is a certain tarn among these hills where the trout are said, when caught, to give vent to their indignation in inarticulate sounds; but I have never fished in that pool, nor, if I found the story true, would I fish there a second time.

There is one other bird which I should wish to notice before I leave these woods and close these notes for the present, which does not need to be watched for like the Wood-wren, but obtrudes himself upon your attention by his bright plumage, his comparatively loud note of warning, and his preference for the lower and barer boughs of the trees. It is not often that we of the midlands have the chance of seeing a Pied Flycatcher alive, and this was only the second time that I had come across him in

our island. If he appears in Cxfordshire, as he did once in my village in April, and once last spring in a wood near Oxford, he is only a passing visitor. It would seem that the flat country is not to his mind, and he makes north and west for wooded hills. From Cumberland we have an excellent account of him in Mr. Macpherson's "Birds of Cumberland", and in Breconshire and Radnorshire he is almost a common bird-perhaps as common as his cousin the little Spotted Flycatcher, who is content with any garden or orchard in any district where he can find flies. The commonplaces of English scenery will not do for the handsome pied bird, perhaps because his brilliant black and white attracts the attention of the most cruel bird-nesting population in the world, or simply because one of those predilections for which we can never altogether account urges him to sunny timbered slopes, where the trees are old and offer him a choice of many a cavernous homestead. Certain it is, that whenever I have seen him on the Continent he has always been in such places, whether among the larger timber of a Swiss mountain-side or on the forest-slopes of the Taunus range. Just as the trout loves swiftly-running

streams, or as the Wood-warbler is sure to be heard where the oak is the prevailing tree, so there are certain spots which you instinctively feel that this Flycatcher ought to have chosen for his habitation, and if you are in the right district you may lay a fair wager that he will be found there.

Such a spot, on the edge of the beech-forests of Wiesbaden, will always remain in very clear outline in my memory, for it was there I first heard the song of this bird. It is very seldom now that I hear a song that is quite new to me. If it were not that

so many of our songsters sing all too short a time, and that when they tune up one by one for the orchestra of the spring season, each instrument touches the ear with the fresh delight of recognition, I might feel as much at the end of my tether as the mountaineer who has no more peaks to climb. But this song was not only new, but wonderfully sweet and striking. "Something like a Redstart's", say the books, (e.g., Mr. Seebohm, and Mr. Saunders in his excellent "Manual of British Birds", now being published in parts); and this is not untrue, so far as it represents the outward form, so to speak, of the song the quickness or shortness of notes, the rapid variations of pitch. But no one who has once accustomed his ear to the very peculiar timbre of the voice of either kind of Redstart will mistake for it the song of the Pied Flycatcher. My notes taken on the spot, and before I had seen any other description of it, recall the song to my memory; the short notes at the beginning, the rather fragmentary and hesitating character of the strain, and the little coda or finish, which reminded me of the Chaffinch; but all this will have no meaning to my readers. There is but one way of learning a bird's song, and that is by listening to it in solitude again and again, until you have associated it in your mind with the form and habits and haunts of the singer.

The song had long ago ceased in

these Welsh woods, and the birds were no longer, as at Wiesbaden, exploring the holes in the trees for a good nesting-place: the hen going into a hole and coming out again to report, while the cock clung like a Swift to the outside, showing me every feather in his back, wings, and tail. Nesting was over in the woods I write of, and the young birds, in their comparatively dull juvenile dress, were flitting about among the moss-clad sycamores, or being fed by their parents if still in statu pupillari. It was time that I should shoulder my rod and creel, and cross the open mountain to the troutstream in the next valley-taking care, so I was warned, not to fall over the slate-quarry-with some hope of hearing the Curlew's call, or of seeing the young Ring-ousels that are bred on these moors; and destined to get drenched in heavy and pitiless showers, before I have extracted a dozen little trout from the deep-brown peaty pools, and the rising water and splashing rain has diverted their minds from my fly.

Though Wales is too far west for the Nightingale, and too little cultivated to suit some few other birds which live entirely on seeds and grain, the naturalist will find plenty to do there, and a field of operations which is

almost unworked. The Welsh do not seem to take kindly to natural history as yet, in spite of their four colleges and their projected University. "The Birds of Wales", when it comes to be written, should far exceed in interest the monographs of the ornithology of single English counties, if only because Wales is a natural division of this island, and not merely an artificial one. I have only written in this paper of two or three species, but the woods were alive with many other kinds, and I had no difficulty, by questioning those who had lived all their lives in the district, in making a list of near a hundred species during the few days of my visit. That visit will always be remembered by me as a delightful break in what promises to be a dull and inhospitable summer. I return to the midlands to find the hay still uncut, or lying in sodden heaps on a soaking soil, and I begin to long again already for the light air and short grass of the hills, and for the musical chat of the mountainbrooks. In pensive moments I seem to feel the living weight of a trout at the end of my line, or to hear the shivering note of the unseen Woodwren coming gradually nearer to me through the lichened oak-boughs.

