egg_--hard and cold and glittering
as the gold that gleams in it--abounds in capital types of both. But for
an example of both here is a stanza taken at random from the _Ode to the
Great Unknown_:--

'Thou _Scottish Barmecide_, feeding the hunger
Of curiosity with airy gammon;
Thou mystery-monger,
_Dealing it out like middle cut of salmon_
_That people buy and can't make head or tail of it_,'

and so forth, and so forth: the first a specimen of oddness of
analogy--the joke intellectual; the second a jest in which the
intellectual quality is complicated with the verbal. Of rarer merit are
that conceit of the door which was shut with such a slam 'it sounded like
a wooden d---n,' and that mad description of the demented mariner,--

'His head was _turned_, and so he _chewed_
_His pigtail_ till he died,'--

which is a pun as unexpected and imaginative as any that exists, not
excepting even Lamb's renowned achievement, the immortal 'I say, Porter,
is that your own Hare or a Wig?' But as a punster Hood is merely
unsurpassable. The simplest and the most complex, the wildest and the
most obvious, the straightest and the most perverse, all puns came alike
to him. The form was his natural method of expression. His prose
extravaganzas--even to the delightful _Friend in Need_--are pretty well
forgotten; his one novel is very hard to read; there is far less in _Up
the Rhine_ than in _Humphry Clinker_ after all; we have been spoiled for
_Lycus the Centaur_ and _The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies_ by the rich
and passionate verse of the Laureate, the distinction, and the measure of
Arnold, the sumptuous diction and the varied and enchanting music of
_Atalanta_ and _Hesperia_ and _Erechtheus_. We care little for the old-
fashioned whimsicality of the _Odes_, and little for such an inimitable
farrago of vulgarisms, such a _reductio ad absurdum_ of sentiment and
style, as _The Lost Child_. But the best of Hood's puns are amusing
after forty years. They are the classics of verbal extravagance, and
they are a thousand times better known than _The Last Man_, though that
is a work of genius, and almost as popular as the _Song of the Shirt_,
the _Bridge of Sighs_, the _Dream of Eugene Aram_ themselves. By an odd
chance, too, the rhymes in which they are set have all a tragic theme.
'Tout ce qui touche a la mort,' says Champfleury, 'est d'une gaiete
folle.' Hood found out that much for himself bef