and you gaze, weeping, over the lifeless form of beauty that had once been innocent and blooming girlhood, but from which the spirit, early soiled and saddened, took violent flight in its despair; Crabbe would give us the record of her sins, and connect her end retributively with her conduct.  Much is in Crabbe that is repulsive and austere; but he is, notwithstanding, an earnest moral teacher and a deep tragic poet.  Let us be content with both Crabbe and Hood:  we need to look at the aspect which each of them gives us of life,—­the stern poetry of fact in Crabbe, and the lyrical poetry of feeling in Hood.  Crabbe has dealt with groups and masses; Hood has immortalized single figures, which, by their isolation and intensity, take full and forcible possession of the mind, and can never be driven out from memory.

This is a rather serious conclusion of an article on a comic genius.  As the humorist is for the most part on the play-side of literature, he should, we are apt to suppose, be entirely on the play-side of life.  He ought to laugh and grow fat,—­and he ought to have an easy-chair to laugh in.  Why should he who makes so many joyous not have the largest mess of gladness to his share?  He ought to be a favored Benjamin at the banquet of existence,—­and have, above the most favored of his brethren, a double portion.  He ought, like the wind, to be “a chartered libertine,”—­to blow where he listeth, and have no one to question whence he cometh or whither he goeth.  He ought to be the citizen of a comfortable world, and he ought to have an ungrudged freedom in it.  What debt is he should not be allowed to learn or to know,—­and the idea of a dun it should not be possible for him even to conceive.  Give him good cheer; enrich the juices of his blood, nourish generously the functions of his brain; give him delicate viands and rosy wine; give him smiles and laughter, music and flowers; let him inherit every region of creation, and be at home in air and water as well as on the earth; at last, in an Anacreontic bloom of age, let him in a song breathe away his life.  Such is the lot, we believe, that many imagine as the condition of a humorist; but which the humorist, less than most men, has ever enjoyed.  All great humorists have been men grave at heart, and often men of more than ordinary trials.  None but the superficial can fail to recognize the severity of Rabelais’s genius.  The best portion of poor Moliere’s manhood was steeped in sorrow.  The life of Swift was a hidden tragedy.  The immortal wit of “Hudibras” did not save Butler from the straits and struggles of narrow means.  Cervantes spent much of his time in a prison, and much of his grandest humor had there its birthplace.  Farquhar died young, and in terrible distress of mind at the desolate prospect that he saw before his orphan children.  How Sheridan died is familiar to us all.  The very conditions of temperament which gave Sterne genius gave him also torment.  Fielding and Smollett battled