Born, in London, 23 May 1799. At school in London. In mercantile house, 1813–15. Health failed. At Dundee, 1815–18; contrib. to local Press from 1814. Articled to firm engravers in London, 1818; but owing to ill-health devoted himself to literature. On staff of “London Mag.,” 1821–23. Married Jane Reynolds, 5 May 1824. Edited “The Gem,” 1829; edited “The Comic Annual,” 1830–42. Financial losses, 1834. Lived at Coblentz, 1835–37; at Ostend, 1837–40. Returned to England, April 1840. Joined staff of “New Monthly Mag.,” 1840; editor, Aug. 1841 to Jan. 1844. “The Song of the Shirt,” published in “Punch, “Christmas 1843. Started “Hood’s Mag.,” Jan. 1844. Crown Pension of £100 granted to his wife, Nov. 1844. Died, at Hampstead, 3 May 1845. Buried in Kensal Green Cemetery. Works: “Odes and Addresses to Great People” (anon.), 1825; “Whims and Oddities” (2 ser.), 1826–27; “National Tales” (2 vols.), 1827; “The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies,” 1827; “The Epping Hunt,” 1829; “The Dream of Eugene Aram,” 1831; “Tylney Hall” (3 vols.), 1834; “Hood’s Own,” 1839; “Up the Rhine,” 1840 (2nd edition same year); “Whimsicalities” (2 vols.), 1844. Posthumous: “Fairy Land” (with his daughter, Mrs. Broderip), 1861 (1860); “Hood’s Own,” 2nd series, ed. by his son, 1861. Collected Works: “Poems” (2 vols.), 1846; “Works,” ed. by his son and daughter (10 vols.), 1869–73. Life: “Memorials,” by Mrs. Broderip, 1860.

Personal

  I think Hood, perhaps the most taking lion I have seen, perhaps because he does not try to take, and his wit comes out really because it cannot stop in, there is so much behind.

  I have the greatest tenderness for the memory of Hood, as I had for himself. But I am not very favourable to posthumous memorials in the monument way, and I should exceedingly regret to see any such appeal as you contemplate made public, remembering another public appeal that was made and responded to after Hood’s death. I think that I best discharge my duty to my deceased friend, and best consult the respect and love with which I remember him, by declining to join in any such public endeavours as that which you (in all generosity and singleness of purpose, I am sure) advance. I shall have a melancholy gratification in privately assisting to place a simple and plain record over the remains of a great writer that should be as modest as he was himself, but I regard any other monument in connection with his mortal resting-place as a mistake.

  My father’s religious faith was deep and sincere: but it was but little known to a world ever too apt to decide by hearing professions, rather than by scrutinising actions. Those to whom his domestic life was every day revealed, felt how he lived after the divine requirements: for he “did justice,” sacrificing comfort, health, and fortune, in the endeavour; he “loved mercy” with a love that was whispering into his ear, even as he was dying, new labours for his unhappy fellows; and he “walked humbly with his God” in a faith too rare to be made a common spectacle…. Almost my father’s last words were, “Lord—say ‘Arise, take up thy cross, and follow me.’” He had borne that cross during his whole life, but the quiet unobtrusive religious faith I have endeavoured to describe, supplied him with exemplary patience under severe sufferings, with cheerfulness under adverse circumstances, with a manly resolution to wrong no one, with an affectionate longing to alleviate the suffering of all classes, and with a charity and love that I will not do more than touch on, for fear I should be thought to be carried away by my feelings.

  He possessed the most refined taste and appreciation for all the little luxuries and comforts that make up so much of the enjoyments of life; and the cares and annoyances that would be scarcely perceptible to a stronger and rougher organisation, fell with a double weight on the mind overtasked by such constant and harassing occupation. He literally fulfilled his own words, and was one of the “master minds at journey-work—moral magistrates greatly underpaid—immortals without a living—menders of the human heart, breaking their own—mighty intellects, without their mite.” The income his works now produce to his children, might then have prolonged his life for many years; although, when we looked on the calm happy face after death, free at last from the painful expression that had almost become habitual to it, we dared not regret the rest so long prayed for, and hardly won.

  He dies in dearest love and peace with his children, wife, friends; to the former especially his whole life had been devoted, and every day showed his fidelity, simplicity, and affection. In going through the record of his pure, modest, honorable life, and living along with him, you come to trust him thoroughly, and feel that here is a most loyal, affectionate, and upright soul, with whom you have been brought into communion. Can we say as much of the lives of all men of letters? Here is one at least without guile, without pretension, without scheming, of a pure life, to his family and little modest circle of friends tenderly devoted.

