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 seems burlesque, the most audacious, there are hidden springs of thought and tears.  Often, when most he seems as the grimed and grinning clown in a circus girded by gaping spectators, he stops to pour out satire as passionate as that of Juvenal, or morality as eloquent and as pure as that of Pascal.  And this he does without lengthening his face or taking off his paint.  Sometimes, when he most absurdly scampers in his thoughts, when he kicks up the heels of his fancy in the most outrageous fashion, he is playing as it most doth please him on our human sympathy, and the human heart becomes an instrument to his using, out of which he discourseth eloquent music according to his moods.  The interest one finds in reading Hood is often the sudden pleasure which comes upon him.  When in the midst of what appears a wilful torrent of absurdity, there bursts out a rush of earnest and instinctive nature.  We could quote enough in confirmation of this assertion to make a moderate volume.  And then the large and charitable wisdom, which in Hood’s genius makes the teacher humble in order to win the learner, we value all the more that it conceals authority in the guise of mirth, and under the coat of motley or the mantle of extravagance insinuates effective and salutary lessons.

No writer has ever so successfully as Hood combined the grotesque with the terrible.  He has the art, as no man but himself ever had, of sustaining the illusion of an awful or solemn narrative through a long poem, to be closed in a catastrophe that is at once unexpected and ludicrous.  The mystification is complete; the secret of the issue is never betrayed; suspense is maintained with Spartan reticence; curiosity is excited progressively to its utmost tension; and the surprise at the end is oftentimes electric.  “A Storm at Hastings” and “The Demon Ship” are of this class.  But sometimes the terrible so prevails as to overpower the ludicrous, or rather, it becomes more terrible by the very presence