We do not claim for Hood, that he was a man of profound, wide, or philosophic intellect, or that for grandeur of imagination he could be numbered among the godlike; we do not claim that he opened up the deeps of passion, or brought down transcendent truths from the higher spheres of mind; we claim for him no praise for science or for scholarship:  we merely maintain, that he was a man of rare humanity, of close, subtile, and various observation, of good sense and common sense, of intuitive insight into character, of catholic sympathy with his kind that towards the lowest was the most loving, of extraordinary social and miscellaneous knowledge that was always at his command, a thinker to the fullest measure of his needs, and, as humorist and poet, an originality and a novelty in the world of genius.  This is our general estimate of Hood.  What further we have to say shall be in accordance with it; and such has been the impressive influence of Hood’s writings upon us, that our thoughts, whether we will or not, are more intent on their serious than on their comic import.

In all the writings of Hood that are not absolutely serious the grotesque is a present and pervading element.  Often it shows itself, as if from an irresistible instinct of fantastic extravagance, in the wild and reckless sport of oddity.  Combinations, mental, verbal, and pictorial, to ordinary mortals the strangest and the most remote, were to Hood innate and spontaneous.  They came not from the outward,—­they were born of the inward.  They were purely subjective, the sportive pranks of Hood’s own me, when that me was in its queerest moods.  How naturally the impossible or the absurd took the semblance of consistency in the mental associations of Hood, we observe even in his private correspondence.  “Jane,” (Mrs. Hood,) he writes, “is now drinking porter,--at which I look half savage.....I must even sip, when I long to swig.  I shall turn a fish soon, and have the pleasure of angling for myself.”  This, if without intention, would be a blunder or a bull.  If it were written unwittingly, the result would be simply ludicrous, and consign it to the category of humor; but knowingly written, as we are aware it was, we must ascribe it to the category of wit.

This presence or absence of intention often decides whether a saying or an image is within the sphere of humor or of wit.  But wit and humor constantly run into each other; and though the absence of intention at once shows that a ludicrous surprise belongs to the humorous, the presence of it will not so clearly define it as belonging to the witty.  Nor will laughter quite settle this question; for there is wit which makes us laugh, and there is humor which does not.  On the whole, it is as to what is purely wit that we are ever the most at fault.  Certain phases of humor we cannot mistake,—­especially those which are broadly comic or farcical.  But sometimes we meet with incidents or scenes which have more in them of the pathetic than the comic, that we must still rank with the humorous.  Here is a case in point.  A time was when it was a penal offence in Ireland for a priest to say Mass, and under particular circumstances a capital felony.  A priest was malignantly prosecuted; but the judge, being humane, and better than the law, determined to confound the informer.