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 société_--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.
But where the two poets come together, on a ground which they have almost to themselves, is in a certain kind of humorous poetry ranging from the terrific-grotesque, as in Hood's _Miss Kilmansegg_ and Praed's _Red Fisherman_, to the simple, humorously tender study of characters, as in a hundred things of Hood's and in not a few of Praed's with _The Vicar_ at their head. The resemblance here is less in special points than in a certain general view of life, conditioned in each case by the poet's breeding, temperament, and circumstance, but alike in essence and quality: in a certain variety of the essentially English fashion of taking life with a mixture of jest and earnest, of humour and sentiment. Hood, partly influenced by the need of caring for the public, partly by his pupilship to Lamb, perhaps went to further extremes both in mere fun and in mere sentiment than Praed did, but the central substance is the same in both.