ovney stream,
No chill except Long Morning,

are very nice things, I do not think they are so good in their kind as
the other things that I have quoted; and this, though the poem contains
the following wholly delightful stanza in the style of the "Ode on a
Distant Prospect of Clapham Academy":

Tom Mill was used to blacken eyes
Without the fear of sessions;
Charles Medlar loathed false quantities
As much as false professions;
Now Mill keeps order in the land,
A magistrate pedantic;
And Medlar's feet repose unscanned
Beneath the wide Atlantic.

The same may even be said of "Utopia," a much-praised, often-quoted, and
certainly very amusing poem, of "I'm not a Lover now," and of others,
which are also, though less exactly, in Hood's manner. To attempt to
distinguish between that manner and the manner which is Praed's own is a
rather perilous attempt; and the people who hate all attempts at
reducing criticism to principle, and who think that a critic should only
say clever things about his subject, will of course dislike me for it.
But that I cannot help. I should say then that Hood had the advantage of
Praed in purely serious poetry; for Araminta's bard never did anything
at all approaching "The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies," "The Haunted
House," or a score of other things. He had also the advantage in pure
broad humour. But where Praed excelled was in the mixed style, not of
sharp contrast as in Hood's "Lay of the Desert Born" and "Demon Ship,"
where from real pity and real terror the reader suddenly stumbles into
pure burlesque, but of wholly blended and tempered humour and pathos. It
is this mixed style in which I think his note is to be found as it is to
be found in no other poet, and as it could hardly be found in any but
one with Praed's peculiar talent and temper combined with his peculiar
advantages of education, fortune, and social atmosphere. He never had to
"pump out sheets of fun" on a sick-bed for the printer's devil, like
his less well-fated but assuredly not less well-gifted rival; and as his
scholarship was exactly of the kind to refine, temper, and adjust his
literary manner, so his society and circumstances were exactly of the
kind to repress, or at least not to encourage, exuberance or
boisterousness in his literary matter. There are I believe who call him
trivial, even frivolous; and if this be done sincerely by any careful
readers of "The Red Fisherm