Which got proportionably spare and skinny.—
Meanwhile the neighbours cried, "Poor Mary Ann!
She can't get over it! She never can!"—
When lo! to prove each prophet was a ninny,
The one that died was the poor wet-nurse, Jenny.—
To aggravate the case,

There were but two grown donkeys in the place;
And most unluckily for Eve's sick daughter,
The other long-eared creature was a male,
Who never in his life had given a pail

Of milk, or even chalk-and-water.

No matter at the usual hour of eight,
Down trots a donkey to the wicket-gate,

With Mister Simon Gubbins on his back.-
"Your sarvant, Miss,—a werry spring-like day.—
Bad time for hasses, though! good lack! good lack!
Jenny be dead, Miss,-but I'ze brought ye Jack:
He doesn't give no milk,-but he can bray."

So runs the story;

And in vain self-glory,

Some saints would sneer at Gubbins for his blindness

But what the better are their pious saws

To ailing souls, than dry hee-haws,

Without the milk of human-kindness.

Barrow also includes the pun in his list of qualities which constitute wit. He says:-"Sometimes it playeth in words and phrases, taking advantage from the ambiguity of their sense, or the affinity of their sound." To give an illustration of Hood's talent in punning were to quote the entire volumes of his humorous writings, "Si monumentum requiris, circumspice." Among the most remarkable, however, of his smaller pieces, containing the largest proportion of plums (and that is like a good Catholic plum-pudding—all plums), is the well-known one, entitled "The pathetic ballad of Faithless Nelly Gray; or, the serious ballad of Mister Brown;" or, better than all, perhaps, the "Pathetic Ballad of Faithless Sally Brown;" every stanza in which contains a pun-and a good pun-ending with the celebrated and often-quoted climax upon the death of the hero, who was a Jack Tar :

His death, which happened in his berth,

At forty-odd befell:

They went and told the sexton, and

The sexton toll'd the bell.

There is one feature enumerated in Barrow's characteristics of wit and humour, that Hood did not possess :-it is the one which he says, consists in uttering "acute nonsense." "Acute" Hood is

at all times, whether he be grave or gay: but he never plunges into the pell-mell of mad waggery-still less of tom-foolery. His wit is always prepared and polished: his humour too, and even his punning; though that, indeed, must have been, in most instances, all-but spontaneous; yet it has not the effect upon the reader's mind of being so. No detraction from his talent is hinted in this suggestion: it is merely instanced as a peculiarity in his intellectual conformation. There is almost a gravity in his humour; while, at times, there is humour in his gravity. I know not whether the aspect and manner of the man at the moment of a humorous utterance may not have influenced me in my present opinion; but I cannot evade the impression that his ludicrous imageries and associations are not wholly free from the effect of careful concoction. This precision and pains-taking may have resulted from a habit of neatness and order acquired in early life. In that short piece of autobiography which he published in the collection called "Hood's Own" he speaks of the pains that he took, in the commencement of his literary career, to copy out his articles for the press in the printing character, "in order (as he says) that I might be enabled more readily to form a judgment of the effect of my little efforts." Straws thrown up show the set of the wind; and trifles, in action and habit, display the bent of mind and character more surely than premeditated elaborations of conduct. Assuredly, Hood had none of the abandonment—the helter-skelter-hit-or-miss inebriety of Rabelais in his wit-lunes; but then no one comes so near to insanity in Delphic inspirations as that profound satirist. Hood's mind had a different bias. He aimed at amusement in his writings, and he hit his mark, which is saying much. He was not the satirist of the mistakes and vices of society: with these he expostulated; and sincerely, and earnestly. He sympathised too deeply with suffering humanityparticularly oppressed womanhood, to censure with a joke or sneer with a pun. He looked out for the ridiculous in conduct and action and dressed them in Saturnalibus. The helpless blunders of society, too, in their civil and social arrangements tickled his fancy, and he turned their condition to compound-wit-interest. What could be more ludicrous (and yet, withal, there was an infusion of his constitutional gravity in the concoction) than his letter from an Emigrant Squatter in one of the virgin settlements in New Holland, with the snakes coming down the chimney, and the grand piano converted into a cupboard?

Hood's sense of the ridiculous in contrast, as well as consociation, also led him at times into parody; and when it did so he succeeded

eminently. He then, like a genuine artist, not only reflected-say, perhaps, refracted or distorted (retaining the outline or matter of the original), but he caught, and, as it were, crystallised the essence and evanescent spirit of its manner. In one of his Annuals there appeared a parody upon Walton's Angler, in a discourse between some urchins fishing in the New River at Sadler's Wells. The childlike imitation of the primitive simplicity in the original angler's manual has all the effect of a perfect production in parody.

