Nothing at first appears more easy than to define and to describe the
genius of Hood. It is strictly singular, and entirely his own. That
which is his is completely his, and no man can cry halves with him, or
quarters,--hardly the smallest fraction. The estimate of his genius,
therefore, puts the critic to no trouble of elaborate discrimination or
comparison. When we think of Hood as a humorist, there is no need
that we should at the same time think of Aristophanes, or Lucian, or
Rabelais, or Swift, or Sterne, or Fielding, or Dickens, or Thackeray.
When we think of him as a poet,--except in a few of his early
compositions,--we are not driven to examine what he shares with
Chaucer, or Spenser, or Shakspeare, or Milton, or Byron, or Coleridge,
or Wordsworth, or any of the poetic masters of literature. Whether as
humorist or as poet, he is in English literature what Richter is in
German literature, "the only one." Then the characteristics of his
genius are outwardly so evident, that, in merely a glance, we fancy we
comprehend them. But the more we think, the more we reflect, the more
the difficulty opens on us of doing full justice to the mind of Hood. We
soon discover that we are dealing, not with a mere punster or jester,
not with a mere master of grimace or manufacturer of broad grins, not
with an eccentric oddity in prose or verse, not with a merry-andrew who
tickles to senseless laughter, not with a spasmodic melodramatist who
writhes in fictitious pain, but that we are dealing with a sincere,
truthful, and most gifted nature,--many-sided, many-colored, harmonious
as a whole, and having a real unity as the centre of its power. To enter
into a complete exposition of such a nature is not our purpose: we must
content ourselves with noting some of its most striking literary and
moral peculiarities. We do not claim for Hood, that he was a man of
profound, wide, or philosophic intellect, or that for grandeur of
imagination he could be numbered among the godlike; we do not claim that
he opened up the deeps of passion, or brought down transcendent truths