the past age, who were mentioned besides.  We want to see this man who has amused and charmed us; who has been our friend, and given us hours of pleasant companionship and kindly thought.  I protest when I came, in the midst of those names of people of fashion, and beaux, and demireps, upon those names “Sir J. R-yn-lds, in a domino; Mr. Cr-d-ck and Dr. G-ldsm-th, in two old English dresses,” I had, so to speak, my heart in my mouth.  What, you here, my dear Sir Joshua?  Ah, what an honor and privilege it is to see you!  This is Mr. Goldsmith?  And very much, sir, the ruff and the slashed doublet become you!  O Doctor! what a pleasure I had and have in reading the Animated Nature.  How did you learn the secret of writing the decasyllable line, and whence that sweet wailing note of tenderness that accompanies your song?  Was Beau Tibbs a real man, and will you do me the honor of allowing me to sit at your table at supper?  Don’t you think you know how he would have talked?  Would you not have liked to hear him prattle over the champagne?

Now, Hood is passed away—­passed off the earth as much as Goldsmith or Horace.  The times in which he lived, and in which very many of us lived and were young, are changing or changed.  I saw Hood once as a young man, at a dinner which seems almost as ghostly now as that masquerade at the Pantheon (1772), of which we were speaking anon.  It was at a dinner of the Literary Fund, in that vast apartment which is hung round with the portraits of very large Royal Freemasons, now unsubstantial ghosts.  There at the end of the room was Hood.  Some publishers, I think, were our companions.  I quite remember his pale face; he was thin and deaf, and very silent; he scarcely opened his lips during the dinner, and he made one pun.  Some gentleman missed his snuff-box, and Hood said,—­(the Freemasons’ Tavern was kept, you must remember, by Mr. Cuff in those days, not by its present proprietors).  Well, the box being lost, and asked for, and Cuff (remember that name) being the name of the landlord, Hood opened his silent jaws and said * * * Shall I tell you what he said?  It was not a very good pun, which the great punster then made.  Choose your favorite pun out of “Whims and Oddities,” and fancy that was the joke which he contributed to the hilarity of our little table.

Where those asterisks are drawn on the page, you must know, a pause occurred, during which I was engaged with “Hood’s Own,” having been referred to the book by this life of the author which I have just been reading.  I am not going to dissert on Hood’s humor; I am not a fair judge.  Have I not said elsewhere that there are one or two wonderfully old gentlemen still alive who used to give me tips when I was a boy?  I can’t be a fair critic about them.  I always think of that sovereign, that rapture of raspberry-tarts, which made my young days happy.  Those old sovereign-contributors may tell stories ever so old, and I shall laugh; they