sale; the second series appeared in 1827. Next came two volumes of
_National Tales_, somewhat after the manner of Boccaccio (but how far
different from his spirit may easily be surmised), which are now little
known. The volume containing the _Plea of the Midsummer Fairies, Hero
and Leander_, and some other of Hood's most finished and noticeable
poems, came out in 1827. _The Midsummer Fairies_ itself was one of the
authors own favorite works, and certainly deserved to be so, as far as
dainty elegance of motive and of execution is concerned: but the
conception was a little too ingeniously remote for the public to ratify
the author's predilection. The _Hero and Leander_ will be at once
recognized as modelled on the style of Elizabethan narrative poems:
indeed Marlow treated the very same subject, and his poem, left
uncompleted, was finished by Chapman. Hood's is a most astonishing
example of revivalist poetry: it is reproductive and spontaneous at the
same time. It resembles its models closely, not
servilely--significantly, not mechanically; and has the great merit of
resembling them with comparative moderation. Elizabethan here both in
spirit and in letter, Hood is nevertheless a little less extreme than
his prototypes. Where they loaded, he does not find it needful to
overload, which is the ready and almost the inevitable resource of
revivalists, all but the fewest: on the contrary, he alleviates a
little,--but only a little.

In 1829 appeared the most famous of all his poems of a narrative
character--_The Dream of Eugene Aram_; it was published in the _Gem_,
an annual which the poet was then editing. Besides this amount of
literary activity, Hood continued writing in periodicals, sometimes
under the signature of "Theodore M."

His excessive and immeasurable addiction to rollicking fun, to the