Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/676

Rh 652 P R A P R M mother died in 1809, whereupon the child was sent to the preparatory school of Langley Broom near Colnbrook, where he remained until he was removed (28th March 1814) to Eton. Towards the close of his schoolboy days he started a manuscript periodical called Apis Jfatina. This was succeeded in October 1820 by the Etonian, a paper pro jected and edited by Praed and Walter Blunt, which appeared every month until July 1821, when the chief editor left the &quot;glade&quot; of Eton and the paper died. Henry Nelson Coleridge, William Sidney Walker, and John Moul- trie were the three best known of his coadjutors in this periodical, which was published by Charles Knight, and of which many interesting particulars are set out in Knight s A utobiography and in Maxwell Lyte s Eton College. Before Praed left school he succeeded in establishing over a shop at Eton a &quot;boy s library&quot; for the use of the higher Etonians, the books of which are now amalgamated in the official &quot; boy s library &quot; in the new buildings. His career at Cambridge, where he matriculated at Trinity College, Octo ber 1821, was marked by exceptional brilliancy. Thrice he gained the Browne medal and twice the chancellor s medal for English verse. He was bracketed third in the classical tripos in 1825, won a fellowship at his college in 1827, and three years later carried off the Seatonian prizes. At the Union his speeches attracted the admiration of his fellow-undergraduates; he struggled, and not unequally, with Macaulay and Austin. The character of Praed dur ing his university life is described by Bulwer Lytton in the first volume of his Life (pp. 227-239, 244-246). At Cam bridge, as at Eton, the poet was drawn by Charles Knight into the pleasures of magazine-writing. KnigMs Quarterly Magazine was started in 1822 with Praed as one of the principal contributors, and, after languishing for some time, it expired when three octavo volumes had been issued. For two years (1825-27) he resided at Eton as private tutor to &quot;Lord Ernest Bruce, a younger son of the marquis of Ailesbury. During part of this time he was occupied in preparing himself for the profession of the law, and on 29th May 1829 he was called to the bar at the Middle Temple. He travelled on the Norfolk circuit, where his prospects of advancement were bright, but the bias of his feelings in clined him towards politics, and after a year or two he devoted himself entirely to political life. Whilst at Cam bridge he leaned to Whiggism, and even to the autumn of 1829 his feelings were bent towards the same side, but with the dawning of the Reform Bill he passed into the opposite ranks, and when he was returned to parliament for St Germans (17th December 1830) his election was due to the kindness of Mr Herries, a zealous member of the Tory party. He sat for that borough until December 1832, and on its extinction contested the borough of St Ives, within the limits of which the Cornish estates of the Praeds are situated. The squibs which he wrote on this occasion were collected in a volume printed at Penzance in 1833 and entitled Trash, dedicated without respect to James Hahe, Esq. M.P., his successful competitor. Praed subsequently sat for Great Yarmouth from 1835 to 1837 and for Aylesbury from the latter year until his death. During the progress of the Reform Bill he advocated the creation of three-cornered constituencies, in which each voter should have the power of giving two votes only, and maintained that freeholds within boroughs should confer votes for the boroughs and not for the county. Neither of these suggestions was then adopted, but the former ulti mately formed part of the Reform Bill of 1866. Praed was for a few months (December 1834 to April 1835) secretary to the Board of Control, and he was much grati fied at receiving the appointment of deputy high steward of his beloved university of Cambridge. The last years of his life were racked by the pains of phthisis, though all that sympathy and devotion could effect to alleviate his sufferings was accomplished by his wife, Helen, daughter of Mr George Bogle, whom he had married in 1835. He died at Chester Square, London, on 15th July 1839, and was buried at Kensal Green on 23d July. Praed s lighter poetry was the perfection of ease. It abounded in allusions to the characters and follies of the day and passed with playful touch from puns to politics. In his humorous effusions he was the chief of a school which in these latter days has found numerous imitators. Many of his poems were marked by much pathetic feeling, for his talents were by no means limited to puns and jests. Several American issues of his works appeared before the comprehensive English edition of his Poems, &quot;with a memoir by Rev. Derwent Coleridge,&quot; was published in 1864. At a later date a selection from his poems by Sir George Young was given to the world. PR/EFECT (prsffectus) was the title of various Roman officials, both civil and military. A praefect was not one of the magistrates proper ; he was, strictly speaking, only the deputy or lieutenant of a superior magistrate or com mander. The following were the most important classes of prefects. 1. The city prefect (pr&fectus urbi) acted at Rome as the deputy of the chief magistrate or magistrates during his or their absence from the city. Thus he represented in the earliest times the king and in later times the consul or consuls when he or they were absent on a campaign or on other public duties, such as the celebration of the annual Latin festival on the Alban Mount. The absence of the chief magistrate for more than a single day rendered the appointment of a prefect obligatory ; but the obligation only arose when all the higher magistrates were absent. Hence so long as the consuls were the only higher magis trates their frequent absence often rendered the appoint ment of a praefect necessary, but after the institution of the praetorship (367 B.C.) the necessity only arose excep tionally, as it rarely happened that both the consuls and the praetor were absent simultaneously. But a praefect continued to be regularly appointed, even under the empire, during the enforced absence of all the higher magistrates at the Latin festival. The right and duty of appointing a proefect belonged to the magistrate (king, dictator, or consul) whose deputy he was, but it seems to have been withdrawn from the consuls by the Licinian law (367 B.C.), except that they still nominated prefects for the time of the festival. No formalities in the appointment and no legal qualifications on the part of the proefect were required. The praefect had all the powers of the magistrate whose deputy he was, except that he could not nominate a deputy to himself. His office expired on the return of his superior. There could only be one city pnufect at a time, though the dictator Caesar broke the rule by appointing six or eight praefects simultaneously. Under the empire there was introduced a city prefecture which differed essentially from the above. Augustus occa sionally appointed a city proefect to represent him in his absence from Italy, although the praetors or even one of the consuls remained in the capital. In the absence of Tiberius from Rome during the last eleven years of his reign (26-37 A.D.) the city prefecture, hitherto an excep tional and temporary office, became a regular and perma nent magistracy ; in all subsequent reigns the prasfect held office even during the presence of the emperor in Rome. He was always chosen by the emperor and usually from men who had held the consulship ; his office was regarded, like the censorship under the republic, as the crowning honour of a long political career. It was not conferred for any definite length of time, but might be held for years or for life. As under the republic, the praefect was not allowed to quit the city for more than a day at a time. His duty was the preservation of peace in the capital ; he was, in fact, the chief of the police, being charged with the super-