  In his moral and social relations in life, Hood’s character lives, I believe, untainted, and in his commerce with his own soul he appears to have been imbued with a deep sense of true and rational piety. Throughout the whole of his works that I am acquainted with there will not be found a single expression that shall bring in question the integrity of his character upon this point. And yet he did not escape the arraignment of persons who constituted themselves an authority to question his orthodoxy in such matters, and to denounce him accordingly.

  There seemed to be a mint in his mind in which the coining of puns was incessantly and almost unconsciously in process, not with the mere object of raising a laugh, but because his marvellous command of language enabled him to use words in every possible sense in which they could be understood; and he could not help playing upon them, even in his most serious moods.

  His labours consisted of writing verse, and his pastime in making puns and shooting sparrows. I have often wondered that he did not make his passerine sport the subject of an ode; for no one was more capable of jesting with his own peculiarities than Thomas Hood…. He had a quiet face, the laughter lying hid behind its gravity. Just before his death, when consumption had mastered him, and the caprice of public favour had much diminished his means of living, he bore himself very independently.

  His was slow wit: it was neither spontaneous nor ready: the offspring of thought rather than an instinctive sparkle; but it was always kindly, gracious, sympathetic; never coarse, never “free,” never even caustic, neither tainted with distrust of the goodness of God, nor to rail at the ingratitude of man. His countenance had more of melancholy than of mirth, it was calm even to solemnity. There was seldom any conscious attempt at brilliancy in his talk; and so far from sharing in that weakness with which wits are generally credited, a desire to monopolize the conversation, he seemed ever ready in society to give way to any who would supply talk. No, not a mere jester was Thomas Hood. He made humanity his debtor, to remain so as long as there are men and women with hearts to feel and understand the lesson he taught. He was the poet of the poor, above all, of the poor who are women, and whose sufferings seem perpetual.

  In the story of Hood there are no dark places which the friendly biographer must leave unnoticed, or gloss over as best he may; no dubious actions to be accounted for by “temperamental causes;” no vices to be referred to “inherited tendencies.” Few men stand less in need of apologies than he does. His character is a most effective protest against the theory that genius exempts its possessor from the obligations which bind ordinary men, giving him license to covet and to appropriate the goods of his neighbor, and to make himself variedly obnoxious to those around him. Here was a man, endowed with gifts of the highest order, delicate, sensitive, keenly alive to every impression of pleasure or of pain, yet living a life of unobtrusive heroism; and, under most trying circumstances, practising the homely, every-day virtues; as faithful in the performance of social and domestic duties as though he had been the most mildly prosaic country gentleman who ever dozed through a life of tranquil prosperity. He was free from egotism. His own pains and troubles were the last things he thought of bringing forward for public or private notice. Under such trials as his, despondency would have seemed only natural, and much complaining would have been excusable; but he showed a brave front to the world, hid his sorrows in his own heart, and uttered no lamentations, no moans of self-commiseration. His fine temper was not easily ruffled; but on just occasion he could prove himself a formidable adversary. Notwithstanding his modesty and his peaceable disposition, he was a dangerous man to trifle with when his self-respect was concerned; and no one ever assailed him on this ground without finding cause for regret. Anything approaching patronage or intrusion upon his private affairs—still more, any meddlesome attempts to pry into his motives, or to impugn his personal character, were sure to be repelled promptly, and in a way not to be forgotten. To see with what spirit he resented and rebuked such offences, read his letter to the fanatical woman, who presumed to sit in judgment upon him for the frivolity of his writings.

  When they were getting up a subscription in London for his monument, some of the most distinguished names in England were prominent on the list; but, to my thinking, those small sums that came up from the working-people of Manchester and Bristol and Preston, far outweighed the piles of guineas poured out by the great ones. Some of those little packages, that were sent in from the working-districts, were marked, “From a few poor needle-women,” “From seven dressmakers,” “From twelve poor men in the coal-mines.” The rich gave of their abundance to honor the wit; the Englishman of genius, the great author; but the poor women of Britain remembered who it was that sang the “Song of the Shirt,” and “The Bridge of Sighs;” and, down there in their dark dens of sorrow and poverty, they resolved to send up their mite, though coined out of heart’s blood, for the good man’s monument. They had heard all about their dying friend, who had been pleading their cause through so many years. They knew that he had been sending out from his sick-chamber lessons of charity and forbearance, reminding Wealth of Want, Feasting of Fasting, and Society of Solitude and Despair.

