metaphysics. But he would hardly have revealed those wonderful vistas
and perspectives of prose, which permit one to call him the first and
most powerful of the decadents: those sentences that lengthen out like
nightmare corridors, or rise higher and higher like impossible eastern
pagodas. He was a morbid fellow, and far less moral than Burns; for when
Burns confessed excess he did not defend it. But he has cast a gigantic
shadow on our literature, and was as certainly a genius as Poe. Also he
had humour, which Poe had not. And if any one still smarting from the
pinpricks of Wilde or Whistler, wants to convict them of plagiarism in
their "art for art" epigrams--he will find most of what they said said
better in _Murder as One of the Fine Arts_.

One great man remains of this elder group, who did their last work only
under Victoria; he knew most of the members of it, yet he did not belong
to it in any corporate sense. He was a poor man and an invalid, with
Scotch blood and a strong, though perhaps only inherited, quarrel with
the old Calvinism; by name Thomas Hood. Poverty and illness forced him
to the toils of an incessant jester; and the revolt against gloomy
religion made him turn his wit, whenever he could, in the direction of
a defence of happier and humaner views. In the long great roll that
includes Homer and Shakespeare, he was the last great man who really
employed the pun. His puns were not all good (nor were Shakespeare's),
but the best of them were a strong and fresh form of art. The pun is
said to be a thing of two meanings; but with Hood there were three
meanings, for there was also the abstract truth that would have been
there with no pun at all. The pun of Hood is underrated, like the "wit"
of Voltaire, by those who forget that the words of Voltaire were not
pins, but swords. In Hood at his best the verbal neatness only gives to
the satire or the scorn a ring of finality such as is given by rhyme.
For rhyme does go with reason, since the aim of both is to bring things