ore Champfleury had
begun to write. His most riotous ballads are ballads of death and the
grave. Tim Turpin does murder and is hanged

'On Horsham drop, and none can say
He took a drop too much';

Ben Battle entwines a rope about his melancholy neck, and for the second
time in life _enlists him in the line_; Young Ben expires of grief for
the falsehood of Sally Brown: Lieutenant Luff drinks himself into his
grave; John Day the amorous coachman,

'With back too broad to be conceived
By any narrow mind,'

pines to nothingness, and is found heels uppermost in his cruel
mistress's water-butt. To Hood, with his grim imagination and his
strange fantastic humour, death was meat and drink. It is as though he
saw so much of the 'execrable Shape' that at last the pair grew friends,
and grinned whenever they foregathered even in thought.

His Immortal Part.

Was Thackeray right, then, in resenting the waste of Hood's genius upon
mere comicalities? I think he was; but only to a certain point. Hood
was a true poet: but it was not until after years of proof and endeavour
that he discovered the use to which his powers could best be put and the
material on which they could best be employed. He worked hard and with
but partial success at poetry all his life long. He passed his life in
punning and making comic assaults on the Queen's English; but he was
author all the while of _The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies_, the _Ode to
Melancholy_, _Hero and Leander_, _Lycus the Centaur_, and a score and
more of lovable and moving ballads; and he had won himself a name with
two such capital examples of melodrama as _The Last Man_ (1826) and _The
Dream of Eugene Aram_ (1829). But as a poet he profited little. The
public preferred him as a buffoon; and not until his last years (and then
anonymously) was he able to utter his highest word. All was made ready
against his coming--the age, the subject, the public mind, the public
capacity of emotion; and in _The Song of the Shirt_ he approved himself a
great singer. In the days of _Lycus the Centaur_ and the _Midsummer
Fairies_ he could no more have written it than the public could have
heeded had he written. But times were changed--Dickens had come, and the
humanitarian epoch--and the great song went like fire. So, a year or two
after, did _The Bridge of Sighs_. That, says Thackeray, 'was his
Corunna, his Heights of Abraham--sickly, weak, wounded, he fell in