  The monument to Hood in Kensal Green was erected by public subscription, at the suggestion of Eliza Cook, and was unveiled by Lord Houghton, July 18, 1854. The simple epitaph was of his own selecting: “He sang ‘The Song of the Shirt.’”

  Hood I saw at his chambers in the Adelphi when I went to fetch his drawings for his “Comic Annual,” queer pen-and-ink drawings to be cut in fac-simile, some by myself. I recall him only as a spare man of fair stature, grave but not ungenial. But I most regarded his tools. Beside pencil and pen there lay on his desk an old graver, a reminiscence of his early time as an engraver in copper, a penknife, and a nail, with which it appeared he cut or scraped out any wrong line in his drawing.

General

  North—“That original and inimitable genius in his way, and his way is wider and more various than most people think—Thomas Hood—and the verses by the editor himself, therein quoted, ‘Eugene Aram’s Dream,’ are among the best things I have seen for some years.”

  His “Dream of Eugene Aram,” places him high among the bards who deal in dark and fearful things, and intimate rather than express deeds which men shudder to hear named. Some others of his poems have much tenderness, and a sense of nature animate and inanimate.

  Mr. Hood possesses an original wealth of humour, invention and an odd sort of wit that should rather be called whimsicality, or a faculty of the “high fantastic.” Among comic writers he is one of those who also possess genuine pathos; it is often deep, and of much tenderness, occasional of expression, and full of melancholy memories. The predominating characteristics of his genius are humorous fancies grafted upon melancholy impressions.

  We look upon this writer as a quaint masquer—as wearing above a manly and profound nature, a fantastic and deliberate disguise of folly. He reminds us of Brutus, cloaking under pretended idiocy, a stern and serious design, which burns his breast, but which he chooses in this way only to disclose. Or, he is like Hamlet—able to form a magnificent purpose, but, from constitutional weakness, not able to incarnate it in effective action. A deep message has come to him from the heights of his nature, but, like the ancient prophet, he is forced to cry out, “I cannot speak—I am a child!” Certainly there was, at the foundation of Hood’s soul, a seriousness, which all his puns and mummeries could but indifferently conceal. Jacquez, in the forest of Arden, mused not with a profounder pathos, or in quainter language, upon the sad pageant of humanity, than does he; and yet, like him, his “lungs” are ever ready to “crow like a chanticleer” at the sight of its grotesquer absurdities. Verily, the goddess of melancholy owes a deep grudge to the mirthful magician, who carried off such a promising votary.

  The beautiful stanzas called “The Bridge of Sighs,” and the painfully touching “Song of the Shirt,” were the means of exciting for an unhappy and neglected class of his countrywomen the pity, the interest, and even the active benevolence of the nation. Such things are not only good works, but good actions; and the triumph of having made genius a minister to philanthropy is a glory worthy of the friend of Lamb and the first humorous writer of his age.

  The vigor of this poem [“Bridge of Sighs,”] is no less remarkable than its pathos. The versification, although carrying the fanciful to the very verge of the fantastic, is nevertheless admirably adapted to the wild insanity which is the thesis of the poem.

  Hood’s verse, whether serious or comic—whether serene like a cloudless autumn evening, or sparkling with puns like a frosty January midnight with stars—was very pregnant with materials for thought…. Like every author distinguished for true comic humour, there was a deep vein of melancholy pathos running through his mirth; and even when his sun shone brightly, its light seemed often reflected as if only over the rim of a cloud. Well may we say in the words of Tennyson, “Would he could have stayed with us!” for never could it be more truly recorded of any one—in the words of Hamlet characterising Yorick—that “he was a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy.”

  Hood’s pathos culminates in “The Song of the Shirt,” “The Lay of the Laborer,” and “The Bridge of Sighs.” These are marvellous lyrics. In spirit and in form they are singular and remarkable. We cannot think of any poems which more show the mystic enchantment of genius. How else was a ragged sempstress in a squalid garret made immortal, nay, made universal, made to stand for an entire sisterhood of wretchedness? Here is direst poverty, blear-eyed sorrow, dim and dismal suffering,—nothing of the romantic. A stern picture it is, which even the softer touches render sterner; still there is nought in it that revolts or shocks; it is deeply poetic, calls into passionate action the feelings of reverence and pity, and has all the dignity of tragedy. Even more wonderful is the transformation that a rustic mind undergoes in “The Lay of the Laborer,” in which a peasant out of work personifies, with eloquent impressiveness, the claims and calamities of toiling manhood. But an element of the sublime is added in “The Bridge of Sighs.” In that we have the truly tragic; for we have in it the union of guilt, grief, despair, and death. An angel from heaven, we think, could not sing a more gentle dirge, or one more pure; yet the ordinary associations suggested by the corpse of the poor, ruined, self-murdered girl are such as to the prudish and fastidious would not allow her to be mentioned, much less bring her into song.

