perpetual "cracking of jokes" (for it amounts to that more definitely
than to anything else in the domain of the Comic Muse), is a somewhat
curious problem, taken in connection with his remarkable genius and
accomplishment as a poet, and his personal character as a solid
housekeeping citizen, bent chiefly upon rearing his family in
respectability, and paying his way, or, as the Church Catechism has
neatly and unimprovably expressed it, upon "doing his duty in that
state of life to which it had pleased God to call him." His almost
constant ill-health, and, in a minor degree, the troubles which beset
him in money-matters, make the problem all the more noticeable. The
influence of Charles Lamb may have had something to do with
it,--probably not very much. Perhaps there was something in the
literary atmosphere or the national tone of the time which gave
comicality a turn of predominance after the subsiding of the great
poetic wave which filled the last years of the eighteenth and the first
quarter of the nineteenth century in our country, in Blake, Burns,
Wordsworth, Scott, Coleridge, Landor, Byron, Keats, and, supreme among
all, Shelley. Something of the same transition may be noticed in the
art of design; the multifarious illustrator in the prior generation is
Stothard,--in the later, Cruikshank. At any rate, in literature, Lamb,
Hood, and then Dickens in his earliest works, the _Sketches by Boz_ and
_Pickwick_, are uncommonly characteristic and leading minds, and bent,
with singular inveteracy, upon being "funny,"--though not funny and
nothing else at all. But we should not force this consideration too
far: Hood is a central figure in the group and the period, and the
tendency of the time may be almost as much due to him as he to the
tendency. Mainly, we have to fall back upon his own idiosyncrasy: he
was born with a boundlessly whimsical perception, which he trained into
an inimitable sleight-of-hand in the twisting of notions and of words;
circumstances favored his writing for fugitive publications and