didn't say _six feet_. I said _four feet_."

In Hood we have all varieties of wit and humor, both separate and
intermingled.

As we have already observed, the grotesque is that which is most
obviously distinctive in Hood's writings. But in different degrees it
is combined with other elements, and in each combination altered and
modified. The combination which more immediately arrests attention is
that with the ludicrous. In this the genius of Hood seemed to hold a
very festival of antics, oddity, and mirth; all his faculties seemed
to rant and riot in the Saturnalia of comic incongruity. And it is
difficult to say whether, in provoking laughter, his pen or his pencil
is the more effective instrument. The mere illustrations of the
subject-matter are in themselves irresistible. They reach at once and
directly the instinctive sense of the ludicrous, and over them youth and
age cachinnate together. We have seen a little girl, eight years old,
laugh as if her heart would break, in merely looking at the pictures in
a volume of Hood. The printed page she did not read or care to read;
what the prints illustrated she knew nothing about; but her eyes danced
with joy and overran with tears of childish merriment. But in all this
luxury of fun, whether by pen or pencil, no word, idea, image, or
delineation obscures the transparency of innocence, or leaves the shadow
of a stain upon the purest mind. To be at the same time so comic and so
chaste is not only a moral beauty, but a literary wonder. It is hard to
deal with the oddities of humor, however carefully, without casual slips
that may offend or shame the reverential or the sensitive. Noble, on the
whole, as Shakspeare was, we would not in a mixed company, until after
cautious rehearsal, venture to read his comic passages aloud. We may
apply the statement, also, to the comic portions of Burns,--and,