queen Titania's darling pet, Or Oberon's wickedest elf, He lay beside a rivulet And looked beside himself."

" Beads and lies have both been told, Tempers are hot and dishes are cold."

And so on almost in every page, often a dozen times in a page. Now these are mere puns which are to our minds utterly devoid of humour,—not even containing so much as Mr. Dickens's well- known joke that Mr. Pickwick after moralizing in his nightshirt "proceeded to put himself into his clothes and his clothes into his portmanteau,"—a subtle sophism of the "undistributed middle," as the logicians would say, or to speak more popularly, a sophism ignoring the distribution of Mr. Pickwick's clothes betweeu himself and his portmanteau. Now this manages to sug- gest, without expressly drawing out a syllogistic proof, that Mr. Pickwick was h fortiori enclosed in that which enclosed the garments which enclosed him,—and though not particularly brilliant is certainly a subtler form of wit than a pun. Yet no one would ever think of quoting it as a fair specimen of Dickens's humour. Now Praed's witticisms are a bwer form of the same thing. Even when they arc not so degraded as mere puns they only differ in being puns upon idioms, instead of upon words, like "pain in heart and four in hand ;" and that though less common and more dialectic a form of pun seems to us to produce an equally empty jingle in the brain. Hood of course makes many puns equally poor ; but a deeper sense of the ludicrous runs through them; and often, as we said, beneath the verbal pun lies a real antagonism of thought and feeling. Let any one read "Miss Kilinansegge and her precious Leg" after the best of Praed's banter, and it will be seen at once bow much deeper a current of satire runs through it. In such a versa as this, for example, which occurs after the lady has been killed by a blow from her own golden leg and robbed of it, the verbal play is employed for the sake of a real con- trast :—

"Gold, still gold! hard, yellow, and cold !

For gold she had lived, and sho died for gold—

By a golden weapon, not oaken;

In the morning they found her all alone— Stiff and bloody and cold as stone— Bat her Leg, the Golden Leg was gona,

And the golden bowl was broken."

This is not a high kind of poetry ; but it has a much deeper Or again,—

Or again,— "So pleasure laughed on every cheek,

And naught save saddles dreamed of pique."

Or again,—

play of thought in it than Praed's play of words. For to contrast that use of " golden" in which the coati./ metal had been used as the symbol of something infin't tly more costly with its vulgar sense, is the aim of the under-current of satire which runs through the tale. It is possible that Mr. Praed's political squibs were much better than his general poetical witticisms. Unfortunately for us, however, these squibs are still kept back for another volume.

Nor are those of Praed's verses in which there is no banter to be called poetry. They were evidently thrown off not from his deeper character but from a fluent memory full of the stock subjects of routine poetry, and run into the kind of thing that one expects to see in "albums" and "amulets." The following, for instance, which has become popular as a drawing-room song, is a hood specimcn :—

" I Rearamme, I RESEICABER. "I remember—I remember How my Childhood fleeted by,— The mirth of its December,

And the warmth of its July ; On my brow, love, on my brow, love, Mao are no signs of care; But my pleasures are not now, love, What Childhood's pleasures were.

"Then the bowers—then the bowers Were blithe as blithe could be ; And all their radiant flowers Were coronals for me: • Gems to-night, love—gems to-night, love,

Are gleaming in my hair; But they are not half so bright, love, As Childhood's roses were "I was singing—I was singing,

And my songs were idle words; But from my heart was springing Wild music like a bird's : Now I sing, love—now I sing, love, A fine Italian air ;

But it's not so glad a thing, love, As Childhood's ballads were.

"I was morry—I WM merry

When nay little lovers came, With a lily, or a cherry, Or a new invented game; Now I've you, love—now I've you, love, To kneel before use there ; But you know you're not so true, love, As Childhood's lovers were !"

