nd Oddities," and fancy that was
the joke which he contributed to the hilarity of our little table.

Where those asterisks are drawn on the page, you must know, a pause
occurred, during which I was engaged with "Hood's Own," having been
referred to the book by this life of the author which I have just been
reading. I am not going to dissert on Hood's humor; I am not a fair
judge. Have I not said elsewhere that there are one or two wonderfully
old gentlemen still alive who used to give me tips when I was a boy?
I can't be a fair critic about them. I always think of that sovereign,
that rapture of raspberry-tarts, which made my young days happy. Those
old sovereign-contributors may tell stories ever so old, and I shall
laugh; they may commit murder, and I shall believe it was justifiable
homicide. There is my friend Baggs, who goes about abusing me, and of
course our dear mutual friends tell me. Abuse away, mon bon! You were so
kind to me when I wanted kindness, that you may take the change out
of that gold now, and say I am a cannibal and negro, if you will. Ha,
Baggs! Dost thou wince as thou readest this line? Does guilty conscience
throbbing at thy breast tell thee of whom the fable is narrated? Puff
out thy wrath, and, when it has ceased to blow, my Baggs shall be to me
as the Baggs of old--the generous, the gentle, the friendly.

No, on second thoughts, I am determined I will not repeat that joke
which I heard Hood make. He says he wrote these jokes with such ease
that he sent manuscripts to the publishers faster than they could
acknowledge the receipt thereof. I won't say that they were all good
jokes, or that to read a great book full of them is a work at present
altogether jocular. Writing to a friend respecting some memoir of him
which had been published, Hood says, "You will judge how well the author
knows me, when he says my mind is rather serious than comic." At the
time when he wrote these words, he evidently undervalued his own serious
power, and thought that in punning and broad-grinning lay his chief
strength. Is not there something touching in that simplicity and
humility of faith? "To make laugh is my calling," says he; "I must jump,
I must grin, I must tumble, I must turn language head over heels, and
leap through grammar;" and he goes to his work humbly and courageously,
and what he has to do that does he with all his might, through sickness,
through sorrow, through exile, poverty, fever, depression--t