may commit murder, and I shall believe it was justifiable homicide.  There is my friend Baggs, who goes about abusing me, and of course our dear mutual friends tell me.  Abuse away, mon bon!  You were so kind to me when I wanted kindness, that you may take the change out of that gold now, and say I am a cannibal and negro, if you will.  Ha, Baggs!  Dost thou wince as thou readest this line?  Does guilty conscience throbbing at thy breast tell thee of whom the fable is narrated?  Puff out thy wrath, and, when it has ceased to blow, my Baggs shall be to me as the Baggs of old—­the generous, the gentle, the friendly.

No, on second thoughts, I am determined I will not repeat that joke which I heard Hood make.  He says he wrote these jokes with such ease that he sent manuscripts to the publishers faster than they could acknowledge the receipt thereof.  I won’t say that they were all good jokes, or that to read a great book full of them is a work at present altogether jocular.  Writing to a friend respecting some memoir of him which had been published, Hood says, “You will judge how well the author knows me, when he says my mind is rather serious than comic.”  At the time when he wrote these words, he evidently undervalued his own serious power, and thought that in punning and broad-grinning lay his chief strength.  Is not there something touching in that simplicity and humility of faith?  “To make laugh is my calling,” says he; “I must jump, I must grin, I must tumble, I must turn language head over heels, and leap through grammar;” and he goes to his work humbly and courageously, and what he has to do that does he with all his might, through sickness, through sorrow, through exile, poverty, fever, depression—­there he is, always ready to his work, and with a jewel of genius in his pocket!  Why, when he laid down his puns and pranks, put the motley off, and spoke out of his heart, all England and America listened with tears and wonder!  Other men have delusions of conceit, and fancy themselves greater than they are, and that the world slights them.  Have we not heard how Liston always thought he ought to play Hamlet?  Here is a man with a power to touch the heart almost unequalled, and he passes days and years in writing, “Young Ben he was a nice young man,” and so forth.  To say truth, I have been reading in a book of “Hood’s Own” until I am perfectly angry.  “You great man, you good man, you true genius and poet,” I cry out, as I turn page after page.  “Do, do, make no more of these jokes, but be yourself, and take your station.”

When Hood was on his death-bed, Sir Robert Peel, who only knew of his illness, not of his imminent danger, wrote to him a noble and touching letter, announcing that a pension was conferred on him: 

“I am more than repaid,” writes Peel, “by the personal satisfaction which I have had in doing that for which you return me warm and characteristic acknowledgments.