(Locker’s “mottoes,” of which this is one, often contain his most characteristic lines.) Praed could no more have written that, or the lines “To my Grandmother,” than Locker could have written “The Vicar.” Both poets have other strings. Praed’s more serious vein could win a contemporary reputation: but he would not have been remembered for this alone, after eighty years. In “At Her Window,” which Mr Coulson Kernahan rightly calls “one of the most beautiful love-songs of the century,” Locker is no longer ironical, but rises to the heights of real passion: “Beating Heart! we come again Where my Love reposes: This is Mabel’s window-pane: These are Mabel’s roses. . . . . . Mabel will be deck’d anon, Zoned in bride’s apparel; Happy zone! Oh hark to yon Passion-shaken carol! Sing thy song, thou trancèd thrush, Pipe thy best, thy clearest;— Hush, her lattice moves, O hush— _Dearest Mabel_!—_dearest_” . . . “I once tried,” says Locker in “My Confidences,” “to write like Praed.” The effort was not wholly successful: Locker is weakest where his manner is most Praedian; and the poet, either realising this, or moulded by the temper of his time, appears to have altered most of the obviously imitative passages. Thus in “Tempora Mutantur” the last stanza runs, in 1857: “What brought this wanderer here, and why Was Pamela away? It might be she had found her grave Or he had found her gay”; but the antithetical pun is excised in the 1893 edition, where the lines are: “The pilgrim sees an empty chair Where Pamela once sat: It may be she had found her grave, It might be worse than that.” So in “Bramble-Rise” “My bank of early violets Is now a bank of savings”