Hardly, if at all, could he have kept up this attitude towards life after he had come to forty year; and he might have become either a merely intelligent and respectable person, which is most probable, or an elderly youth, which is of all things most detestable, or a caterwauler, or a cynic, or a preacher. From all these fates the gods mercifully saved him, and he abides with us (the presentation being but slightly marred by the injudicious prodigality of his editors) only as the poet of Medora's musical despair lest Araminta should derogate, of the Abbot's nightmare sufferings at the hands of the Red Fisherman, of the plaintive appeal after much lively gossip-- And you'll come--won't you come?--to our Ball, of all the pleasures, and the jests, and the tastes, and the studies, and the woes, provided only they are healthy and manly, of Twenty-five. 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. FOOTNOTES: [19] 1. _The Poems of Winthrop Mackworth Praed, with a Memoir by the Rev. Derwent Coleridge._ In two volumes. London, 1864. 2. _Essays by Winthrop Mackworth Praed, collected and arranged by Sir George Young, Bart._ London, 1887. 3. _The Political and Occasional Poems of Winthrop Mackworth Praed, edited, with Notes, by Sir George Young._ London, 1888. [20] Since I wrote this I have been reminded by my friend Mr. Mowbray Morris of Byron's I enter thy garden of roses, Beloved and fair Haidee. It is not impossible that this _is_ the immediate original. But Praed has so improved on it as to deserve a new patent. XIII GEORGE BORROW