“Brother Ichabod Muzzle,” calmly answered Dizzle.

Fizzle leaped out, hurried to his home, and was soon seen whipping his unfortunate horse in a certain direction.  He was on his way to the residence of the Reverend Ichabod Muzzle, who lived five or six miles off.  He reached the home of the Reverend Ichabod.  The friends greeted each other.  Fizzle, though pregnant with indignation, assumed the benignant air of the Beloved Disciple.  Muzzle looked Platonically the incarnate idea of the Christian Parson.

“Fine day,” said Fizzle.

“Lovely,” said Muzzle.

“Glorious view from this window,” observed Fizzle.

“Superb,” replied Muzzle.

“The beauties of Nature are calming and consolatory,” murmured Fizzle.

“And so are the doctrines of grace,” whispered Muzzle.

Fizzle could hold out no longer.  Still he tried to look the placid, and to speak with meekness.

“Pray, how did it come, Brother Muzzle,” said Fizzle, “that you reported I declared in my farewell-sermon it was as easy to preach to the dead buried six feet under the earth as to the people of Drowsytown?”

“You have been grossly misinformed, my brother,” replied Muzzle.  “I didn’t say six feet.  I said four feet.”

In Hood we have all varieties of wit and humor, both separate and intermingled.

As we have already observed, the grotesque is that which is most obviously distinctive in Hood’s writings.  But in different degrees it is combined with other elements, and in each combination altered and modified.  The combination which more immediately arrests attention is that with the ludicrous.  In this the genius of Hood seemed to hold a very festival of antics, oddity, and mirth; all his faculties seemed to rant and riot in the Saturnalia of comic incongruity.  And it is difficult to say whether, in provoking laughter, his pen or his pencil is the more effective instrument.  The mere illustrations of the subject-matter are in themselves irresistible.  They reach at once and directly the instinctive sense of the ludicrous, and over them youth and age cachinnate together.  We have seen a little girl, eight years old, laugh as if her heart would break, in merely looking at the pictures in a volume of Hood.  The printed page she did not read or care to read; what the prints illustrated she knew nothing about; but her eyes danced with joy and overran with tears of childish merriment.  But in all this luxury of fun, whether by pen or pencil, no word, idea, image, or delineation obscures the transparency of innocence, or leaves the shadow of a stain upon the purest mind.  To be at the same time so comic and so chaste is not only a moral beauty, but a literary wonder.  It is hard to deal with the oddities of humor, however carefully, without casual slips that may offend or shame the reverential or the sensitive.  Noble, on the whole, as Shakspeare was, we would not in a mixed company, until after