his Whims and Oddities; and, in irregular verse, satirized the would-be great men of the time, and the eccentric legislation they proposed in Parliament.  These short poems are full of puns and happy jeux de mots, and had a decided effect in frustrating the foolish plans.  After this he published National Tales, in the same comic vein; but also produced his exquisite serious pieces, The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies, Hero and Leander, and others, all of which are striking and tasteful.  In 1838 he commenced The Comic Annual, which appeared for several years, brimful of mirth and fun.  He was editor of various magazines,—­The New Monthly, and Hood’s Magazine.  For Punch he wrote The Song of the Shirt, and The Bridge of Sighs.  No one can compute the good done by both; the hearts touched; the pockets opened.  The sewing women were better paid, more cared for, elevated in the social scale; and many of them saved from that fate which is so touchingly chronicled in The Bridge of Sighs.  Hood was a true poet and a great poet. Miss Kilmansegg and her Precious Leg is satire, story, epic, comedy, in one.

If he owed to Smollett’s Humphrey Clinker the form of his Up the Rhine, he has equalled Smollett in the narrative, in the variety of character, and in the admirable cacography of Martha Penny.  His caricatures fasten facts in the memory, and every tourist up the Rhine recognizes Hood’s personages wherever he lands.

After a life of ill-health and pecuniary struggle, Hood died, greatly lamented, on the 3d of May, 1845, and left no successor to wield his subtle pen.

THOMAS DE QUINCEY (1785-1859).—­This singular author, and very learned and original thinker, owes much of his reputation to the evil habit of opium-eating, which affected his personal life and authorship.  His most popular work is The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, which interests the reader by its curious pictures of the abnormal conditions in which he lived and wrote.  He abandoned this noxious practice in the year 1820.  He produced much which he did not publish; and his writings all contain a suggestion of strength and scholarship, a surplus beyond what he has given to the world.  There are numerous essays and narratives, among which his paper entitled Murder considered as One of the Fine Arts is especially notable.  His prose is considered a model of good English.

The death of Dickens and Thackeray left England without a novelist of equal fame and power, but with a host of scholarly and respectable pens, whose productions delight the popular taste, and who are still in the tide of busy authorship.

Our purpose is already accomplished, and we might rest without the proceeding beyond the middle of the century; but it will be proper to make brief mention of those, some of whom have already departed, but many of whom still remain, and are producing new works, who best illustrate the historical value and teachings of English literature, and whose writings will be read in the future for their delineations of the habits and conditions of the present period.