novelty in its combinations, we have not yet come to the essential Hood. In 'The Haunted House' it is often thought that we find him. Scarcely, though the quality by which he resembles Hawthorne, the sense of a mystery enveloping real and mouldering things, is there, and traverses a poem too long and too detailed to maintain its suspense throughout. Not even Poe has experimented so carefully and deliberately in this particular kind of evil glamour. In 'The Elm-Tree' we have the Hawthorne feeling again, and again the idea is hardly serious enough to justify so many stanzas. In 'The Dream of Eugene Aram' Hood achieves. Here what has been fanciful in the rendering of sensation becomes a dreadful and penetrating humanity, and we realise that Hood is, above all, an artist of the human heart.

Hood's verse is the broken-hearted jesting of a sick buffoon, to whom suffering has brought pity and taught the cruel humour of things. It is natural to him to be sentimental and fantastic at once, a tender-hearted Fantasio who has 'passed the equinoctial of Queubus with the Vapians,' 'a fag for all the town,' as he calls himself:

'I am a shuttle-cock myself,

The world knocks to and fro.'

Once or twice he arraigns the justice of things on his own behalf, as when he says, in a rare self-confession:

'But oh! as many and such tears are ours
As only should be shed for guilt and shame.'

With him there is

'Death, death, and nothing but death,
In every sight and sound,'

till his aspect becomes at moments almost that of a death's head grinning in a mirror. He mocks, as he laments, without bitterness; and can write a gay elegy:

'What can the old man do but die?'

but there is always a consciousness of how near death is.

The thought of it is never out of his head; and while in 'Hero and Leander' he sets it to a pageant of watery beauty, and in 'The Bridge of Sighs' makes a great tune out of it, and sets his verse shivering with the horror of it in 'Eugene Aram,' he also plays with it, and will have his fooling. It is dreadful to recollect how much of what is mere trivial fun in his copious and miscellaneous work (making a collected edition a kind of posthumous cruelty) was written by a man joking for money, lest he should 'die beyond his means.' That recollection takes out some of the pleasure with which we can still read the best of the comic poems. 'That half Hogarth,' Lamb called him, praising' a prime genius and hearty fellow'; but does the epithet quite characterise him? The best pieces are not always the most famous, as for instance the mainly meaningless Miss Kilmansegg,' which has hardly more than a juggler's agility in its tap-tap of a ceaseless ball rising and falling like a shuttle-cock. A little space fitted best for the due exercise of that riotous fun which would come whenever Hood called it, but not always go when the somersaults were over; a fun never other than sharp, salt, alert, but most significant, not in any meaning at the back of it, but in the sting of its rhymes and the crackle of its puns, perhaps the most accurate in the language.

'Eugene Aram' is a masterpiece of horror, and in it Hood perfects that style which has an emphasis far beyond epigram, because it comes straight from the heart and carries with it an awful inwardness of thought. When, here, he says:

'A dozen times I groaned; the dead

Had never groaned but twice,'

there is the same quality and calibre as in the moral reflection in 'The Song of the Shirt':

'O God, that bread should be so dear

And flesh and blood so cheap!'

Since the 'Ancient Mariner' there has been no such spiritual fear in our poetry, and the nightmare comes to us as if out of

our own bed, the sensations translate themselves into our own nerves. The words reach us like a whisper, from which it is impossible to escape. That imagination, which had hardly shown itself among the thick flocks of fancy in all the other poems, is here, naked, deadly, and beautiful.

In 'The Song of the Shirt' this drama passes into an indignant song, not less human, and coming with its splendid lyric quality to prove that a conviction, a moral lesson if you will, can turn red-hot and be forged into a poem. Here, too, is 'modernity,' but of a kind that can be contemporary with every age. Only one more human thing exists in the work of Hood, and that is one of the greatest English poems of its kind, 'The Bridge of Sighs.' It has lost nothing by becoming the property of all the world, like the last lines of the Emperor Hadrian, in which there is not more final a moral, or some of those outcries and lamentations in the Old Testament, to which it seems almost to go back and snatch a form. The fragility of the metre, its swiftness, as of running water, the piercing daintiness of the words, which state and denounce in a song, go to make a poem which is like music and like a cry, and means something terribly close and accusing. A stone is flung angrily and straight into the air, and may strike the canopy before it falls back on the earth. That saying of

'Anywhere, anywhere
Out of the world!'

has passed through interpreters, and helped to make a rare corner of modern literature; and the pity of the whole thing is like that of a great line of Dante, not less universal.

