The Sun.
London, England, 1846-01-19 00:00:00

LITERATURE.

THE COMIC ANNUALfrr 1846. By Thomas Hood.
Poor Tom Hood's capacity— his extraordinary
capacity—for compositions of the very bighest poetical
merit, has recently been commemorated by ourselves,
in reviewing the late republication of his poems.
Now, by the reprint of his renowned " Whimsicali-
ties," at this moment lying on our escritoire, we are
enabled, with some degree of plausibility, to parti-
cularise the exuberance, the sun-heartedness, and

the irresistible breadth of his humour. Almost
everybody has revelled in the facetiousness which is
squandered with such lavish pleasantry over this
volume ; the contents alternately insinuating a moral
or pointing an eccentricity. A more genial, hearty,
or unaffected exhibition of drollery can scarcely be
discovered anywhere, and gloriously has Leech em-
bodied several of Hood's happiest creations. His il-
lustration to that illustrious conceit ending—
"No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member,
No shade, no shine, no bun erflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flow'rs, no leaves, no birds—November!"
is rich to an extreme ; the frostbitten smear of a
man's figure just discernable through the fog, his
(literally) frieze coat muffled up to his nose, the
canal water at his feet too thickly encrusted with ice
to permit of suicide—all these concomitants, produced
simply with parallel lines, bring that most miserable
and blue-devilliA month before one palpably and
visibly. Then Miss Crane—the Miss Crane—with
her button nose and her starched mittens—there,
from
her the pencil of Leech, you can almost distinguish
~ shrill, scrooping voice, as she utters the grace
before meat :—" For what we are going to receive—
elbows, elbows !—the Lord make us—backs in and
shoulders down—truly thankful— and no chattering !
Amen." Then Mr. Pryme, the famous Mr. Pryme,
with his bald head as " scarlet as a love-apple"—
there he is to the very life; and Mrs. Gardiner, too, as
she appeared when chasing away that incorrigible
pig, who derived such exquisite gratification from
wallowing in a bed of tulips ; and James Hoekin,
and Mr. Crumpler, there they are all together
finished to a hair or a wrinkle—sheer callotypes.
Nevertheless, capital as are these productions of
Leech, grotesquely as they are conceived and excel-
lently as they are reduced to form—they still lag far
behind those rough, inartistic, malformed pictorial
jokes, which only Hood could accomplish or invent,
for comicality and point; from " Hullah-baloo,"
as a chorus of singers shouting in concert, after the
system of Mainzer and his fellow-labourer, to " Does
your mother know you're out ?" as uttered by the
faam-yard cock to the chicken just popped from its
shell. And as to the extravagant jocoseness of the
literature, nothing need be insisted upon that question ;
almost every one being familiar with its amazing and
preposterous humour. Surely there is nobody but
remembers the " Sea-Totaller,' and that scrap of in-
corrigible fun christened "An Extraordinary Ope-
ration." And surely everybody recollects " The
Longest Hour in my Life," and " The Camberwell
Beauty." And surely—and surely a remembrance of
" The Grimsby Ghost " can never have evaporated
from the memory of any one who has once travelled
over those thirteen mortal chapters, all athirst
to discover the important secret which troubles the
phantom of the late widow Mullins, the chaud-
leress, and causes it to haunt the shop In
her favourite post " between the coffee-mill and
the barrel of red herrings," until the goblin
at last divulges the secret to her daughter,
in those remarkable and memorable words—" Mary,
it arn't booked, but there's tuppence for sandpaper at
number nine !" From all subjects, even the most un-
aluring, the ready fancy and spontaneous wit of Hood
extracted materials for our merriment, sunning them
at the same moment with the glow of philanthropy.
The summer air, with its green " luxury of
boughs," the vernal glory of the dingle,
or the gleam of water in a midnight valley,
stirred up his heart with a mysterious, but
potent gladness ; he wandered through the natural
cloisters of the forest with his whole soul brimming
up with a love for Nature and Nature's God. In those
moments he was a poet of the loftiest order; his mind
was attuned to the subtlest presence of beauty ; ex-
trinsic loveliness, however, partial or minute, found a
ready response in his bosom. His thoughts were
then purified to an exceeding delicacy, and his words
were musical and modulated in proportion. But in
his gayer moments, when the wine of Anacreon
seemed to stain his lips, and the heart flashed up
through the eye in sparkles of merriment, none could
vie with him in the wonderful richness of his drollery ;
his quips had the gold of originality, and shone with
the lustre of their absurdity. As a collection of this
true and legitimate species of humour, this reprint of
" Hood's Whimsicalities" is without a parallel.