| 1. | Sheridan’s Plays. |
| 2. | Plays from Molière. By English Dramatists. |
| 3. | Marlow’s Faustus and Goethe’s Faust. |
| 4. | Chronicle of the Cid. |
| 5. | Rabelais’ Gargantua and the Heroic Deeds of Pantagruel. |
| 6. | Machiavelli’s Prince. |
| 7. | Bacon’s Essays. |
| 8. | Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year. |
| 9. | Locke on Civil Government and Filmer’s “Patriarcha.” |
| 10. | Butler’s Analogy of Religion. |
| 11. | Dryden’s Virgil. |
| 12. | Scott’s Demonology and Witchcraft. |
| 13. | Herrick’s Hesperides. |
| 14. | Coleridge’s Table-Talk. |
| 15. | Boccaccio’s Decameron. |
| 16. | Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. |
| 17. | Chapman’s Homer’s Iliad. |
| 18. | Mediæval Tales. |
| 19. | Voltaire’s Candide, and Johnson’s Rasselas. |
| 20. | Jonson’s Plays and Poems. |
| 21. | Hobbes’s Leviathan. |
| 22. | Samuel Butler’s Hudibras. |
| 23. | Ideal Commonwealths. |
| 24. | Cavendish’s Life of Wolsey. |
| 25 & 26. Don Quixote. | |
| 27. | Burlesque Plays and Poems. |
| 28. | Dante’s Divine Comedy. Longfellow’s Translation. |
| 29. | Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield, Plays, and Poems. |
| 30. | Fables and Proverbs from the Sanskrit. (Hitopadesa.) |
| 31. | Lamb’s Essays of Elia. |
| 32. | The History of Thomas Εllwood. |
| 33. | Emerson’s Essays, &c. |
| 34. | Southey’s Life of Nelson. |
| 35. | De Quincey’s Confessions of an Opium Eater, &c. |
| 36. | Stories of Ireland. By Miss Edgeworth. |
| 37. | Frere’s Aristophanes: Acharnians, Knights, Birds. |
| 38. | Burke’s Speeches and Letters. |
| 39. | Thomas à Kempis. |
| 40. | Popular Songs of Ireland. |
| 41. | Potter’s Æschylus. |
| 42. | Goethe’s Faust: Part II. Anster’s Translation. |
| 43. | Famous Pamphlets. |
| 44. | Francklin’s Sophocles. |
| 45. | M. G. Lewis’s Tales of Terror and Wonder. |
| 46. | Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. |
| 47. | Drayton’s Barons’ Wars, Nymphidia, &c. |
| 48. | Cobbett’s Advice to Young Men. |
| 49. | The Banquet of Dante. |
| 50. | Walker’s Original. |
| 51. | Schiller’s Poems and Ballads. |
| 52. | Peele’s Plays and Poems. |
| 53. | Harrington’s Oceana. |
| 54. | Euripides: Alcestis and other Plays. |
| 55. | Praed’s Essays. |
| “Marvels of clear type and general neatness.”—Daily Telegraph. | |
INTRODUCTION.
The readers of our Library are greatly indebted to Sir George Young for his kindness in presenting them with this first collected edition of the prose writings of his uncle, Winthrop Mackworth Praed. He little knows the charm of the bright regions of Literature who cannot yield himself to full enjoyment of their infinite variety. As we pass from book to book, it is a long leap from Euripides to the brilliant young Etonian who brought all the grace of happy youth into such work as we have here. Happy the old who can grow young again with this book in their hands. If we all came into the world mature, and there were no childhood and youth about us, what a dull world it would be! Any book is a prize that brings the fresh and cheerful voice of youth into the region of true Literature. Of Praed’s work in this way none can speak better than Sir George Young in his Preface.
Of his life, these are a few dry facts. He was born in 1802, lost his mother early, and went to Eton at the age of[Pg 6] twelve. He was still at Eton when, at the age of eighteen, in 1820, he and his friend Walter Blount edited the Etonian, which began its course in October 1820 and ended in July 1821. In the following October Praed went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he obtained a Fellowship. He obtained medals for Greek odes and epigrams, a medal for English verse, and he was still full of the old grace of playfulness. He was called to the Bar in 1829. An elder sister died in 1830, and his love for her is shown in tender touches of his later verse. The vers de société which he wrote, and which no man wrote better than Praed, retain their charm because their playfulness is on the surface of a manly earnest nature, from the depth of which a tone now and then rises that comes straight into our hearts. Praed was in Parliament from November 1830 until after the passing of the Reform Bill, and again in 1834, when he was Secretary to the Board of Control under Sir Robert Peel. His father died in 1835; in the same year Praed married; and in July 1839 he died, aged thirty-seven.
Η. Μ.
October 1887.[Pg 7]