THE MINORS

'He and his muse might be minors.' - Johnson's Dictionary.

IN order that I may omit no one coming within the limits of my list who has written anything in verse that is, or was

once thought, tolerable, I have strung together, a little indiscriminately, the names which follow. I hope that the word or two in which I have tried to characterise them may be enough to at least suggest the view I take of their claim to be mentioned. They are given in chronological order.

The earliest I find is ELIZABETH CARTER (1717-1806), who, besides writing very indifferent verses, was a good scholar in many languages, and translated Epictetus. Next comes the REV. JOHN SKINNER (1721-1807), who wrote the rollicking song of 'Tullochgorum,' which Byron admired for the swing of it. CHARLES ANSTEY (1724-1805), a good Latin scholar, who wrote a clever poem on a decayed Macaroni, and the more famous 'New Bath Guide' (with its 'watered tabbies, flowered brocades'); he wrote with facility, which is perhaps what his son meant by 'a sudden and peculiar operation of the mind (not easily described) resolving itself, as it were, incontinently into verse.' EDWARD JERNINGHAM (1727-1812), who Miss Burney tells us was 'all daintification in manner, speech, and dress,' wrote worthless verses during the whole of a long life. JANE ELLIOTT (1727-1805) made a lasting fame by writing one ballad, 'The Flowers of the Forest.' JOHN HOOLE (1727-1803) was a translator, in the manner of Pope, of Tasso, Metastasio, and Ariosto. THOMAS PERCY (17291811), famous for his 'Reliques,' may be forgiven for intruding some of his own unimportant verse among so many authentic treasures. RICHARD CUMBERLAND (1732–1811), an indifferent dramatist, the writer of a rather ghastly epic on 'Calvary,' in one of his odes, dedicated to Romney, anticipates the later worship of 'Grasmere's calm retreat,' 'stately Windermere,' and 'Keswick's sweet fantastic vale.' ROBERT JEPHSON (1736-1803), a writer of tragic and comic plays, was praised by Walpole, whose 'Castle of Otranto' he adapted for the stage. MRS. PIOZZI (1741-1821), Johnson's friend, wrote verse in one century and lived nearly twenty years into the next. HANNAH COWLEY (1743-1809) was the Anna

Matilda of the two cooing partners in the Della Cruscan couple (the other was Robert Merry, an even worse versifier); but in spite of her abandonment to the sickening and platonic love-duet between two poetasters, she has left some comedies, among them 'The Belle's Stratagem,' which are still sometimes seen on the stage. CHARLES MORRIS (1745-1838), 'the inimitable Captain Morris,' was punch-maker and bard of the Beefsteak Society, and he wrote songs savoured to its table. HENRY JAMES PYE (1745-1813), the 'Poetical Pye,' meatless and savourless, was poet laureate from 1790 to 1833. ANNA SEWARD (1747-1809), the Swan of Lichfield, who while living had 'thrown an unfettered hand,' she tells us, 'over the lyre of Horace' (unfettered, that is, by too close an acquaintance with the text in Latin), left a cruel legacy to Sir Walter Scott, - her poems to publish. CHARLOTTE SMITH (1749-1806), who translated 'Manon Lescaut,' and was a guest of Hayley at Eartham, wrote better verse than her host's, genuine in its observation of nature, and not without a small personal skill and taste. NEIL DOUGLAS (1750-1823), 'minister of the Word of God,' wrote a pious play, in tedious ten-syllable couplets, 'the Royal Penitent, or True Repentance Exemplified by David, King of Israel,' in which he is concerned partly in giving 'Serious Hints at this Awful Crisis' of 'David's unhappy affair with Bathsheba.' LADY ANNE BERNARD (1750-1825) wrote, at the age of twenty-one, the popular and still remembered 'Auld Robin Gray.' RICHARD BRINSLEY SHERIDAN (1751-1816) jingled once or twice in rhyme to put a moment's pause to his prose liveliness. WILLIAM ROSCOE (1753-1831), the first English student of the Renaissance, wrote indifferent verses about slavery when he was young, and for children when he was old. GEORGE ELLIS (1753-1815), the writer of 'Poetical Tales by Sir Gregory Gander,' light and lively society verses, was one of the collaborators of Canning and Frere in the 'Anti-Jacobin.' THOMAS JAMES MATHIAS (1754-1835), a somewhat clumsy and spiteful satir