a conceit or two; and these quibbles are precisely what make you quake. "Every tear hinders needle and thread," reminds us distantly of these words, occurring in the very centre of the Lear agony, "Nuncle, it is a naughty night to swim in." Hood, as well as Shakspere, knew that, to deepen the deepest wo of humanity, it is the best way to show it in the lurid light of mirth; that there is a sorrow too deep for tears, too deep for sighs, but none too deep for smiles; and that the aside and the laughter of an idiot might accompany and serve to aggravate the anguish of a god. And what tragedy in that swallow's back which "twits with the spring" this captive without crime, this suicide without intention, this martyr without the prospect of a fiery chariot! The "Bridge of Sighs" breathes a deeper breath of the same spirit. The poet is arrested by a crowd in the street: he pauses, and finds that it is a female suicide whom they have plucked dead from the waters. His heart holds its own coroner's inquest upon her, and the poem is the verdict. Such verdicts are not common in the courts of clay. It sounds like a voice from a loftier climate, like the cry which closes the Faust," She is pardoned." He knows not-what the jury will know in an hour-the cause of her crime. He wishes not to know it. He cannot determine what proportions of guilt, misery, and madness have mingled with her "mutiny." He knows only she was miserable, and she is dead-dead, and therefore away to a higher tribunal. He knows only that, whate'er her guilt, she never ceased to be a woman, to be a sister, and that death, for him hushing all questions, hiding all faults, has left on her "only the beautiful." What can he do? He forgives her in the name of humanity; every heart says amen, and his verdict, thus repeated and confirmed, may go down to eternity. Here, too, as in the " Song of the Shirt," the effect is trebled by the outward levity of the strain. Light and gay the masquerade his grieved heart puts on; but its every flower, feather, and fringe shakes in the internal anguish as in a tempest. This one stanza (coldly praised by a recent writer in the "Edinburgh Review," whose heart and intellect seem to be dead, but to us how unspeakably dear!) might perpetuate the name of Hood: "The bleak wind of March Made her tremble and shiver, But not the dark arch, Nor the black flowing river; Glad to death's mystery Anywhere, anywhere After all this, we have not the heart, as Lord Jeffrey would say, to turn to his "Whims and Oddities," &c. at large. “Here lies one who spat more blood and made more puns than any man living," was his self-proposed epitaph. Whether punning was natural to him or not, we cannot tell. We fear that with him, as with most people, it was a bad habit, cherished into a necessity and a disease. Nothing could be more easily acquired than the power of punning, if, as Dr Johnson was wont to say, one's mind were but to abandon itself to it. What poor creatures you meet continually, from whom puns come as easily as perspiration. If this was a disease in Hood, he turned it into commodity." His innumerable puns, like the minnikin multitudes of Lilliput, supplying the wants of the Man Mountain, fed, clothed, and paid his rent. This was more than Aram Dreams or Shirt Songs could have done, had he written them in scores. Some, we know, will, on the other hand, contend that his facility in punning was the outer form of his inner faculty of minute analogical perception that it was the same power at play-that the eye which, when earnestly and piercingly directed, can perceive delicate resemblances in things, has only to be opened to a see like words dancing into each other's embrace; and that this, and not the perverted taste of the age, accounts for Shakspere's puns; punning being but the game of football, by which he brought a great day's labour to a close. Be this as it may, Hood punned to live, and made many suspect that he lived to pun. This, however, was a mistake. For, apart from his serious pretensions as a poet, his puns swam in a sea of humour, farce, drollery, fun of every kind. Parody, caricature, quiz, innocent double entendre, mad exaggeration, laughter holding both his sides, sense turned awry, and downright, staring, slavering nonsense, were all to be found in his writings. Indeed, every species of wit and humour abounded, with, perhaps, two exceptions ;— the quiet, deep, ironical smile of Addison, and the misanthropic grin of Swift (forming a stronger antithesis to a laugh than the blackest of frowns) were not in Hood. Each was peculiar to the single man whose face bore it, and shall probably re-appear no more. For Addison's matchless smile we may look and long in vain; and forbid that such a horrible distortion of the "human face divine" as Swift's grin (disowned for ever by the fine, chubby, kindly family of mirth!) should be witnessed again on earth! "Alas! poor Yorick. Where now thy squibs ?