d break, in merely looking at the pictures in
a volume of Hood. The printed page she did not read or care to read;
what the prints illustrated she knew nothing about; but her eyes danced
with joy and overran with tears of childish merriment. But in all this
luxury of fun, whether by pen or pencil, no word, idea, image, or
delineation obscures the transparency of innocence, or leaves the shadow
of a stain upon the purest mind. To be at the same time so comic and so
chaste is not only a moral beauty, but a literary wonder. It is hard to
deal with the oddities of humor, however carefully, without casual slips
that may offend or shame the reverential or the sensitive. Noble, on the
whole, as Shakspeare was, we would not in a mixed company, until after
cautious rehearsal, venture to read his comic passages aloud. We may
apply the statement, also, to the comic portions of Burns,--and,
indeed, to comic literature in general. But who has fear to read most
openly anything that Hood ever wrote? or who has a memory of wounded
modesty for anything that he ever read secretly of Hood's? Dr. Johnson
says that dirty images were as natural to Swift as sublime ones were to
Milton;--we may say that images at once lambent and laughable were those
which were natural to Hood. Even when his mirth is broadest, it is
decent; and while the merest recollection of his drollery will often
convulse the face in defiance of the best-bred muscles, no thought
arises which the dying need regret. Who can ever forget "The Lost
Heir," or remember it but to laugh at its rich breadth of natural, yet
farcical, absurdity? The very opening begins the giggle:--

"One day, as I was going by
That part of Holborn christened High," etc.

Then there is that broadest of broad, but morally inoffensive stories,
in which the laundress, in trying to cure a smoking chimney, blows
herself to death, having merely power to speak a few words to
Betty,--who gaspingly explains to her mistress "The Report from Below":--

"Well, Ma'am, you won't believe it,
But it's gospel fact and true,
But these words is all she whispered,--
_'Why, where is the powder blew?_'"

For other examples refer to "The Ode to Malthus" and "The Blow-up,"
which pain the sides while they cheer the heart.

Again, we find the grotesque through Hood's writings in union with
the fantastic and the fanciful. His fertility in the most unexpected
analogies becomes to the reader of his works a matte