Hood, however, could be the gravest of moralists in the midst of the most rampant burlesque. An instance of this may be referred to, in that extraordinary production, "Miss Kilmansegg and her Precious Leg," certainly the greatest effort of his genius; for it combines fine satire (which is wit); redundant humour; copious imagination, brilliant fancy; a most artist-like and varied versification; and, to crown all, a moral intertissued, as pure and golden as the subject itself. Gold and its attributes-its power and its weakness; its uses and its abuses; its pains and its penalties, form the text of this fine homily: and the taste, ingenuity, and correct keeping which the poet has displayed in maintaining that dominant and keynote,-"Gold"-ringing in the "mind's ear," is especially admirable. Like a man of good sense and a man of the world, Hood has not hood-winked his better knowledge by a vulgar abuse of "Gold," in the abstract, as the fox abused the abstracted grapes; but the shaft of his moral is directed against the misapplication and misuse of the precious talisman,-convertible to an equal blessing in one case, as to a curse in the other.

Let me recal to the reader's recollection a liberal assortment of passages from the several divisions of the lady's history. First, of her" Birth we are informed :

She was born exactly at half-past two,
As witness'd a time-piece in or-molu

That stood on a marble table;

Showing at once the time of day,

And a team of gildings running away
As fast as they were able,

With a golden God, with a golden star,
And a golden spear in a golden car,
According to Grecian fable.

Like other babes, at her birth she cried,
Which made a sensation far and wide,

Ay, for twenty miles around her :

For though to the ear 'twas nothing more
Than an infant's squall, it was really the roar
Of a fifty thousand pounder!

It shook the next heir

In his library chair,

And made him cry, "Confound her!"

Here is the portrait of the infant's father at her "Christening," receiving the guests, a "photo" which will infallibly clasp on to immortality :

And Sir Jacob the father strutted and bow'd,

And smiled to himself, and laughed aloud,

To think of his heiress and daughter :

And then in his pockets he made a grope;
And then in the fulness of joy and hope,
Seem'd washing his hands with invisible soap,
In imperceptible water.

He had roll'd in money, like pigs in mud,

Till it seemed to have entered into his blood

By some occult projection:

And his cheeks instead of a healthy hue,

As yellow as any guinea grew,

Making the common phrase seem true
About a rich complexion.

And in this same vein he records the several stages of the lady's career; her "Education," "Her Accident," of which the golden leg was the result; "Her Courtship," "Her Marriage,” “Her Honeymoon" (a melancholy sarcasm), " Her Will," her last "Dream," "Her Death." In these last the main feature and object of her whole life is introduced (like a pedal point upon the leading subject at a close of a musical composition) with singularly fine tact and taste. She is on the brink of eternity (for she is about to be murdered for her gold), and her visions in sleep run back to the scenes of her youth. Only observe how he chimes upon the text to his story :—

Thus, even thus the countess slept,

While Death still nearer and nearer crept,
Like the Thane who smote the sleeping-

But her mind was busy with early joys,

Her golden treasures, and golden toys,
That flashed a bright

And golden light

Under lids still red with weeping.

The golden doll she used to hug!

Her coral of gold, and the golden mug!
Her god-father's golden presents!
The golden service she had at her meals,
The golden watch, and chain, and seals,
Her golden scissors, and thread and reels,
And her golden fishes and pheasants!

The golden guineas in silken purse.

And her golden legends she heard from her nurse,
Of the mayor in his gilded carriage.

And London streets that are paved with gold,

And the golden eggs that were laid of old,
With each golden thing,

To the golden ring

At her own auriferous marriage!

And still the golden light of the sun

Through her golden dream appear'd to run,
Though the night that roar'd without was one
To terrify seamen and gipsies;

While the moon, as if in malicious mirth,
Kept peeping down at the ruffled earth,
As though she enjoy'd the tempest's birth
In revenge of her old eclipses.

But vainly, vainly, the thunder fell,

For the soul of the sleeper was under a spell
That time had lately embitter'd.

The Count, as once at her foot he knelt-
That foot which now he wanted to melt!
But-hush! 'twas a stir at her pillow she felt-
And some object before her glitter'd.

'Twas the golden leg!-she knew its gleam!
And up she started, and tried to scream,
But ev'n in the moment she started-

Down came the limb with a frightful smash,

And lost in the universal flash

That her eye-balls made at so mortal a crash,
The spark, called vital, departed!

Gold, still gold! hard, yellow, and cold;
For gold she had lived, and she died for gold,

By a golden weapon-not oaken;
In the morning they found her alone,
Stiff and bloody, and cold as stone;
But her leg, the Golden Leg, was gone,
And the "Golden bowl was broken!"
Gold,-still gold! it haunted her yet-
At the Golden Lion the inquest met,
Its foreman, a carver and gilder-

And the jury debated from twelve till three
What the verdict ought to be,

And they brought it in a "Felo de se,"

Because her own leg had killed her!

Then succeeds the "Moral" to the story with one of the specimens of the poet's prolific talent in rhyming :

Gold! gold! gold! gold!

Bright and yellow, hard and cold,