  Like other men, Hood had his “fixed ideas” in life—permanent thoughts and convictions, in behalf of which he could become pugnacious or even savage, or under the excitement of which every show of humour would fall off from him, and he would appear as a man purely sorrowful and serious. The sentiment of Anti-Pharisaism may be regarded as traditional in all men of popular literary genius; and back from our own days to those of Burns and still farther, British Literature has abounded with expressions of it, each more or less powerful in its time, but not superseding the necessity of another, and still another, in the times following. Almost last in the long list of these poets of Anti-Pharisaism comes the name of Hood. His writings are full of this sentiment, and especially of protests against over-rigid Sabbatarianism. On no subject did he so systematically and resolutely exert his powers of sarcasm and wit; and perhaps the English language does not contain any single poem from which the opponents of extreme Sabbatarianism and of what is called religious formality in general can borrow more pungent quotations, or which is really in its way a more eloquent assertion of personal intellectual freedom, than the “Ode to Rae Wilson, Esquire.”

  I look back at the good which of late years the kind English Humourists have done; and if you are pleased to rank the present speaker among that class, I own to an honest pride at thinking what benefits society has derived from men of our calling. That “Song of the Shirt,” which Punch first published, and the noble, the suffering, the melancholy, the tender Hood sang, may surely rank as a great act of charity to the world, and call from it its thanks and regard from its teacher and benefactor. That astonishing poem, which you all of you know, of the “Bridge of Sighs,” who can read it without tenderness, without reverence to Heaven, charity to man, and thanks to the beneficent genius which sang for us so nobly?

  Pass we now to the serio-comic Hood,—a poet whose memory is “emblazoned with a halo of light-hearted mirth and pleasantry,” but whose coruscations of wit and fancy do not more charm us, than do the genial charities and deep human sympathies which characterize his graver productions. If he was the “prince of punsters,” he was also pre-eminently the poet of pathos; for, as a portrayer of life in its various phases, his rich and graceful imagery, and vivid descriptions of sorrow and suffering, were no less conspicuous than the kindly spirit with which his sarcasms and satires are tempered, so that while they cauterize, they cure. How much of human suffering has been mitigated, how many a home of sadness consoled, by the pleadings of his powerful pen! The spirit of his playful productions, so chaste, and so glittering with sportive gayety and humour, are yet enriched with the pure gold of wisdom, so that while they charm the imagination, they also benefit the heart.

  A genius of a high class cutting capers and making jokes, an author of the humour and deeper calibre of the highest Elizabethan poets, and with the gentle satire of Touchstone, an essayist in his way as subtile as Charles Lamb, a tale-maker with the drolatique power and capability of Rabelais, and a poet with much of the sweetness and more than the pathos of Keats;—these together would make up Thomas Hood.

  Hood was not one of those men of commanding intellect who arise but once or twice at most in a nation’s history. He did not signalize himself by being the first to climb the slippery steeps of Pisgah, and catch sublime glimpses of the promised land with which to gladden the heart of the world. He is no cold unapproachable idol of the intellect—to be worshipped from afar with awe and trembling. Rather is he enshrined amid the Lares and Penates of our hearts—our household favorites—our Charley Lambs and Sir Philip Sidneys; a kind, genial, honest-hearted man of genius, whom one feels it is good to know and pleasant to remember, whose laugh has a hearty ring wherewith to blow away the cobwebs of sorrow and care, and the shake of whose hand does one’s heart good. There have been three or four greater writers in our nation’s history, and a few more as great, but there has been no one whose noble efforts on behalf of the poor, the outcast, and the sinning, will serve to embalm his memory and his works in a kindlier affection and regard than Thomas Hood, “the darling of the English heart.”

