Londoner by actual birth, De Know'st thou that land? It and contrasted beauty; of wil an angry sea on one side, and lazy tide on the other; of a 1 tors scattered on its surface; haunted; of lush meadows w bury themselves in the abundar houses, old fashions, old trees, ol women. It has been said that girls in Plymouth in a day tha This proposition will probabl certainly are a great number Herrick, who was a good judge several in his time, though tha of the Mermaid Tavern, of ra sorely at having to do clerical : Coleridge's was a strangely irregular and eccentric life Praed's was just as regular. Never did he shoot-off at a tangent. His father was distinguished in law and politics, and expected his son to attain distinction also. The expectation was realised. He took Eton by storm; in fact, he became the typical ideal Etonian-a graceful scholar and a finished gentleman at an age when the ordinary youngster is a pedant or a lout. This is what Eton has the capacity for producing: the fine young fellow without any pretensions to omniscience, but who is good at Latin verse and cricket and boating, and who a year or two later would go into battle or into a Parliamentary debate as gaily as he went to the wickets. Praed, from delicacy of constitution, was not famous at either cricket or boating, but he was a capital fives-player. His great success, however, was editorial. He projected The Etonian, unquestionably the ablest school-periodical that has ever appeared. Do you know, gentle reader (if that old-fangled form of the apostrophe may yet be tolerated), what it is to edit journal or magazine? Can you conceive the difficulty of giving it the impress of your own mind, without thwarting or repressing your contributors? It is no easy matter: experto crede. Praed did it in his boyhood; and so well, that a volume of The Etonian is delightfully readable to this day. If you can get hold of it, read Moultrie's Godiva, and say whether it is equal to Tennyson's. Praed also left his mark permanently on Eton by establishing the Boys' Library; an institution which from small beginnings has become a very noble affair, a the graves of dead languages too deeply, or to join the crew of plodding algebraists, of whom my friend Mr. Cayley writes: 66 'Pigs they were; Only the roots they loved were mostly square." He won prizes for Greek, Latin, English verse, as a mere matter of course. In two successive years he took the Chancellor's medal. His classic exercitations were real poetry. But he found that his true field was the borderland between the realms of politics and literature; he was by nature a man of affairs, and yet a man of ideas; he was born alike to guide and to fascinate the world. Of the Union Debating Society he was a prominent member, having two rivals only-Macaulay and Charles Austin. Oddly enough, Macaulay was a high Tory at Cambridge, and Praed an advanced Liberal, for half a century ago. Not infrequent are these sudden unexpected changes in youthful opinion. When Canning was at Eton, his brilliant capacity reached the ear of Fox, through his nephew, Lord Holland; so he determined to make a Whig of him, and used to give the two boys dinners at The Christopher, and teach them politics. When Canning entered Parliament, his first speech was in support of Pitt. There was rather a bitter epigram hereon, by General Fitzpatrick :— "The turning of coats so common is grown, That no one would think to attack it; But such reproaches are unfair. No boy of two or threeand-twenty can by possibility have made up his mind on |