or a most emphatic and striking condensation of his thought.  “Take care of your cough,” he writes to his engraver, “lest you go to coughy-pot, as I said before; but I did not say before, that nobody is so likely as a wood-engraver to cut his stick.”  Speaking of his wife, he says,—­“To be sure, she still sticks to her old fault of going to sleep while I am dictating, till I vow to change my Womanuensis for a Manuensis.”  How keenly and well the pun serves him in burlesque, in his comic imitations of the great moralist!  He hits off with inimitable ridicule the great moralist’s dislike to Scotland.  Boswell inquired the Doctor’s opinion on illicit distillation, and how the great moralist would act in an affray between the smugglers and the excise.  “If I went by the letter of the law, I should assist the customs; but according to the spirit, I should stand by the contrabandists.”  The Doctor was always very satirical on the want of timber in the North.  “Sir,” said he to the young Lord of Icombally, who was going to join his regiment, “may Providence preserve you in battle, and especially your nether limbs!  You may grow a walking-stick here, but you must import a wooden leg.”  At Dunsinnane the old prejudice broke out.  “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.