  He was the poet of the heart, and sound at heart himself,—the poet of humane sentiment, clarified by a living spring of humor, which kept it from any taint of sentimentalism. To read his pages is to laugh and weep by turns; to take on human charity; to regard the earth mournfully, yet be thankful, as he was, for what sunshine falls upon it, and to accept manfully, as he did, each one’s condition, however toilsome and suffering, under the changeless law that impels and governs all. Even his artistic weakness (and he had no other) were frolicsome and endearing. Much of his verse was the poetry of the beautiful, in a direction opposite to that of the metaphysical kind. His humor—not his jaded humor, the packhorse of daily task-work, but his humor at its best, which so lightened his pack of ills and sorrows, and made all England know him—was the merriment of hamlets and hostels around the skirts of Parnassus, where not the gods, but Earth’s common children, hold their gala-days within the shadow. Lastly, his severer lyrical faculty was musical and sweet: its product is as refined as the most exacting need require, and keeps more uniformly than other modern poetry to the idiomatic measures of English song…. There are no strained and affected cadences in his songs. Their diction is so clear that the expression of the thought has no resisting medium,—a high excellence in ballad-verse. With respect to their sentiment, all must admire the absolute health of Hood’s poetry written during years of prostration and disease. He warbled cheering and trustful music, either as a foil to personal distress,—which would have been quite too much to bear, had he encountered its echo in his own voice,—or else through a manly resolve that, come what might, he would have nothing to do with the poetry of despair. The man’s humor, also, buoyed him up, and thus was its own exceeding great reward.

  On the whole, we can pronounce Hood the finest English poet between the generation of Shelley and the generation of Tennyson.

  Whether, under favourable circumstances, he would have produced more work of a high character is a question that it is scarcely profitable to discuss; but it is manifest that during his life-time the somewhat coarse-palated public welcomed most keenly not so much his best as his second-best. The “Tom Hood” they cared for was not the delicate and fanciful author of the “Plea of the Midsummer Fairies,” but the Hood of “Miss Kilmansegg and her Precious Leg,”—the master of broad-grin and equivoque, the delightful parodist, the impressible and irresistible joker and Merry-Andrew. It is not to be denied that much of his work in this way is excellent of its kind, admirable for its genuine drollery and whim, having often at its core, moreover, that subtle sense of the lacrimæ rerum, which lends a piquancy of sadness and almost a quality of permanence to much of our modern jesting. But the rest!—the larger part! Nothing except the record of his over-strained, over-burdened life can enable us to understand how the author of the “Ode to Rae Wilson,” the “Lament for Chivalry,” and the lines “On a distant Prospect of Clapham Academy” could ever have produced such mechanical and melancholy mirth as much of that which has been preserved appears to be. Yet his worst work is seldom without some point; it is better than the best of many others; and, with all its drawbacks, it is at least always pure. It should be remembered too that the fashions of fun pass away like other fashions.

  The sonnets of Hood scarcely appear to have received the recognition that they deserve. They have a strength of thought, and clearness of expression that should insure them a higher rank than they have yet been permitted to take.

  Hood was indeed a boom to the literature of this century; for he had, not only the language of genius, but the genius of language as well. He was facile princeps in diction as well as in thought. The ground he occupies is an exceptional one, quite as peculiar to himself as that which belongs to Tennyson or Dickens. He is no reproduction of anybody else. He is nobody’s echo, nobody’s mantle-bearer. He is Hood the Only, just as the Germans claim for Jean Paul that special distinction of individuality.

  To Hood, with his grim imagination and his strange fantastic humour, death was meat and drink. It is as though he saw so much of the “execrable Shape” that at last the pair grew friends, and grinned whenever they foregathered even in thought.

  Hood produced in twenty-four years an amount of prose and verse of which at least one-half the world might willingly let die. Of the other half, all the serious poetry is remarkable, and a small portion of first-rate excellence. Lyrics such as the “Song of the Shirt,” the “Bridge of Sighs,” “Eugene Aram,” the song beginning “I remember, I remember, the house where I was born,” and the “Ode to Melancholy” are of an assured immortality. His humorous verse—and in the best of it, as in “Miss Kilmansegg,” are often blended poetry, pathos, and even real tragic power—is of a kind that Hood absolutely created. Not only was he the most prolific and successful punster that ever used that form of wit, but he turned it to purposes of which no one had ever supposed it capable. It became in his hands the most natural and obvious vehicle for all his better gifts. The truth is, he brought to it the transfiguring power of real imagination and, instead of its degrading whatever object touched, in his hands it ministered to the noblest ends.

