cautious rehearsal, venture to read his comic passages aloud.  We may apply the statement, also, to the comic portions of Burns,—­and, indeed, to comic literature in general.  But who has fear to read most openly anything that Hood ever wrote? or who has a memory of wounded modesty for anything that he ever read secretly of Hood’s?  Dr. Johnson says that dirty images were as natural to Swift as sublime ones were to Milton;—­we may say that images at once lambent and laughable were those which were natural to Hood.  Even when his mirth is broadest, it is decent; and while the merest recollection of his drollery will often convulse the face in defiance of the best-bred muscles, no thought arises which the dying need regret.  Who can ever forget “The Lost Heir,” or remember it but to laugh at its rich breadth of natural, yet farcical, absurdity?  The very opening begins the giggle:—­

  “One day, as I was going by
  That part of Holborn christened High,” etc.

Then there is that broadest of broad, but morally inoffensive stories, in which the laundress, in trying to cure a smoking chimney, blows herself to death, having merely power to speak a few words to Betty,—­who gaspingly explains to her mistress “The Report from Below":—­

“Well, Ma’am, you won’t believe it, But it’s gospel fact and true, But these words is all she whispered,—­ ’Why, where is the powder blew?’”

For other examples refer to “The Ode to Malthus” and “The Blow-up,” which pain the sides while they cheer the heart.

Again, we find the grotesque through Hood’s writings in union with the fantastic and the fanciful.  His fertility in the most unexpected analogies becomes to the reader of his works a matter of continual wonder.  Strange and curious contrasts and likenesses, both mental and. verbal, which might never once occur even to a mind of more than common eccentricity and invention, seem to have been in his mind with the ordinary flow of thinking.  Plenteous and sustained, therefore, as his wit is, it never fails to startle.  We have no doubt of his endless resources, and yet each new instance becomes a new marvel.  His wit, too, is usually pregnant and vital with force and meaning.  This constitutes the singular and peculiar worth of his verbal wit in general, and of his puns in particular.  In verbal wit he has had but few equals, and in puns he has had none.  He made the pun an instrument of power; and had his wit been malignant, he could have pointed the pun to a sharpness that would have left wounds as deep as thought, and could have added a poison to it that would have kept them rankling as long as memory lasted.  The secret of his power in the pun is, that he does not rest in the analogy of sound alone, but seeks also for analogy of significance.  Generally there is a subtile coincidence between his meaning and what the sound of the pun signifies, and thus the pun becomes an amusing or illustrative image,