from the higher spheres of mind; we claim for him no praise for science
or for scholarship: we merely maintain, that he was a man of rare
humanity, of close, subtile, and various observation, of good sense and
common sense, of intuitive insight into character, of catholic
sympathy with his kind that towards the lowest was the most loving, of
extraordinary social and miscellaneous knowledge that was always at his
command, a thinker to the fullest measure of his needs, and, as humorist
and poet, an originality and a novelty in the world of genius. This is
our general estimate of Hood. What further we have to say shall be in
accordance with it; and such has been the impressive influence of Hood's
writings upon us, that our thoughts, whether we will or not, are more
intent on their serious than on their comic import.

In all the writings of Hood that are not absolutely serious the
_grotesque_ is a present and pervading element. Often it shows itself,
as if from an irresistible instinct of fantastic extravagance, in the
wild and reckless sport of oddity. Combinations, mental, verbal, and
pictorial, to ordinary mortals the strangest and the most remote, were
to Hood innate and spontaneous. They came not from the outward,--they
were born of the inward. They were purely subjective, the sportive
pranks of Hood's own ME, when that ME was in its queerest moods. How
naturally the impossible or the absurd took the semblance of consistency
in the mental associations of Hood, we observe even in his private
correspondence. "Jane," (Mrs. Hood,) he writes, "is now drinking
porter,--at which I look half savage.....I must even _sip_, when I long
to _swig_. I shall turn a fish soon, and have the pleasure of angling
for myself." This, if without intention, would be a blunder or a bull.
If it were written unwittingly, the result would be simply ludicrous,
and consign it to the category of humor; but knowingly written, as we
are aware it was, we must ascribe it to the category of wit.