From the Dublin University Magazine.

THE LATE THOMAS HOOD.

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"Poor Tom Hood!" For Hood was a universal favorite-a pet of the public. Men would as little have thought of sternly WE rejoice that Hood's verses have been taking Hood to task, as of rebuking the collected. The collection, the short pre- quick-glancing fancies of a bright-eyed face to these volumes informs us, "is made thoughtful child. He was one of those in fulfilment of his own desire; it was whom most of us who had never beheld his among his last instructions to those who face in the flesh, knew, by a sort of indiwere dearest to him." The injunction only rect intellectual intimacy better than comshowed a just sense of the rights of his mon acquaintanceship. How often he came own remarkable and original genius. There to us a pleasant thought, when such is a phrase which seems to have been blown are wanted!" How often did the careupon by Cockneysim, till one is nervous wrinkled forehead smooth under the passabout using it, and yet, if Cockneyism would ing influence of one of his incomparable have let it alone, it is a pretty and expressive fragments of humor, caught in the Poet's phrase enough; Hood's verses are "refresh- Corner of some country newspaper, where ing"-specially refreshing to us profession- the smiling little violet modestly blossomed al employers of poetical common-place-re- in the midst of thorny brakes-of pastorals freshing as rural breezes to one long in populous city pent," who draws his easy and invigorated breath upon the slope of some heaven-kissing Wicklow hill after days and weeks of Sackville-street and Merrion-square in July.

(not of Theocritus, but) of Doctor MacHale, of speeches of Mr. Joseph Hume, and dissertations on railroads, and infallible receipts for the bite of a mad dog! And there is something peculiarly pathetic about the death of a humorist-of a humorWe wish we had a half-sovereign (for ist true-hearted and blameless as Hood was. our desires are moderate and reasonable) Shakspeare has embodied and immortalized for every single individual who, opening the feelings of us all in the Yorick scene these two neat little volumes, will give in Hamlet. Death-grim and ghastly the first utterance to his thoughts in the Death-what business had the old scythesthree simple but weighty monosyllables- man, his crapes and his cross-bones-with VOL. III.-No. III.

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our Tom Hood? with this "fellow of infi- Humor is not the gem so much as the flownite jest and most excellent fancy "-his er, the creature of the rain and the beam gibes, his gambols, and his flashes of-of tears and smiles. Wit is clear and merriment ?" Could he not have been well cold as the starry midnight. Humor tender content-we should not have had a word and vague as the moon-lit eve. Wit is of against it to take to himself a score of the head; Humor of the heart; angels and political economists, and leave us our own devils may be witty-man alone has humor. Tom Hood? Were there not critics week- With such spirits as Hood and Charles ly, monthly, quarterly? Had he no nice Lamb this was eminently manifested. They pickings in the Corn Law League? No were both men of profound feeling, men of Irish repealers under whose loss the world a large soul for fellow-man, sighing amid would have been meekly resigned? Were all their smiles, and flowing deep, with all there no profoundly learned Doctors of the surface-sparkle of their playfulness. Laws and of Divinity-no discoverers of That keen susceptibility of the ludicrous, "a new system of the philosophy of the and prompt inventiveness in all the ways human mind"-no grave statisticians pow- of exciting it, were in them compatible with erful in population and poor laws? or if he a very learned spirit of human dealings, must have his "men of wit about town," and much of the pitying temper that knowwas Brookes's, indeed, unpeopled of its ledge works in worthy hearts. We do not Whigs, or the Tories of the Carlton all very well know the precise idiosyncrasy of scattered and Peeled? Alas! that that brain old Democritus; his hard materialist phi-the exquisitely sensitive instrument of losophy does not speak too well for it; but delicate thought-should now be formless he might have been, for all his perennial dust! that tricksy spirit now naked and grin, as tender-souled a being as ever was unbodied-no arch and flexible lip to quiver his weeping brother sage of Ephesus. with the coming jest, no eye to twinkle Were we (to the unspeakable sorrow of with the inward joy of drollest fancies! universal literature) far gone in a deep But Hood was much more than a humor-ditch, and both by some metempsychosis ist, he was (and his parting request shows contrived in this nineteenth century, to pass that, with all his unaffected modesty he by that way, we should back Heraclitus to knew it) a true and genuine poet. There be the first to desert us; he would have too have been spirits of loftier flight and more much to do wiping his eyes at our distressenduring wing, natives of the upper ele- es, poor fellow! to be able to turn his hands ment, whose home was the empyrean; with to any other use. The world, which in these we dare not rank him; but the eagle matters within its own coarse daily ken, is is not solitary in the heavens; and if he seldom wholly wrong, has always felt it; it alone, undazzled by the beam of mid-day, distrusts ostentatious mourners; it suspects can dare to give the great Sun himself where tears are so promptly shed that the glance for glance, there are other winged stream readily overflows only because the creatures who are satisfied to receive his channel is shallow; while it is unfortunateradiance upon their bright and glossy plu- ly but too willing to sympathize with joyous bonhommie, and to give to careless good humor, at the same time, of which we now fellowship all the honors of the heart. The speak is much more than this; so much more, indeed, that your humorist is frequently the least pliable of good fellows; often a proverbial "oddity "a solitary selfreflective observer-unpopular with the mass whom he makes uncomfortable-dear and precious to the few.

