iting-master at Christ Hospital. She is stated to have had good
manners, a cultivated mind, and literary tastes, though a high
educational standard is not always traceable in her letters. At 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
cooling-down in his fondness. It would appear that, 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 a man of just,
honorable, 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 imposed 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 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 other of Hood's most finished and noticeable
poems, came out in 1827. _The Midsummer Fairies_ itself was one of the
authors own favorite works, and certainly deserved to be so, as far as