us.  Wit of this kind treats logic with every possible outward demonstration of respect—­“keeps the word of promise to the ear, and breaks it to the sense.”  Dean Swift’s famous question to the man carrying the hare, “Pray, sir, is that your own hare or a wig?” is perfect in its way.  Here there is an absolute identity of sound with an equally absolute and therefore ludicrous disparity of meaning.  Hood abounds in examples of this sort of fun—­only that his analogies are of a more subtle and perplexing kind.  In his elegy on the old sailor he says,

  His head was turned, and so he chewed
  His pigtail till he died.

This is inimitable, like all the best of Hood’s puns.  To the ear it is perfect, but so soon as you attempt to realize it to yourself, the mind is involved in an inextricable confusion of comical non sequiturs.  And yet observe the gravity with which the forms of reason are kept up in the “and so.”  Like this is the peddler’s recommendation of his ear-trumpet: 

  I don’t pretend with horns of mine,
  Like some in the advertising line,
  To magnify sounds on such marvellous scales
  That the sounds of a cod seem as large as a whale’s.

  There was Mrs. F. so very deaf
  That she might have worn a percussion cap
  And been knocked on the head without hearing it snap. 
  Well, I sold her a horn, and the very next day
  She heard from her husband in Botany Bay.

Again, his definition of deafness: 

  Deaf as the dog’s ears in Enfield’s “Speaker.”

So, in his description of the hardships of the wild beasts in the menagerie,

  Who could not even prey
  In their own way,

and the monkey-reformer who resolved to set them all free, beginning with the lion; but

  Pug had only half unbolted Nero,
  When Nero bolted him.

In Hood there is almost always a combination of wit and fun, the wit always suggesting the remote association of ideas, and the fun jostling together the most obvious concords of sound and discords of sense.  Hood’s use of words reminds one of the kaleidoscope.  Throw them down in a heap, and they are the most confused jumble of unrelated bits; but once in the magical tube of his fancy, and, with a shake and a turn, they assume figures that have the absolute perfection of geometry.  In the droll complaint of the lover,

  Perhaps it was right to dissemble your love,
  But why did you kick me down-stairs?

the self-sparing charity of phrase that could stretch the meaning of the word “dissemble” so as to make it cover so violent a process as kicking downstairs has the true zest, the tang, of contradiction and surprise.  Hood, not content with such a play upon ideas, would bewitch the whole sentence with plays upon words also.  His fancy has the enchantment of Huon’s horn, and sets the gravest conceptions a-capering in a way that makes us laugh in spite of ourselves.