any rate, the marriage was a happy one; Mrs. Hood being a tender and attentive wife, unwearied in the cares which her husband's precarious health demanded, and he being (as I have said) a mirror of marital constancy and devotion, distinguishable from a lover rather by his intense delight in all domestic relations and details than by any coolingdown in his fondness. It would appear taat, in the later years of Hood's life, he was not on entirely good terms with some members of his wife's family, including his old friend John Hamilton Reynolds. What may have caused this I do not find specified: all that we know of the character of Hood justifies us in thinking that he was little or not at all to blame, for he appears throughout as a man of just, honourable, and loving nature, and free besides from that sort of self-assertion which invites a collision. Every one, however, has his blemishes; and we may perhaps discern in Hood a certain over-readiness to think himself impose upon, and the fellow-creatures with whom he had immediately to do a generation of vipers—a state of feeling not characteristic of a mind exalted and magnanimous by habit, or "gentle" in the older and more significant meaning of the term. The time was now come for Hood to venture a volume upon the world. Conjointly with Reynolds, he wrote, and published in 1825, his Odes and Addresses to Great People. The title page bore no author's name; but the extraordinary talent and point of the work could hardly fail to be noticed, even apart from its appeal to immediate popularity, dealing as it did so continually with the uppermost topics of the day. It had what it deserved, a great success. This volume was followed, in 1826, by the first series of Whims and Oddities, which also met with a good sale; the second b series appeared in 1827. Next came two volumes of National Tales, somewhat after the manner of Boccaccio (but how far different from his spirit may easily be surmised), which are now little known. The volume containing the Plea of the Midsummer Fairies, Hero and Leander, and some others of Hood's most finished and noticeable poems, came out in 1827. The Midsummer Fairies itself was one of the author's own favourite works, and certainly deserved to be so, as far as dainty elegance of motive and of execution is concerned: but the conception was a little too ingeniously remote for the public to ratify the author's predilection. In 1829 appeared the most famous of all Hood's poems of a narrative character-The Dream of Eugene Aram: it was published in the Gem, an annual which the poet was then editing. Besides this amount of literary activity, Hood continued writing in periodicals, sometimes under the signature of "Theodore M." His excessive and immeasurable addiction to rollicking fun, to the perpetual "cracking of jokes" (for it amounts to that more definitely than to anything else in the domain of the Comic Muse), is a somewhat curious problem, taken in connection with his remarkable genius and accomplishment as a poet, and his personal character as a solid housekeeping citizen, bent chiefly upon rearing his family in respectability, and paying his way, or, as the Church Catechism has neatly and unimprovably expressed it, upon "doing his duty in that state of life to which it had pleased God to call him." His almost constant ill-health, and, in a minor degree, the troubles which beset him in money matters, make the problem all the more noticeable. The influence of Charles Lamb may have had something to do with it,— probably not very much. Perhaps there was something in the literary atmosphere or the national tone of the time which gave comicality a turn of predominance after the subsiding of the great poetic wave which filled the last years of the eighteenth and the first quarter of the nineteenth century in our country, in Burns, Scott, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Landor, Byron, Keats, and, supreme among all, Shelley. Something of the same transition may be noticed in the art of design: the multifarious illustrator in the prior generation is Stothard, in the later, Cruikshank. At any rate, in literature, Lamb, Hood, and then Dickens in his earliest works, the Sketches by Boz and Pickwick, are uncommonly characteristic and leading minds, and bent, with singular inveteracy, upon being "funny,"-though not funny and nothing else at all. But we should not force this consideration too far: Hood is the central figure in the group and the period, and the tendency of the time may be almost as much due to him as he to the tendency. Mainly, we have to fall back upon his own idiosyncrasy: he was born with a boundlessly whimsical perception, which he trained into an inimitable sleight-of-hand in the twisting of notions and of words; circumstances favoured his writing for fugitive publications and skimming readers, rather than under conditions of greater permanency; and the result is as we find it in his works. His son expresses the opinion that part of Hood's success in comic writing arose from his early reading of Humphrey Clinker, Tristram Shandy, Tom Jones, and other works of that period, and imbuing himself with their style: a remark, however, which applics to his prose rather than his poetical works. Certain it is that the appetite for all kinds of fun, verbal and other, was a part of Hood's nature. We see it in the practical jokes he was continually playing on his good-humoured wife such as altering into grotesque absurdity many of the words contained in her letters to friends we see it-the mere animal love of jocularity, as it might be termed-in such a small point as his frequently addressing his friend Philip de Franck, in letters, by the words "Tim says he," instead of any human appellative.* Hood reminds us very much of one of Shakspeare's Fools (to use the word in no invidious sense) transported into the nineteenth century, the Fool in King Lear, or Touchstone. For the occasional sallies of Coarseness or ribaldry, the spirit of the time has substituted a bourgeois good-humour which respects the family circle, and haunts the kitchen stairs; for the biting jeer, intended to make some victim uncomfortable, it gives the sarcastic or sprightly banter, not unconscious of an effort at moral amelioration; for the sententious sagacity, and humorous enjoyment of the nature of man, it gives bright thoughts and a humanitarian sympathy. But, on the whole, the intellectual personality is nearly the same: seeking by *This "Tim says he" is a perfect gag in many of Hood's letters. It is curious to learn what was the kind of joke which could assume so powerful an ascendant over the mind and associations of this great humourist. Here it is, as given in the Hood Memorials from Sir Jonah Barrington's Memoirs:— "Tim,' says he. 'Sir,' says he. Fetch me my hat,' says he ; 'That I may go,' says he, 'To Timahoe,' says he, And go the fair,' says he, And see all that's there,' says he. First pay what you owe,' says he; - 'Now by this and by that,' says he, natural affinity, and enjoying to the uttermost, whatever tends to lightness of heart and to ridicule-thus dwelling indeed in the region of the common-place and the gross, but constantly informing it with some suggestion of poetry, some wise side-meaning, or some form of sweetness and grace. These observations relate of course to Hood's humorous poems: into his grave and pathetic poems he can import qualities still loftier than these-though even here it is not often that he utterly forswears quaintness and oddity. The risible, the fantastic, was his beacon-light; sometimes as delicate as a dell of glow-worms; sometimes as uproarious as a bonfire; sometimes, it must be said (for he had to be perpetually writing, whether the inspiration came or not, or his inspiration was too liable to come from the very platitudes and pettinesses of everyday life), not much more brilliant than a rushlight, and hardly more aromatic than the snuff of a tallow candle. We must now glance again at Hood's domestic affairs. His first child had no mundane existence worth calling such; but has nevertheless lived longer than most human beings in the lines which Lamb wrote for the occasion, On an Infant dying as soon as born. A daughter followed, and in 1830 was born his son, the Thomas Hood of the present day whose writings are more distinguishable from those of his father upon perusal of the contents of a volume than upon inspection of its title page. The family was then living at Winchmore Hill; thence they removed, about 1832, to the Lake House, Wanstead, a highly picturesque dwelling, but scanty in domestic comorts. The first of the Comic Annual series was brought out at Christmas 1830. In the following couple of years, Hood did some theatrical work; writing the libretto for an English opera which (it is |