W. WARDE FOWLER.

HALF a century after his death, Praed, who is loved by those who love him perhaps as sincerely as most greater writers, has had his works presented to the public in a form which may be called complete. This is of itself rather a cautious statement in appearance, but I am not sure that it ought not to be made more cautious still. The completeness is not complete, though it is in one respect rather more than complete; and the form is exceedingly informal. Neither in size, nor in print, nor in character of editing and arrangement do the two little fat volumes which were ushered twenty-four years ago into the world by Derwent Coleridge, and the one little thin volume which appeared last year under Sir George Young's name with no notes and not much introduction, and the very creditable edition of the political poems which has just appeared under the same care but better cared for, agree together. But this, though a nuisance to those who love not a set of odd volumes, would matter comparatively little if the discrepancies were not equally great in a much more important

matter than that of mere externals. Only the last of the four volumes and three books just enumerated can be said to be really edited at all; and though that is edited very well, it is the least important. Sir George Young, who has thus done a pious

11. "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 o. Winthrop Mackworth Praed, edited, with Notes, by Sir George Young". London, 1888.

work to his uncle's memory, was concerned not merely in the cheap issue of the prose last year, but in the more elaborate issue of the poems in 1864. But either his green unknowing youth did not at that time know what editing meant, or he was under the restraint of some higher powers. Except that the issue of 1864 has that well-known page-look of "Moxon's ", which is identified to all lovers of poetry with associations of Shelley, of Lord Tennyson, and of other masters, and that the pieces are duly dated, it is difficult to say any good thing of the book. There are no notes; and Praed is an author who is much in need of annotation. With singular injudiciousness, a great deal of album and other verse is included which was evidently not intended for publication, which does not display the writer at his best, or even in his characteristic vein at all, and the memoir is meagre in fact and decidedly feeble in criticism. As for the prose, though Sir George Young has prefixed an introduction good as far as it goes, there is no index, no table even of contents, and the separate papers are not dated, nor is any indication given of their origin-a defect which, for reasons to be indicated shortly, is especially troublesome in Praed's case. Accordingly anything like a critical study of the poet is beset with very unusual difficulties, and the mere reading of him, if it were less agreeable in itself, could not be said to be exactly easy. Luckily Praed is a writer so eminently engaging to the mere reader, as well as so interesting in divers ways to the personage whom some one has politely called "the gelid critic", that no sins or shortcomings of his editors can do

him much harm, so long as they let him be read at all.

Winthrop Mackworth was the third son of Serjeant Praed, Chairman of the Board of Audit, and, though his family was both by extraction and by actual seat Devonian, he was born in John Street, Bedford Row, on June 26th, 1802, the year of the birth of Victor Hugo, who was perhaps about as unlike Praed in every conceivable point, except metrical mastery, as two men possessing poetic faculty can be unlike one another. John Street may not appear as meet a nurse for a poetic child as Besançon, especially now when it has settled down into the usual office-and-chambers state of Bloomsbury. But it is unusually wide for a London street; it has trees-those of the Foundling Hospital and those of Gray's Inn-at either end, and all about it cluster memories of the Bedford Row conspiracy, and of that immortal dinner which was given by the Briefless One and his timid partner to Mr. Goldmore, and of Sydney Smith's sojourn in Doughty Street, and of divers other pleasant things. In connection however with Praed himself, we do not hear much more of John Street. It was soon exchanged for the more cheerful locality of Teignmouth, where his father (who was a member of the old western family of Mackworth, Praed being an added surname) had a country house. Serjeant Praed encouraged, if he did not positively teach, the boy to write English verse at a very early age: a practice which I should be rather slow to approve, but which has been credited, perhaps justly, with the very remarkable formal accuracy and metrical ease of Praed's after work. Winthrop lost his mother early, was sent to a private school at eight years old, and to Eton in the year 1814.

