Sleep, Mr. Speaker: dream of the time When loyalty was not quite a crime, When Grant was a pupil in Canning's school, And Palmerston fancied Wood a fool. Lord, how principles pass away! Sleep, Mr. Speaker; sleep, sleep while you may. Sleep, Mr. Speaker; sweet to men Is the sleep that comes but now and then; Sweet to the sorrowful, sweet to the ill, Sweet to the children who work in a mill. You have more need of sleep than they, Sleep, Mr. Speaker; sleep, sleep while you may. But the chief merit of Praed's political verse as a whole seems to me to be that it kept his hand in, and enabled him to develop and refine the trick, above referred to, of playing on words so as to give a graceful turn to verse composed in his true vocation. Of the verse so composed there are more kinds than one; though perhaps only in two kinds is the author absolutely at his best. There is first a certain class of pieces which strongly recall Macaulay's "Lays" and may have had some connexion of origin with them. Of course those who are foolish enough to affect to see nothing good in "The Battle of the Lake Regillus," or "Ivry," or "The Armada," will not like "Cassandra," or "Sir Nicholas at Marston Moor," or the "Covenanter's Lament for Bothwell Brigg," or "Arminius." Nevertheless they are fine in their way. "Arminius" is too long, and it suffers from the obvious comparison with Cowper's far finer "Boadicea." But its best lines, such as the well-known I curse him by our country's gods, The terrible, the dark, The scatterers of the Roman rods, The quellers of the bark, are excellent in the style, and "Sir Nicholas" is charming. But not here either did Apollo seriously wait for Praed. The later romances or tales are far better than the earlier. "The Legend of the Haunted Tree" shows in full swing that happy compound and contrast of sentiment and humour in which the writer excelled. And "The Teufelhaus" is, except "The Red Fisherman" perhaps, the best thing of its kind in English. These lines are good enough for anything: But little he cared, that stripling pale, For the sinking sun or the rising gale; For he, as he rode, was dreaming now, Poor youth, of a woman's broken vow, Of the cup dashed down, ere the wine was tasted, Of eloquent speeches sadly wasted, Of a gallant heart all burnt to ashes, And the Baron of Katzberg's long moustaches. And these: Swift as the rush of an eagle's wing, Or the flight of a shaft from Tartar string, Into the wood Sir Rudolph went: Not with more joy the schoolboys run To the gay green fields when their task is done; Not with more haste the members fly, When Hume has caught the Speaker's eye.