Soon after this period Mr. Praed was called to the bar, and in 1831 was returned to parliament for St. Germains, in Cornwall. The two great speakers of the Cambridge Union, Thomas Babington Macaulay and Winthrop Mackworth Praed, sat on opposite benches, when the oratory of sport had become a stern reality. The one has fulfilled all the hopes of his youth; the other, we can only speak of him with unbidden tears.

"But the fair guerdon when we hope to find,
And think to burst out into sudden blaze,
Comes the blind Fury with the abhorred shears,
And slits the thin-spun life. But not the praise."