Part 11 (1/2)

The people in his happy reign, Were blessed beyond all other nations: Unharmed by foreign axe and chain, Unhealed by civic innovations; They served the usual logs and stones, With all the usual rites and terrors, And swallowed all their fathers' bones, And swallowed all their fathers' errors.

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 pa.s.s 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 cla.s.s 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 ”Ca.s.sandra,” 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 G.o.ds, 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:

But little he cared, that stripling pale, For the sinking sun or the rising gale; For he, as he rode, was dreaming now, Poor youth, of a woman's broken vow, Of the cup dashed down, ere the wine was tasted, Of eloquent speeches sadly wasted, Of a gallant heart all burnt to ashes, And the Baron of Katzberg's long moustaches.

And these:

Swift as the rush of an eagle's wing, Or the flight of a shaft from Tartar string, Into the wood Sir Rudolph went: Not with more joy the schoolboys run To the gay green fields when their task is done; Not with more haste the members fly, When Hume has caught the Speaker's eye.

But in ”The Red Fisherman” itself there is nothing that is not good. It is very short, ten small pages only of some five-and-twenty lines each.

But there is not a weak place in it from the moment when ”the Abbot arose and closed his book” to the account of his lamentable and yet lucky fate and punishment whereof ”none but he and the fisherman could tell the reason why.” Neither of the two other pract.i.tioners who may be called the masters of this style, Hood and Barham, nor Praed himself elsewhere, nor any of his and their imitators has trodden the breadthless line between real terror and mere burlesque with so steady a foot.

Still not here was his ”farthest,” as the geographers say, nor in the considerable ma.s.s of smaller poems which practically defy cla.s.sification. In them, as so often elsewhere in Praed, one comes across odd notes, stray flashes of genius which he never seems to have cared to combine or follow out, such as the unwontedly solemn ”Time's Song,” the best wholly serious thing that he has done, and the charming ”L'Inconnue.” But we find the perfect Praed, and we find him only, in the verses of society proper, the second part of the ”Poems of Life and Manners” as they are headed, which began, as far as one can make out, to be written about 1826, and the gift of which Praed never lost, though he practised it little in the very last years of his life. Here, in a hundred pages, with a few to be added from elsewhere, are to be found some of the best-bred and best-natured verse within the English language, some of the most original and remarkable metrical experiments, a profusion of the liveliest fancy, a rush of the gayest rhyme. They begin with ”The Vicar,” _vir nulla non donandus lauru_.

[Whose] talk was like a stream, which runs With rapid change from rocks to roses: It slipped from politics to puns, It pa.s.sed from Mahomet to Moses; Beginning with the laws which keep The planets in their radiant courses, And ending with some precept deep For dressing eels, or shoeing horses.

Three of the Vicar's companion ”Everyday Characters” are good, but I think not so good as he; the fifth piece, however, ”The Portrait of a Lady,” is quite his equal.

You'll be forgotten--as old debts By persons who are used to borrow; Forgotten--as the sun that sets, When s.h.i.+nes a new one on the morrow; Forgotten--like the luscious peach That blessed the schoolboy last September; Forgotten--like a maiden speech, Which all men praise, but none remember.

Yet ere you sink into the stream That whelms alike sage, saint, and martyr, And soldier's sword, and minstrel's theme, And Canning's wit, and Gatton's charter, Here, of the fortunes of your youth, My fancy weaves her dim conjectures, Which have, perhaps, as much of truth As pa.s.sion's vows, or Cobbett's lectures.

Here, and perhaps here first, at least in the order of the published poems, appears that curious mixture of pathos and quizzing, sentiment and satire, which has never been mastered more fully or communicated more happily than by Praed. But not even yet do we meet with it in its happiest form: nor is that form to be found in ”Josephine” which is much better in substance than in manner, or in the half-social, half-political patter of ”The Brazen Head,” or in ”Twenty-eight and Twenty-nine.” It sounds first in the ”Song for the Fourteenth of February.” No one, so far as I know, has traced any exact original[20]

for the altogether admirable metre which, improved and glorified later in ”The Letter of Advice,” appears first in lighter matter still like this:

Shall I kneel to a Sylvia or Celia, Whom no one e'er saw, or may see, A fancy-drawn Laura Amelia, An _ad libit_ Anna Marie?