That is pretty verse, but it is no more. It is impossible to mistake it for poetry, which must, to be worth anything, come out of the poet's character. All the ideas and images in it are the stock ideas and images—the joyousness of childhood, the " coronals" that children make of flowers, the comparative falsehood of mature love ascoutrasted with the love of children,—all of them the pretty, untrue ideas aud phrases which are the regular stock in trade of elegant versifiers. Mr. Coleridge refers with admira- tion in his memoir to the following song, and thinks it contains the impress of the feelings with which the poet regarded his mother, who died in his early childhood ; and, in fact, the last verse is the only one we can find in these volumes which seems to us to bear the impress of a genuinely kindled imagination :-

"3y Hy mother's grave, my mother's grave ! Oh! dreamless is her slumber there, And drowsily the banners wave

O'er her that was so chaste and fair !

Yea! love is dead, and memory faded ! Bat when the dew is on the brake, And silence sleeps on earth and sea, And mourners weep, and ghosts awake, Oh I then she cometh back to tue, In her cold beauty darkly shaded!

'1 cannot guess her face or form;

But what to me is form or face ?

I do not ask the weary worm

To give me back each buried grace Of glistening eyes, or trailing tresses! I only feel that she is here,

And that we meet, and that we part' And that I drink within mine ear, And that I clasp around my heart, Her sweet still voice, and soft caresses !

"Not in the waking thought by day, Not in the sightless dream by night, Do the mild tones and glances play,

Of her who was my cradle's light! But in some twilight of calm weather She glides, by fancy dimly wrought,

A glittering cloud, a darkling beam With all the quiet of a thought, And all the passion of a dream, Linked in a golden spell together."

The last verse has real passion and beauty, and is almost Wordsworthian ; but even of this song the two first verses strike us as common-place.

Mr. Coleridge tells us, or quotes another friend of Praed, who tells us, that the true key to his gay verse was its purpose of

"Drawing off intrusive eyes, Prom that intensity of human love, And that most deep and tender sympathy, Close guarded in the-chamber of his heart."

And this is very likely true, and- for that very reason it is not worth much. It is the characteristic of a ruse de guerre to with- draw attention from the vital points of the conflict ; but it is the characteristic of true poetry to express the vital essence of the poet's thoughts and life. Look at them as we may, Praed's verses are at best the careless and only too fluent amuse- ments of a clever, lively, fanciful, and very facile rhymer,— the amusements of a man whose heart and ambition were not bound up with literature at all, but with politics. That he would have made a thoughtful if not a power- ful Conservative statesman is plain enough. He had the keenness even at the time of the Reform agitation to foresee the great danger of making a mere concession to the false prin- ciple of representing only numbers, instead of as far as pos- sible the distinct ideas and interests of the community ; and. ,proposed, as a little step at least in the right direction, to give .many of the counties three members and only two votes to each elector, so that an adequate minority by uniting could carry the third seat. Another amendment of Praed's to the Reform Bill, evidently intended with the same general aim, but which (for reasons not now necessary to assign) we think less desirable, has since been seriously proposed by his party :— " Another amendment was moved by Praed to the Reform Bill of 1832, which, if carried, would have forestalled the measure upon which the last Derby Government practically staked its existence. It was that freeholds situate within boroughs should in all cases confer votes for the borough, and not for the county.' The proposal was of course rejected ; but the speech in which it was advocated contains a store of valuable hints as to the principal defects in the Reform Bill of 1832, and fully deserves consideration by future reformers."

These suggestions from so young a man show great depth of political judgment, and there seems to us to be nothing in his poems which deserves half so much respect as these imperfect traces of practical sagacity and sound political philosophy. The only piece betraying a vestige of real power is the somewhat grim conception called "The Red Fisherman," which succeeds in producing something at least of the intended effect, but even this is, in the main, grotesque fancy, not real power. Praed knew himself better than his friends knew him when he wrote to a friend that he had acquired "a strong and enduring ambition," in place of the pleasure in "temporary notoriety" which hiscollege friends would alone remember in him. With all the sweetness and tenderness of temperament which gave him a keen enjoyment for poetry, all his real creative power seems to have been practical, and we cannot but lament the more deeply on that account the early death which cut him off from the service of his country. He* would have been no narrow Conservative,—a man far too wise and thoughtful to plead for mere sullen resistance, far too clear-headed also to follow Mr. Disraeli's flighty and erratic orbit. It is such men the Conservatives need. And we cannot but lament that Mr. Coleridge has not given us a -fuller account of his short political career. It would have been worth many hundred pages of these album-stanzas and indifferent puns.