-thy quiddities?—thy flashes that wont to set the table in a roar? Quite chopfallen ?" The death of a man of mirth has to us a drearier significance than that of a more sombre spirit. He passes into the other world as into a region where his heart had been translated long before. To death, as to a nobler birth, had he looked forward; and when it comes, his spirit readily and cheerfully yields to it, as one great thought in the soul submits to be displaced and darkened by a greater. To him death had lost its terrors, at the same time that life had lost its charms. But can a ghost laugh or shake his gaunt sides"-is there wit any more than wisdom in the grave?-do puns there crackle?-or do Comic Annuals there mark the still pro 66 cession of the years? The death of a humorist, as the first serious epoch in his history, is a very sad event. In Hood's case, however, we have this consolation: a mere humorist he was not, but a sincere lover of his race-a hearty friend to their freedom and welfare—a deep sympathiser with their sufferings and sorrows; and if he did not to the full consecrate his high faculties to their service, surely his circumstances as much as himself were to blame. Writing, as we are, in Dundee, where he spent some of his early days, and which never ceased to possess associations of interest to his mind; and owing, as we do to him, a debt of much pleasure, and of some feelings higher still, we cannot but take leave of his writings with every sentiment of good-humour and gratitude. THOMAS MACAULAY. To attempt a new appraisement of the intellectual character of Thomas Macaulay, we are impelled by various motives. Our former notice of him* was short, hurried, and imperfect. Since it was written, too, we have had an opportunity of seeing and hearing the man, which, as often happens in such cases, has given a more distinct and tangible shape to our views, as well as considerably modified them. Above all, the public attention has of late, owing to circumstances, been so strongly turned upon him, that we are tolerably sure of carrying it along with us in our present discussion. The two most popular of British authors are, at present, * In our first " Gallery of Portraits." Charles Dickens and Thomas Macaulay. The supremacy of the former is verily one of the signs of the times. He has no massive or profound intellect-no lore superior to a schoolboy's-no vast or creative imagination-little philosophic insight, little power of serious writing, and little sympathy with either the subtler and profounder parts of man, or with the grander features of nature; (witness his description of Niagara-he would have painted the next pump better!) and yet, through his simplicity and sincerity, his boundless bon hommie, his fantastic humour, his sympathy with every-day life, and his absolute and unique dominion over every region of the Odd, he has obtained a popularity which Shakspere nor hardly Scott in their lifetime enjoyed. He is ruling over us like a Fairy King or Prince Prettyman-strong men as well as weak yielding to the glamour of his tiny rod. Louis XIV. walked so erect, and was so perfect in the management of his person, that people mistook his very size, and it was not discovered till after his death that he was a little and not a large man. So many of the admirers of Dickens have been so dazzled by the elegance of his proportions, the fairy beauty of his features, the minute grace of his motions, and the small sweet smile which plays about his mouth, that they have imagined him to be a Scott, or even a Shakspere. To do him justice, he himself has seldom fallen into such an egregious mistake. He has seldom, if ever, sought to alter, by one octave, the note Nature gave him, and which is not that of an eagle, nor of a nightingale, nor of a lark, but of a happy, homely, gleesome "Cricket on the Hearth." Small almost as his own Tiny Tim, dressed in as dandyfied a style as his own Lord Frederick Verisoft, he is as full of the milk of human kindness as his own Brother Cheery ble; and we cannot but love the man who has first loved all human beings, who can own Newman Noggs as a brother, and can find something to respect in a Bob Sawyers, and something to pity in a Ralph Nickleby. Never was a monarch |