s large as a whale's.

There was Mrs. F. so very deaf
That she might have worn a percussion cap
And been knocked on the head without hearing it snap.
Well, I sold her a horn, and the very next day
She heard from her husband in Botany Bay.

Again, his definition of deafness:

Deaf as the dog's ears in Enfield's "Speaker."

So, in his description of the hardships of the wild beasts in the
menagerie,

Who could not even prey
In their own way,

and the monkey-reformer who resolved to set them all free, beginning
with the lion; but

Pug had only half unbolted Nero,
When Nero bolted him.

In Hood there is almost always a combination of wit and fun, the wit
always suggesting the remote association of ideas, and the fun jostling
together the most obvious concords of sound and discords of sense.
Hood's use of words reminds one of the kaleidoscope. Throw them down in
a heap, and they are the most confused jumble of unrelated bits; but
once in the magical tube of his fancy, and, with a shake and a turn,
they assume figures that have the absolute perfection of geometry. In
the droll complaint of the lover,

Perhaps it was right to dissemble your love,
But why did you kick me down-stairs?

the self-sparing charity of phrase that could stretch the meaning of the
word "dissemble" so as to make it cover so violent a process as kicking
downstairs has the true zest, the tang, of contradiction and surprise.
Hood, not content with such a play upon ideas, would bewitch the whole
sentence with plays upon words also. His fancy has the enchantment of
Huon's horn, and sets the gravest conceptions a-capering in a way that
makes us laugh in spite of ourselves.

Andrew Marvell's satire upon the Dutch is a capital instance of wit as
distinguished from fun. It rather exercises than tickles the mind, so
full is it of quaint fancy:

Holland, that scarce deserves the name of land,
As but the offscouring of the British sand,
And so much earth as was contributed
By English pilots when they heaved the lead,
Or what by ocean's slow alluvium fell
Of shipwrecked cockle and the muscle-shell;
This indigestful vomit of the sea
Fell to the Dutch by just propriety.

Glad, then, as miners who have found the ore
They, with mad labor, fished their land to shore,
And dived as desperately for each piece
Of earth as if 't had been of ambergreese
Collecting anxiously small loads of clay,
Less t