Produced by Jane Robins, Reiner Ruf, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) #################################################################### Transcriber’s Notes This e-text is based on ‘The Works of Thomas Hood, Vol. I,’ published in 1882. Inconsistent and uncommon spelling and hyphenation have been retained; punctuation and typographical errors have been corrected. Footnotes have been moved to the end of the sections in which their respective footnote anchors are situated. Small caps have been changed to uppercase letters. #################################################################### THE WORKS OF THOMAS HOOD. COMIC AND SERIOUS, IN PROSE AND VERSE, WITH ALL THE ORIGINAL ILLUSTRATIONS. EDITED, WITH NOTES, BY HIS SON AND DAUGHTER. VOL. I. LONDON: WARD, LOCK, & CO., WARWICK HOUSE, SALISBURY SQUARE, E.C. NEW YORK: 10 BOND STREET. PREFACE. It is now many years ago, nay, more than half a century, since Thomas Hood first began to wield the pen which was to do such good service to literature. The first scrap of his boyish versifying that can now be traced, consists of a sort of rhyming description of Dundee, after the manner of Anstey’s Bath Guide, and this is dated 1815.[1] That he was prematurely cut off by disease, accelerated by overwork while in the very prime of his mental powers, is now well known. The Works he left behind have gradually but steadily risen in popular esteem and circulation ever since his death,--in other countries besides his own, and on both sides of the Atlantic,--so that there are now few writers of this century better appreciated and becoming more widely known than Thomas Hood. I believe that one part at least of the secret of this great and increasing value for his writings, lies in the fact, that like our great Shakespeare, and even another deep writer and thinker of our own time,--Thackeray,--he wrote such pure, vigorous, intelligible English. He speaks in his works to the great mass of the people in a tongue they can understand and thoroughly feel. However far his abundant fancy and versatile humour may lead him from the track, there is no obscurity to puzzle as well as dazzle. And this almost severe plainness of expression serves him well in such poems, for instance, as the “Song of the Shirt,” where the repetition of the homeliest phrases make the intensity of the suffering stand out in a more appalling reality.