The prose pieces of Winthrop Mackworth Praed have never before been presented in a collected form. They are worthy of preservation, in a degree hardly less than his verse; though by the latter he has hitherto been best known, and will probably be longest remembered. At the time when the high quality of his literary work obtained for the Etonian the honour, unprecedented in the case of a school magazine, of a complimentary notice in the Quarterly Review, it was to the merit of his prose, as much as to that of his poetry, that attention was called by the reviewer. It is not, however, as the phenomenally precocious work of a schoolboy that these papers have been thought worthy of reproduction in the Universal Library. The circumstance that they were, most of them, written at Eton, is only to be accounted of as adding to their interest, by giving the reader a point of view from which to sympathize with the writer’s humour. It would, however, be a mistake to consider the senior Etonian of 1820 as corresponding to any reasonable description of what is generally denoted by the word “schoolboy.” At[Pg 8] the age of eighteen or nineteen, when his grandfathers had already taken their first degrees, subjected to a discipline as light as that of a modern University, more free to study in the way the spirit moved him, or not to study at all, than the undergraduate of a “good” college now, the pupil of Goodall, Keate, or Plumptre was of a maturer sort than is now to be found among the denizens of Sixth Forms. He came between two ages in the history of our Public Schools, in neither of which could such literary work as here follows have been produced by a “schoolboy.” There preceded him the age in which a youth went early to the University, and early into life. There has followed the day in which “boys” at school, when no longer boys, but men in years, are held fast by discipline to boyish studies, or at any rate to boyish amusements. The circumstance that a few individuals, of great and early matured literary gifts, were assembled together under these conditions at a single school, on two several occasions, in two successive generations, at an interval of about thirty years, operated to enrich English Literature with two graceful and unique volumes. Of the Microcosm, the best pieces are due to Canning and Frere; in the Etonian, the share of Praed surpasses and eclipses that of his contemporaries. From his University friends, indeed, he derived powerful help; there are a few lines of poetry, by William Sidney Walker, better than any of his own; and there are a few pages of prose, by Henry Nelson Coleridge, which are also better; but for sustained excellence, and for an energy and variety in production, truly extraordinary under the circumstances, Praed, and Praed only, is the hero of the Etonian; the over-[Pg 9]praised and ambitiously constructed efforts of his friend Moultrie not excepted.
After Praed left Eton, his bent led him to verse, rather than to prose, as his appropriate vehicle of expression; and it was only occasionally that he sent a prose contribution, either to Knight’s Quarterly Magazine, or to the London Magazine, or to the ephemeral pages of the Brazen Head. Two speeches of his in Parliament were “reprinted by request;” but they seem to have owed this distinction rather to the special interest, at the time, of their subject-matter, than to any exceptional finish in their literary form. They were speeches in Committee on the Reform Bills of 1831 and 1832, the one on moving as an amendment what was afterwards known as the “three-cornered constituency” arrangement; the other on moving, similarly, that freeholds within the limits of boroughs should confer votes for the borough and not for the county. His partly versified squib, “The Union Club,” in which he parodied the style and matter of the principal speakers among Cambridge undergraduates in 1822, has been included in this collection, for the sake especially of the comical imitations of Lord Macaulay and Lord Lytton. It was written, as Macaulay himself informed me, “for Cookesley to recite at supper-parties.” The late Rev. William Gifford Cookesley, long an assistant master at Eton, who acted as Lord Beaconsfield’s cicerone when he came down to the spot to make studies for “Coningsby,” is gratefully remembered by many of his scholars for his genuine, if somewhat irregular, love of literature, and for his hearty sympathy with boyish good-fellowship. He was a contemporary of Praed’s both at[Pg 10] Eton and Cambridge, and long preserved, in maturer years, his admirable faculty of mimicry.
Among the characteristics of these pieces will be found an almost unfailing good taste; a polished style, exhibiting a sparkle, as of finely constructed verse; a strong love of sheer fun, not ungracefully indulged; a dash of affectation, inoffensive, and such as is natural in a new-comer, upon whom the eyes of his circle have, by no fault of his, been drawn; a healthy, breezy spirit, redolent of the playing-fields; and a hearty appreciation of the pleasures arising from a first fresh plunge into the waters of literature. Powers of observation are shown of no mean order, and powers, also, of putting in a strong light, whether attractive or ridiculous, the more obvious features of everyday characters. These powers afterwards ripened into a truly admirable skill of political and social verse-writing; and they showed signs of deepening into a more forcible satiric power, tempered with humour, as his too short career drew towards its end.
Praed is moreover especially to be commended in that he is never dull. Although free from “sensationalism,” he is not forgetful that the first business of a writer is—to be read. There are gentle lessons of good manners, of unselfishness, and of chivalry, to be read in his pages; they are not loudly trumpeted, but there they are; there is also a sincere respect for great minds and for good work in literature, enlivened, not neutralized, by unfailing high spirits. One could dispense, certainly, with some of his antithesis; perhaps with all his punning; but life is not so short, or so lively in itself, as to leave us no time to be[Pg 11] amused, and no ground for gratitude to the writers who amuse us.
The only omissions from this collection are, besides the speeches above mentioned, the prefaces contributed, in the taste of the day, to the several numbers of the Etonian, under the title “The King of Clubs,” and to Knight’s Quarterly Magazine, under the title “Castle Vernon.” These are lively in their way, but unequal, and full of allusions which would require notes to make them intelligible. Occasionally, too, they are padded out with contributory matter by other hands. One rather ambitious failure, to be found in the Etonian, “On Silent Sorrow,” has also been omitted, and will not be missed.
It should be added, that the leading articles of the Morning Post newspaper, from August 1832 to some time in the autumn of 1834, were for the most part of Praed’s writing. Many of them are exceedingly well written; but their contents are, of necessity, too ephemeral for reproduction in these pages.
GEORGE YOUNG.