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. The _Hero and Leander_ will be at once
recognized as modelled on the style of Elizabethan narrative poems:
indeed Marlow treated the very same subject, and his poem, left
uncompleted, was finished by Chapman. Hood's is a most astonishing
example of revivalist poetry: it is reproductive and spontaneous at the
same time. It resembles its models closely, not
servilely--significantly, not mechanically; and has the great merit of
resembling them with comparative moderation. Elizabethan here both in
spirit and in letter, Hood is nevertheless a little less extreme than
his prototypes. Where they loaded, he does not find it needful to
overload, which is the ready and almost the inevitable resource of
revivalists, all but the fewest: on the contrary, he alleviates a
little,--but only a little.

In 1829 appeared the most famous of all his 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 Blake, Burns,
Wordsworth, Scott, Coleridge, Landor, Byron, Keats, and, s