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a Whose dripping wings flash sun-light as they

veer,"

whose nests are not in the pathless crags, but deep in the bowery woodlands, where, amid all that sea of waving trees beneath, the winged wanderer--the floating flower of the air-drops, with the unerring instinct of love, upon his own expectant home.

It is, indeed, observable that true humor is seldom, if ever, unaccompanied with a deep sense and faculty of the pathetic. This is one of its ordinary practical distinctions from wit. Wit is, in its essence, feelingless; the pure, intellectual concretion; the icy crystal that glitters and chills.

Man alone laughs; for he alone perpetually contrasts his state with a higher ideal

the failure with the success, the accidental with the immutable, the false with the real, the is with the ought to be. The brute is too low, the angel too lofty, for that strange mingled emotion of proud sarcastic pleasure which is so appropriate to a medi

al creature, who, midway between the de- tirical fancy shoot oftentimes at random, mon and the demigod, is ever greater and to enjoy their abounding strength; Swift ever less than himself. never throws away a shot, he fits his arrow to the bow, eyes his shrinking victim, and cleaves the heart. There is a terrible seriousness in his jests. Yet, let no man think to lightly settle the question of the influence of Swift's writings. They tend to make us uncomfortable; but they tend to make us honest. It is not pleasant to gaze on the flayed Marsyas; but the beauty which is skin-deep may the less deceive us after such a sight.

It has often been said-and no man fit to read the book will ever gainsay it-that Don Quixote is a work of pathos. Insanity, indeed, can hardly ever raise feelings of the unmingled ludicrous; and still less such insanity as this! Consider it well. A noble-hearted old man, a genuine Spanish gentleman, though, it may be, in somewhat shattered circumstances; with a brain overcharged with visions of ideal perfection, eager, after his own fashion, to redress Probably in Sterne-in my Uncle Toby wrongs and restore the balance of the world, the perfection of genuine humor was sincerer than many of the lights of chival- nearly attained; and what a model is that ry he thought to imitate, ever more com- of pathetic nature! How prodigious must passionate, chaste, high-principled, reli- have been the amount of the corruption gious, gallant-it is the very miracle of the that spoiled Sterne's heart! Of all the author's genius, not so much to have writ- dread phenomena of human perversity, ten the book that of all others has made there is none more mournful than the utmankind laugh, as with such a hero to have ter separation of the moral imagination prevented us from weeping. Rabelais, in- from the practical moral belief; or, what deed, has little pathos; it is owing to this is perhaps the truer statement-the sepa very want, almost as much as to his ineffa- ration of the moral belief itself from all its ble grossness, that in spite of all that vigor designed control over the life of its posof exulting fancy, rolling and wallowing in sessor. How awful this dwelling of the its own infinite ocean of mirth, ruling with ONE man in two worlds, without one point a conqueror's caprices the whole empire of of contact between them; the world of fun, Rabelais is scarcely, except by curious imagination-of the closet and the deskstudents, read. Swift-so often compared with its glorious population of ideal excelwith Rabelais, and certainly rivalling his lences, models of pure and persuasive virfilth-does not, whatever Pope may say, sit tue, beings of thought so real and inde"in Rabelais' easy chair;" Swift's seat is structible, that, clothed in language, they no easy chair; better name it "the seat of shall live and govern mankind for countless the scornful," the restless couch of a stern ages-to dwell amid such a society, the and merciless spirit, pouring itself out in gifted freeman of such a City of God, the those undying works, not in self-indulgent inward conscience of the genius who cremerriment, but in bitter and burning con- ates and upholds them, itself audibly speaktempt. Hypocrisy of all kinds Swift had a ing in every such vision that he moulds; fearful gift to penetrate and to disgrace; and the world of practical life, mean, ambut his scorn is almost as dark and terrible bitious, sensual, selfish-unvisited by one as the hypocrisy itself; which will you have ray of the starry influences of its sister -the tears of the crocodile or the laughter sphere, lower far and more despicable than of the hyena? Accordingly, Swift is more that of the most illiterate cottager, whose of the wit than the humorist; his manufac- views are bounded by the narrow circle of ture is the work of intellect, as clear and the fields he tills;—and to think that these keen as a mathematician's; his invention is currents should twine in subtlest links, the servant and instrument of his reason; each day, each hour, nay, each minute, every thing in his boldest conceptions has yet never blend,-the lovely creations of its object, and that, for the most part, dis- fancy still rising in their bright profusion, tinct and decisive. In his very ribaldry, unsoiled and immaculate, the low and there is no "superfluity of naughtiness;" worldly calculations of the same mind, he discards as an incumbrance the loose now the schemer for advancement or gain, vesture of imaginative phraseology and de- mingling through that crowd of glorious coration-not because he could not, but thoughts unabashed and unrebuked by the would not, adopt it; the poet may come high presence in which they move! down to the arena in his singing-robes, but then the fearful facility with which the habSwift strips for the fight. Other men of sa- it is acquired; the rapidity with which the

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