Thackeray preferred Hood's passion to his fun; and Thackeray knew. Hood had an abundance of a certain sort of wit, the wit of odd analogies, of remote yet familiar resemblances, of quaint conceits and humourous and unexpected quirks. He made not epigrams but jokes, sometimes purely intellectual but nearly always with the verbal quality as well. The wonderful jingle called _Miss Kilmansegg_--hard and cold and glittering as the gold that gleams in it--abounds in capital types of both. But for an example of both here is a stanza taken at random from the _Ode to the Great Unknown_:-- 'Thou _Scottish Barmecide_, feeding the hunger Of curiosity with airy gammon; Thou mystery-monger, _Dealing it out like middle cut of salmon_ _That people buy and can't make head or tail of it_,' and so forth, and so forth: the first a specimen of oddness of analogy--the joke intellectual; the second a jest in which the intellectual quality is complicated with the verbal. Of rarer merit are that conceit of the door which was shut with such a slam 'it sounded like a wooden d---n,' and that mad description of the demented mariner,-- 'His head was _turned_, and so he _chewed_ _His pigtail_ till he died,'-- which is a pun as unexpected and imaginative as any that exists, not excepting even Lamb's renowned achievement, the immortal 'I say, Porter, is that your own Hare or a Wig?' But as a punster Hood is merely unsurpassable. The simplest and the most complex, the wildest and the most obvious, the straightest and the most perverse, all puns came alike to him. The form was his natural method of expression. His prose extravaganzas--even to the delightful _Friend in Need_--are pretty well forgotten; his one novel is very hard to read; there is far less in _Up the Rhine_ than in _Humphry Clinker_ after all; we have been spoiled for _Lycus the Centaur_ and _The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies_ by the rich and passionate verse of the Laureate, the distinction, and the measure of Arnold, the sumptuous diction and the varied and enchanting music of _Atalanta_ and _Hesperia_ and _Erechtheus_. We care little for the old- fashioned whimsicality of the _Odes_, and little for such an inimitable farrago of vulgarisms, such a _reductio ad absurdum_ of sentiment and style, as _The Lost Child_. But the best of Hood's puns are amusing after forty years. They are the classics of verbal extravagance, and they are a thousand times better known than _The Last Man_, though that is a work of genius, and almost as popular as the _Song of the Shirt_, the _Bridge of Sighs_, the _Dream of Eugene Aram_ themselves. By an odd chance, too, the rhymes in which they are set have all a tragic theme. 'Tout ce qui touche a la mort,' says Champfleury, 'est d'une gaiete folle.' Hood found out that much for himself before Champfleury had begun to write. His most riotous ballads are ballads of death and the grave. Tim Turpin does murder and is hanged