t. "Sir," said he to Boswell,
"Macbeth was an idiot; he ought to have known that every wood in
Scotland might be carried in a man's hand. The Scotch, Sir, are like the
frogs in the fable: if they had a log, they would make a king of it." We
will quote here a stanza which contains quite a serious application of
the pun; and for Hood's purpose no other word could so happily or so
pungently express his meaning. The poem is an "Address to Mrs. Fry"; and
the doctrine of it is, that it is better and wiser to teach the young
and uncorrupted that are yet outside the prison than the vicious and the
hardened who have got inside it. Thus he goes on:--

"I like your chocolate, good Mistress Fry!
I like your cookery in every way;
I like your Shrove-tide service and supply;
I like to hear your sweet Pandeans play;
I like the pity in your full-brimmed eye;
I like your carriage and your silken gray,
Your dove-like habits, and your silent preaching;
But I don't like your _Newgatory_ teaching."

Hood had not only an unexampled facility in the discovery of analogies
in a multitude of separate resemblances and relations, but he had an
equal facility of tracing with untiring persistency a single idea
through all its possible variations. Take, for example, the idea
of _gold_, in the poem of "Miss Kilmansegg," and there is hardly a
conceivable reference to _gold_ which imagination or human life can
suggest, that is not presented to us.

But this play of words and thought would, after all, be in itself little
more than serious trifling, a mere exhibition of mental and verbal
ingenuity. It would be a kind of intellectual and linguistical
dexterity, which would give the author a singularity and supremacy
above the world. It would make him the greatest of mental acrobats or
jugglers, and he might almost deserve as eminent a reputation as a
similar class of artists in bodily achievements; possibly he might claim
to be ranked with the man who cooked his dinner and ate it on a tight
rope over the Niagara Rapids, or with the man who placed a pea-nut under
a dish-cover and turned it into the American eagle. Such, however, is
not Hood's case. In all feats of mental and verbal oddity, he does,
indeed, rank the highest,--but _that_ is the very lowest of his
attainments. His pranks do verily cause us to laugh and wonder; but
there is also that ever in his pranks which causes us to think, and
even sometimes to weep. In much of his that