The still shorter life of Winthrop Mackworth Praed, on the other hand, was passed under sufficiently favourable stars. He was born in 1802, and his father, Serjeant Praed, possessed property, practice at the bar, and official position. Praed was sent to Eton, where he became a pillar of the famous school magazine _The Etonian_, and thence to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he did extremely well, made the acquaintance of Macaulay, and wrote in _Knight's Quarterly_. After a short interval of tutoring and reading for the bar he entered Parliament in 1830, and remained in it for the rest of his life, which closed on 15th July 1839. He had latterly been secretary to the Board of Control, and it was thought that, had he lived, he might have made a considerable political reputation both as speaker and administrator. The almost unchequered sunshine of one of these careers and the little sun and much shadow of the other have left traces--natural though less than might be supposed--of difference between the produce of the two men; but perhaps the difference is less striking than the resemblance. That Hood--obliged to write for bread, and outliving Praed by something like a decade at the two ends--wrote a great deal more than Praed did is of little consequence, for the more leisurely writer is as unequal as the duty labourer. Hood had the deeper and stronger genius: of this there is no doubt, and the advantage more than made up for Praed's advantages in scholarship and in social standing and accomplishment. In this serious work of Hood's--_Lycus the Centaur_, _The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies_, _The Elm Tree_, _The Haunted House_--there is observable--to a degree never surpassed by any of the poets of this group except Beddoes, and more sustained and human, though less weird and sweet, than his--a strain of the true, the real, the ineffable tone of poetry proper. At this Praed never arrives: there are at most in him touches which may seem to a very charitable judgment to show that in other circumstances sorrow, passion, or the like might have roused him to display the hidden fire. On the other hand, neither Hood's breeding, nor, I think, his nature, allowed him to display the exquisite airiness, the delicate artificial bloom and perfection, of Praed's best _vers de societe_--the _Season_, the _Letter of Advice_, and the rest. This last bloom has never been quite equalled--even Prior's touch is coarse to it, even that of the late Mr. Locker is laboured and deliberate. So too as there is nothing in Praed of the popular indignation--generous and fine but a little theatrical--which endears Hood to the general in _The Bridge of Sighs_ and _The Song of the Shirt_, so there is nothing in Hood of the sound political sense, underlying apparent banter, of Praed's _Speaker Asleep_ and other things.