Born, in London, 26 July 1802. At school at Langley Broom, 1810–14; at Eton, March 1814 to 1821. Edited “The Etonian,” with W. Blunt, 1821. To Trin. Coll., Camb., Oct. 1821; Browne Medallist for Greek Ode, 1822 and 1823; for Greek Epigrams, 1822 and 1824; Chancellor’s Medal for English Poem, 1823 and 1824; B.A., 1825. Contrib. to Knight’s “Quarterly Mag.,” 1822. Part editor of “The Brazen Head,” 1826. At Eton, as private tutor to Lord Ernest Bruce, 1825–27. Fellow, Trin. Coll., Camb., 1827; Seatonian prize poem, 1830. Called to Bar at Middle Temple, 29 May, 1829. Contrib. to “Times,” “Morning Post,” “Albion,” etc. M.P. for St. Germans, by purchasing seat, Dec. 1832; constituency disfranchised same year by Reform Bill. M.P. for Great Yarmouth, 1834–37. Sec. to Board of Control, Dec. 1834 to April 1835. Married Helen Bogle, 1835. M.P. for Aylesbury, 1837. Deputy High Steward to Univ. of Cambridge. Died, in London, 15 July 1839. Buried at Kensal Green. Works: “Carmen Græcum: Pyramides Ægyptiacæ” [1822]; “Epigrammata” [1822]; “Australasia” [1823]; “Carmen Græcum: In Obitum T. F. Middleton” [1823]; “Lillian,” 1823; “Athens” [1824]; “Epigrammata [1824]; “Speech in Committee on the Reform Bill,” 1832; “Trash” (anon.), 1833. Collected Works: “Poetical Works,” ed. by R. W. Griswold (New York), 1844; ed. by Derwent Coleridge, revised edn. (2 vols.), 1885; “Essays,” ed. by Sir G. Young, 1887; “Political and Occasional Poems,” ed. by Sir G. Young, 1888.

Personal

  What he might have become had life been spared it were now vain to conjecture. He married happily; he died young. Light, lively, brilliant, the darling of every society that he entered, he was yet most beloved by those who knew him best. To me it seems that had he outlived the impetuosity of youth, he would have become something higher and better than a political partisan, however clever, or a fashionable poet, however elegant.

  It is not easy to separate my recollections of the Praed of Eton from those of the Praed of Cambridge. The Etonian of 1820 was natural and unaffected in his ordinary talk; neither shy nor presuming; proud, without a tinge of vanity; somewhat reserved, but ever courteous; giving few indications of the susceptibility of the poet, but ample evidence of the laughing satirist; a pale and slight youth, who had looked upon the aspects of society with the keen perception of a clever manhood; one who had, moreover, seen in human life something more than follies to be ridiculed by the gay jest or scouted by the sarcastic sneer.

  To his contemporaries, to all by whom he was intimately known, to very many who knew him mainly by report, and who perhaps cherish the remembrance of a casual meeting, the name of Winthrop Praed is still as the sound of music. The depths of his nature were indeed opened but to few; not often or willingly to them: but he had a special faculty and privilege, better than any craft of will, by which he attracted even when he seemed to repel,—and was more than popular even when, in his younger and gayer days, he appeared to court animadversion and defy dislike.

  His nature might be compared to an Æolian lyre that is stirred by inspiration from without, rather than a harp that vibrates to the touch of human fingers. Or one may see in him a likeness to that type of character which the greatest of modern masters has portrayed in “Tristram,” whose mind, even when haunted by an object of real passion, was prone to yield to any transient distraction.

  A common interest in that debating society brought together in joyous social life the most ardent and ambitious youths of the University. What robust and sanguine society exhilarated the suppers to which we adjourned from our mimic senate! There, foremost in ready wit, as the hour before he had been in brilliant extempore eloquence, was Winthrop Mackworth Praed. There was a fascination in the very name of this young man which eclipsed the repute of all his contemporaries. Sweeping away prizes and scholarships from the competition of perhaps sounder and more copious learning; the quickest and easiest debater in the Union, without study or preparation; carrying everywhere into our private circles a petulant yet graceful vivacity; matchless in repartee; passionately fond of dancing; never missing a ball, though it were the night before an examination; there was in his mind a restless exuberance of energy and life, all the more striking from its contrast with a frame and countenance painfully delicate and marked by the symptoms of consumption. He excited at the University the same kind of haunting personal interest that Byron was then exciting in the world. All were fond of speculating about his future. For the outlines of his genius were not definitely marked. They vanished away when you ought to seize them.

General

  There was through all his poetry—and it is its deepest although not its most obvious charm—a love of the genuine and the true, a scorn for the false and the pretending, which is the foundation of all that is really good in eloquence as well as in poetry, in conduct and in character, as well as in art. The germ of the patriot and the statesman is to be found in the love of truth and the hatred of pretense; and never were they more developed than in the poems of Winthrop Mackworth Praed.

