e of them; inasmuch, too, as he has never
once succeeded in conceiving, much less in picturing, such a train of
conflicting emotions as any one of the complications from which he starts
might be supposed to generate. To many there is nothing Greek about his
dramatic work except the absence of stage directions; and to these that
quality of 'Landorian abruptness' which seems to Mr. Sidney Colvin to
excuse so many of its shortcomings is identical with a certain sort of
what in men of lesser mould is called stupidity.

HOOD

How Much of Him?

Hood wrote much for bread, and he wrote much under pressure of all manner
of difficulties--want of health and want of money, the hardship of exile
and the bitterness of comparative failure; and not a little of what he
produced is the merest journalism, here to-day and gone to-morrow. At
his highest he is very high, but it was not given to him to enjoy the
conditions under which great work is produced: he had neither peace of
body nor health of mind, his life from first to last was a struggle with
sickness and misfortune. How is it possible to maintain an interest in
all he wrote, when two-thirds of it was produced with duns at the door
and a nurse in the other room and the printer's-devil waiting in the
hall? Of his admirable courage, his fine temper, his unfailing goodness
of heart, his incorruptible honesty, it were hard to speak too highly;
for one has but to read the story of his life to wonder that he should
have written anything at all. At his happiest he had the gift of
laughter; at his deepest and truest the more precious gift of tears. But
for him there were innumerable hours when the best he could affect was
the hireling's motley; when his fun and his pathos alike ran strained and
thin; when the unique poet and wit became a mere comic rhymester. Is it
just to his memory that it should be burdened with such a mass of what is
already antiquated? But one answer is possible. The immortal part of
Hood might be expressed into a single tiny volume.

Death's Jest-Book.

Thackeray preferred Hood's passion to his fun; and Thackeray knew. Hood
had an abundance of a certain sort of wit, the wit of odd analogies, of
remote yet familiar resemblances, of quaint conceits and humourous and
unexpected quirks. He made not epigrams but jokes, sometimes purely
intellectual but nearly always with the verbal quality as well. The
wonderful jingle called _Miss Kilmans