  In reply to the further question, “What was Thomas Hood?” we answer, Punster, poet, preacher, all combined; a teacher both in life and word on highest Christian principle. Hood’s reputation with the general public is undoubtedly only as a joker, and, beyond controversy, he was in act and word, constitutionally, spontaneously, necessarily, always and everywhere, the perpetrator of jests, verbal and practical. The design of this paper is to correct, if possible, this false estimate of a brave knight who went laughingly to battle, but still went to battle, against giant falsehoods and follies and giant wrongs and giant misbeliefs, and with his smooth round stones of song did smite them. Its aim is to portray him as poet; in highest, truest sense a poet in life and verse; a maker, creator, who of materials old and familiar doth fashion results startling in their beauty, and in themselves a revelation. And its further aim is to claim for the punster-poet the honor due to the preacher, though unordained and unrecognized, and to show from his sermons how effective was his preaching of that charity “which suffereth long and is kind, which envieth not, vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, thinketh no evil;” of toleration, that hardest lesson for humanity to learn.

  There was little that was didactic or practical in these famous songs of sorrow. Not his was the mission of teaching or the hand to build up reformatory institutions. He fulfilled the true office of poetry in giving vent to that boundless sympathy with suffering and remorseful horror of having any share in the system which makes it possible—which has become in our days the warmest sentiment of the common mind, little as even that has been able to do for the long established evils which mock reformation, or for those human incapacities and weakness which force so many struggling creatures downward to the lowest hopeless depths of worthless labour and starvation. Hood’s poems did more perhaps to awaken the national heart than the most appalling statistics could have done, more a hundred times than recent attempts to make capital of vice and feed the impure imagination and gather profit from a vile curiosity, ever could accomplish. That dreadful image of the drowned creature “fashioned so slenderly” taken out of the tragic river with who could tell what piteous past behind her, and no refuge but the dark and awful tides surging between its black banks—has been impressed for ever on the imagination, intolerable yet perfect in the tragedy of its voiceless despair.

  Few have taught so forcibly as Hood the truth that the resources of laughter and tears are very near together. Whether we look upon him as a master of frolic, or a master of pathos, his place among English poets is a high one. His hard struggle for existence enriched him with the qualities in which he at first seemed deficient; and the pieces composed under pressure of necessity, and perhaps without direct poetic intention, place him far higher than his deliberate bids for the name and fame of a poet.

  As a poet he takes a place among contemporary poets and a place peculiarly his own.

  I am very fond of Hood, who is strongest on his whimsical side.

  The fountain of his fun was really inexhaustible, since he drew from it without ceasing for a quarter of a century. But at intervals in later years the waters ran thin and flat, without sparkle or effervescence. Yet no humorist ever wrote so much with so large a remainder of excellence. His puns are not mere verbal sleight of hand, but brilliant verbal wit. Not even Charles Lamb has so mastered the subtlety and the imagery of the pun. Hood goes beyond the analogy of sound and catches the analogy of meaning. But leaving out of the question this inimitable control of words, his drollery is still unrivaled, because it is the whimsical expression, not of the trifler but of the thinker, even of the moralist, and always of the imaginative poet. In the whirl of his absurdities suddenly appears a glimpse of everlasting truth. The merry-Andrew rattles his hoop and grins, but in his jest there is a hint of wholesome tears.

  Hood, it is true, was too great a man to be dismissed as merely a writer of the transition; yet, just because of his greatness, his history shows better than that of any other man how earnestness was discouraged and triviality fostered. Seldom have so great poetic gifts been so squandered—with no dishonour to Hood—on mere puns. The poet, as an early critic pointed out, was a man of essentially serious mind; but he had to earn bread for himself and his children, and as jesting paid, while serious poetry did not, he was compelled to jest…. Perhaps the most original fruit of Hood’s genius is “Miss Kilmansegg,” which conceals under a grotesque exterior deep feeling and effective satire. It has been sometimes ranked as Hood’s greatest work; and if comparison be made with his longer pieces only, or if we look principally to the uniqueness of the poem, the judgment will hardly be disputed; but probably the popular instinct which has seized upon “The Song of the Shirt” and “The Bridge of Sighs,” and the criticism which exalts “The Haunted House,” are in this instance sounder.

  Humour and Pathos, a century ago, linked their hands across the cradle of Thomas Hood to vow him for their own. And he was theirs till death. Over the events of his life, or the creations of his brain, that joint-possession never slacked its hold for an hour. If, to visible seeming, Pathos holds supremacy to-day in the sufferings of the poet’s body, Humour claims the guidance of his muse; if to-morrow Humour should irradiate his outward life with laughter, we may be sure that Pathos will cast its shadow within. Tears and laughter are never far apart in that strangely-mingled life. Behind the smile there is a thinly-veiled sadness; through the tears there comes a gleam of mirth. It was a dual life he lived, an April day of shine and shadow.