  In his early poems there is a buoyancy which afterward is wanting in his lines…. While few poets have written purer verse than he, few satirists have done their task with more gentleness. While we laugh at the follies of the day as he portrays them, we feel that the very subject of the picture would read the lines with complacent thoughts, and with admiration at the skill which had individualized him as his own ideal.

  Much that Praed wrote was written hastily; much of it was written while he was yet very young. Of much, then, the intrinsic value is small…. Praed was not without a certain measure of the poetic faculty. But, aside from that, but two things seem to have made him a writer of verse: his imitative ability, of which the reader is made aware by being often reminded of other writers, as Byron, Scott, Hood, while never arrested by any strong marks of originality; and, secondly, the persistent cultivation given to such poetic ability as he had by his father at home, by his tutors at school and college, and at the university by the competition for prizes, of which honors he bore off many. He thus acquired all the arts of versification. The precocity of his parts was, perhaps, their most distinguishing feature, and his early productions are characterized by that neat finish which appears rarely in the first essays of genius but is often found in the works of youthful talent…. It would be wrong to say that Praed is a mere versifier. If he is tried by his thoughts, if we enquire what, amidst much that is temporary and trivial, we may find that is noble, beautiful, and enduring, we shall discover here and there amid the prose some gleams of golden poetry. He is the possessor of a fancy not powerful and capable of sustained flights, but very quick and fertile in details. It can create for us the nymph of a single tree, but if we would wander in enchanted forests we must commit ourselves to some mightier master of the spell than he.

  His spirit was keen and eager, and the great incentive to all he did was the desire to excel. This passion mastered his whole being; and the momentary earnestness he threw into every successive undertaking was probably instrumental in undermining his constitution. Praed takes us into another atmosphere altogether from that in which Swift and Prior moved. Even satire had become good-natured and love decorous. We discover no single line which could not be read aloud in the most fastidious circle. Praed has the sweetness of a summer’s night, and his wit represents the twinkling of the stars. Yet, in the midst of all his gaiety, in some of his poems a tinge of melancholy seems to indicate a premature weariness of life.

  The “Vicar” is a beautiful bit of verse, but its touch of tenderness sets it apart from all Praed’s other work, which is brilliant with a hard and metallic brilliancy. Praed dazzles almost to weariness; his lines stand out sharply like fireworks at midnight. More brilliant than Praed no poet well could be.

  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.

  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 every-day 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.

  Unhappy is the person of whom it can be said that he neither has been, is, nor ever will be in the temper and circumstances of which Praed’s verse is the exact and consummate expression; not much less unhappy he for whom that verse does not perform the best perhaps of all the offices of literature, and call up, it may be in happier guise than that in which they once really existed, the “many beloved shadows” of the past.

  It has generally been the custom to regard Praed as the foremost exponent of what, for want of an exacter term, is known as “society verse,”—by society verse being intended, not so much the verse that treats of man as a social animal as the verse that treats of man (and woman) as they appear in that fashionable world. Many of Praed’s pieces do undoubtedly come in this category, and they are numerous enough to justify his claim to be the Corphæus of his kind. But it is unjust to class him solely as the laureate of county balls and archery meetings…. His command of his instrument was so great, and his epigrammatic faculty so perfected by use, that the slightest provocation was sufficient to enable him to throw off a creditable “copy of verses.” Thus it now and then fell out that the lines were finished before he had time to think whether the motive was adequate, or whether they included that beginning, middle, and end which even the trifles of metre require for their preservation. Also it occurred to him at times to write variations on himself, which, in his own interest, it had been wiser to withhold. But these are the objections of those who admire him so much that they would never have him below his best. When he is at his best—and we take that best to be exemplified by “The Red Fisherman,” “The Vicar,” “Quince,” “My Own Araminta,” “Our Ball,” “Good Night to the Season,” and some twenty more pieces, political and otherwise—he is unsurpassed and unsurpassable. In ease of wit and humour, in spontaneity and unflagging vivacity of rhythm, in sparkle of banter and felicity of rhyme, no imitator, whom we can recall, has ever come within measurable distance of Winthrop Mackworth Praed.

  If Praed had been more of a colourist, he would have been our Watteau of the pen.

  Praed’s best poetry shows very remarkable grace and lightness of touch. His political squibs would perhaps have been more effective had they been more brutal; but Praed could not cease to be a gentleman even as a politician. The delicacy of feeling, with a dash of acid though never coarse satire, gives a pleasant flavour to his work; and in such work as the “Red Fisherman” he shows an imaginative power which tempts a regret for the diffidence which limited his aspirations. Probably, however, he judged rightly that his powers were best fitted for the lighter kinds of verse.

  Praed belongs to the class of writers of vers de société of which Prior is the earlier and Locker-Lampson the later master; and it is not too much to say that he surpasses both.