THE POETICAL WORKS OF THOMAS HOOD.* Tins pretty volume, bound

in blue and gold, and illustrated by Dore, contains a selection of Hood's choicest poems, grave and gay. The prefatory notice bears the signature of W. M. Rossetti, which is in He& sufficient witness that the short tale is well told, —the tale of "an upright and beneficial career, bright with genius and coruscating with wit, dark with the lengthening and deepening shadow of death." Being based on the memorials pub- lished by Hood's son and daughter, there is nothing new to tell of an outwardly uneventful life, but Mr. Rossetti's keen comprehen- sion enables him to smelt the essential facts together into a life- like whole.

The strange blending of mirth and melancholy in Hood's nature made it seem like one of those Eastern stuffs of black shot with gold of which it is impossible to say which of the two predomi- nates. To the man who wrote the "Bridge of Sighs," the "Haunted House," and the "Dream of Eugene Aram" must be assigned a high place among the masters of all that is pathetic in art or ghastly in the realms of imagination. But to the author of Hood's Comic Annual, from which various selections are here made by Mr. Rossetti, is also owing a rich store of delightful humour, whose perfect innocence renders it the heritage of young and old

alike. No selections can give the full flavour of those annual volumes, for they were full of such extraordinary pictures as only he who wrote the letter-press could by any possibility have drawn, and which have now acquired an additional flavour of absurdity by reason of the obsolete costumes. His fat boys bursting through their jackets are all the more ridiculous by reason of the great round frills with which all our fathers and uncles were adorned. The Buoy at the Nore, bobbing up and down amidst a waste of waters, is frilled up to his throat ; and the two little wrestlers who are sparring at each other with plump doubled-up fists would obviously wear frills also, had they not stripped for combat down to their infant drawers and absurd little leather boots. So of the old women and the young swells, and the elderly gentlemen in swallow-tailed coats. Father Time has aided the caricaturist to set forth their peculiarities, just as be has cast additional glory upon the all-familiar portraits of Mr. Pickwick, Mr. Snodgrass, and Mr. Winkle.

Mr. Rossetti has certainly chosen the comic masterpiece. Miss Kilmansegg is here, with her extraordinary wealth of adjectives ; and who but Hood, while recounting her fortunate advent, ever thought of describing the vicissitudes of infant life by saying that

"One little craft is cast away

In its very first trip in Babbicomb Bay, While another rides safe at Port Natal."

And Sally Brown is here, with Ben the Carpenter, of whom, when he tried

"To sing All's well,' He could not, though he tried; His head was turned, and so he chew'd His pig-tail till he died."

But some of Hood's best lines are not in his beat pieces, and could not, therefore, be imported into a volume of selections. For in- stance, in the the Comic Annual for 1833, in the ballad of "The Ghost," the one noteworthy verse is the observation upon widow B.'s late lamented husband :— " In Middle Row, some years ago, There lived one Mr. Brown; And many folks considered him The stoutest man in town."

What a sober, yet well-grounded appreciation had these people in the excellence of their own judgment ! And one of Hood's best hits is a mere sketch ; Neptune with a long white beard, his head crowned with aquatic plants, and under his bare arm a huge • The Poetical 1Forks of Thomas Hood, Edited, with a Critical Memoir, by William Michael Rossetti. London : Moson. vase whence streams a cataract of water, inquiring politely of an old woman with a mob cap and a warming pan, "(Jan I have at bed here ?"

Then there is that queer ditty, half fun and wholly bitterness, entitled, "A Lay of Real Life," beginning,

"Who ruined me ere I was born, Sold every acre, grass or corn, And left the next heir all forlorn ?

My grandfather."

"Who got in scrapes, an endless score, And always laid them at my door, Till many a bitter bang I bore ?

My cousin."

And so on through a triste catologue. In "Number One,", the silhouette of the forlorn spinster,

"A sitting at the window-pane, Without a bit of blind,"

recurs to our memory with peculiar force. Her corkscrew curls have the twisting of nigh forty years ago ; the special twist which has well-nigh died out. Just as, in France, the emigres came back after Waterloo in pigtails and powder, so there are always some linger- ing imigres from the olden time ; if they want to know how they look, let them consult a chance volume of Hood's comic annual E Lastly we may refer to the vignette in which a pig, lightly balanced in an upright sitting posture upon the digestive organs of an unhappy dreamer, asks this portentous question, "Why did you sup upon Pork ? "

We have turned over these- old volumes in order to explain to ourselves and others the wonderful fascination which Hood's burles- que humour exercised over the generation of our childhood. Re- ferring from them to Mr. Rossetti's volume of selections we are strongly impressed with the idea that it is by his serious poetry that he will chiefly live. His fun is delightful, but it is to a certain extent local and temporary. It lives in his pencil as much as in his pen. It is not interwoven with the very texture of his graver thought, like Thackeray's satire or Dickens's grand grotesque. It is not Gothic, blossoming out from the stone. There is no fun in "Eugene Aram," none in the "Bridge of Sighs," none in the "Song of the Shirt." Had he been known only by these great poems, no mortal would ever have guessed that. he possessed that vein of rollicking brightness. And so it is that we turn to his graver tenderer muse to show us the immortal Thomas Hood. He has written verses which will linger in the nation's ear when greater poems will be read and quoted, but never sung. The pages open by chance at that exquisite " Death-

Bed :"—

" Our very hopes belied our fears, Our fears our hopes belied, We thought her dying when she slept, And sleeping when she died."

Or at Ruth, who

"Stood among the stooks,

Praising God with sweetest looks."

Counting up the sum of all, we are ready to endorse Mr. Rossetti's verdict that he was "the finest English poet between the genera- tion of Shelley and the generation of Tennyson."