Public schools in their effect of allegiance on public schoolboys have counted for much in English history, literary and other, and Eton has counted for more than

any of them. But hardly in any

A

case has it counted for so much with the general reader as in Praed's. friend of mine, who, while entertaining high and lofty views on principle, takes low ones by a kind of natural attraction, says that the straightforward title of "The Etonian " and Praed's connection with it are enough to account for this. There you have a cardinal fact easy to seize and easy to remember." Praed? Oh! yes, the man who wrote 'The Etonian'; he must have been an Eton man," says the general reader. This is cynicism, and cannot be too strongly reprehended. But unluckily, as in other cases, a kind of critical deduction or reaction from this view has also taken place, and there are persons who maintain, that Praed's merit is a kind of coterie-merit, a thing which Eton men are bound, and others are not bound but the reverse, to uphold. This is an old, but apparently still effective trick. I read not long ago a somewhat elaborate attempt to make out that the people who admire Mr. Matthew Arnold's poems admire them because they, the people, are Oxford

men.

Now this form of "ruling out” is undoubtedly ingenious. "You admire Mr. Arnold's poems?" "Yes, I do." "You are an Oxford man?" "Yes, I am." "Ah! I see." And it is perfectly useless for the victim to argue that his admiration of the poet and his allegiance to the University. have nothing to do with each other. In the present case I at least am free from this illogical but damaging disqualification. I do not think that any one living admires Praed more than I do; and neither Eton nor Cambridge, which may be said to have divided influence on him, claims any allegiance from me.

On Praed himself, however, the influence of Eton was certainly great, if not of the greatest. Here he began in other school periodicals besides "The Etonian" ("The College Magazine", "Hora Otiosa", "Apis Matina ")

his prose and, to some though a less extent, his verse-exercises in finished literature. Here he made the beginnings of that circle of friends (afterwards slightly enlarged at Cambridge by the addition of non-Etonians and including one or two Oxford men who had been at Eton) which practically formed the staff of "The Etonian itself and of the subsequent "Knight's Quarterly" and "Brazen Head". The greatest of them all, Macaulay, belonged to the later Trinity set; but the Etonians proper included the two Coleridges (Derwent and his cousin and brother-in-law, Henry Nelson), Moultrie, W. S. Walker, C. H. Townsend, and others. There has been, I believe, a frequent idea that boys who contribute to school-magazines never do anything else. Praed certainly could not be produced as an instance. He was not a great athlete, partly because his health was always weak, partly because athletics were then in their infancy. But he is said to have been a good player at fives and tennis, an amateur actor of merit, expert at chess and whist, and latterly a debater of promise, while, in the well-known way of his own school and University, he was more than a sufficient scholar. He went to Trinity in October, 1821, and in the three following years won the Browne Medals for Greek verse four times and the Chancellor's Medal for English verse twice. He was third in the Classical Tripos, was elected to a Fellowship at his college in 1827, and in 1830 obtained the Seatonian Prize with a piece, "The Ascent of Elijah", which is remarkable for the extraordinary facility with which it catches the notes of the just published "Christian Year". He was a great speaker at the Union, and, as has been hinted, he made a fresh circle of literary friends for himself, the chief ornaments whereof were Macaulay and Charles Austin. It was also during his sojourn at Cambridge that the short-lived but brilliant venture of "Knight's Quarterly" was launched.

He was about four years resident at Trinity in the first instance; after which, according to a practice then common enough but now, I believe, obsolete, he returned to Eton as private and particular tutor to Lord Ernest Bruce. This employment kept him for two years. He then read law, was called to the Bar in 1829, and in 1830 was elected to Parliament for the moribund borough of St. Germans, was re-elected next year, contested St. Ives, when St. Germans lost its members, but was beaten; in 1834 was elected for Great Yarmouth, and 1837 for Aylesbury, which last seat he held to his death. During the whole of this time he sat as a Conservative, becoming a more thorough one as time went on; and as he had been at Cambridge a very decided Whig, and had before his actual entrance on public life written many pointed and some bitter lampoons against the Tories, the change, in the language of his amiable and partial friend and biographer, "occasioned considerable surprise". Of this also more presently for it is well to get merely biographical details over with as little digression as possible. Surprise or no surprise, he won good opinions from. both sides, acquired considerable reputation as a debater and a man of business, was in the confidence both of the Duke of Wellington and of Sir Robert Peel, was made Secretary of the Board of Control in 1834, married in 1835, was appointed Deputy-High Steward of his University (a mysterious appointment, of the duties of which I have no notion), and died of disease of the lungs on July 15th, 1839. Not very much has been published about Praed personally; but in what has been published, and in what I have heard, I cannot remember a single unfriendly

sentence.

Notwithstanding his reputation as an "inspired schoolboy", I do not know that sober criticism would call him a really precocious writer, especially in verse. The pieces by which