over me;" and those who visit his tomb now, find it covered with daisies and violets.

The last of the group of poets of whom Wordsworth was the first in poetic rank and Rogers the first in order of birth, was Thomas Hood (1798-1845). The death of his father left the family poor, and it was by his own choice that the son went early to work rather than burden his widowed mother with his education. At twenty-one he became sub-editor of the "London Magazine," for which (beside doing other work), he concocted humorous "Answers to Correspondents," etc. This soon developed into regular literary work in the magazine, which numbered among its contributors such men as Lamb, Hazlitt, De Quincy, Coleridge and others well-known.

At twenty-six Hood married. It was a love-match; not smiled upon by the young lady's family, yet productive of great happiness. The wife had literary taste and judgment, and was the valued critic of all his later work. He grew

so dependent on her that he could hardly write unless she was at hand. The charming little jeu d'esprit entitled "Parental Ode to my Son, aged three years and five months," shows, incidentally, his habits in this respect.

Hood's first book, published a year or two after his marriage, was a collection from his scattered pieces, called "Whims and Oddities." For seven years he produced yearly the "London Comic Annual," and during this time wrote his one entire work, "Tylney Hall," a novel. The rest of his collected works consist of poems, stories, travels and isolated bits of prose and verse, each good in its time and place, but not adapted to continuous reading. They seem, as they flash out from the pages of a periodical, like successive discharges of fireworks at a fête; but collected in a mass and read at one sitting they somewhat resemble the several pieces all ignited at once.

Hood's mind, being attuned to this species of composition,

seems to have run always toward jokes and puns. Nothing could meet his eye which was not instinctively scanned for its adaptability to a quip; he was the one great verbal humorist. Mrs. S. C. Hall says of him:

I remember the first time I met him was at one of the pleasant soirées of the painter Martin; for a moment I turned away as many have done—disappointed, for the countenance, in repose, was of melancholy rather than of mirth; there was something calm, even to solemnity, in the upper portion of his face, which in public was seldom relieved by the eloquent play of the mouth or the occasional sparkle of an observant eye. Theodore Hook, perhaps, liked his celebrity. . . He [Hood] was too sensitive, too refined to endure it; the dislike to being pointed at as "the man who is funny," kept him out of a crowd, where there were always numbers who honored his genius and loved him for his gentle domestic virtues.

Although "social" in all his feelings, he never sought to stimulate his wit by the false poison of draughts of wine; nor was he ever more cheerful than when at his own fireside he enjoyed the companionship of his dear and devoted wife.

Hood was so great as a punster, a rhymester and a wit, that one is apt to forget that he was also a poet and a philanthropist. The same hand which penned "Morning Meditations," gave the world also the "Song of the Shirt," and the "Bridge of Sighs." Even in some of the poems most thickly strewn with jokes, like "The Tale of a Trumpet," and "Miss Kilmansegg," he had a lesson to teach, and taught it well. Some of his sonnets, notably the one on "Lear," are pure pathos, and many of his shorter poems have a sad undertone which shows that the sources of laughter and of tears are not far apart.

The close of the long poem "Miss Kilmansegg and her Precious Leg" is interesting as a feat in rhyming as well as for its moral:

Gold! gold! gold! gold!

Bright and yellow and hard and cold,
Molten, graven, hammered and rolled;
Heavy to get and light to hold;

As even its minted coins express,

Now stamped with the image of good Queen Bess,
And now of a Bloody Mary!

The "Tale of a Trumpet" contains, in spite of its stern lesson, some delightful bits of fun. A peddler is recommending his ear-trumpet:

There was Mrs. F.

So very deaf

She might have worn a percussion-cap

And been knocked on the head without hearing it snap;

I sold her a horn, and the very next day

She heard from her husband at Botany Bay!

From the lighter efforts we turn to the more serious strains of this tender - hearted, pitying, loving, lovable man; to the lines by which he himself asked to be remembered; for at his wish the record of one of his humane poems is inscribed on his tomb in the simple phrase, "He wrote the 'Song of the Shirt'."

Seam, and gusset, and band,

Band, and gusset, and seam,

Till over the buttons I fall asleep

And sew them on in my dream.

Less known, though scarcely less worth knowing, is "The Lady's Dream." A single stanza near the close gives its keynote:

The wounds I might have healed!

The human sorrow and smart!
And yet it was never in my soul

To play so ill a part:

But evil is wrought by want of thought,

As well as want of heart.

This was

Late in life, Hood received through the influence of Sir Robert Peel an annual pension of £100. continued to his widow; who, with two children, was left unprovided for at his death, except by the pension. It is a sad commentary on the distribution of the world's rewards that service like his is so poorly paid- that those who, with the pen, lead the thought of the world, are so often left behind in the distribution of its bounties. A subscription was started for the benefit of Hood's family, the appeal for which opens with these words:

This distinguished writer, who has for upwards of twenty years entertained the public with a constant succession of comic and humoristic works, in the whole range of which not a single line of immoral tendency or calculated to pain an individual can be pointed out, whose poems and serious writings rank among the noblest modern contributions of our national literature and whose pen was the ever ready and efficient advocate of the unfortunate and the oppressed (as recently, for instance, in the admirable "Song of the Shirt," which gave so remarkable an impulse to the movement in behalf of distressed needlewomen), has left by his death a widow and two children in straitened and precarious circumstances.

Some relief was afforded by this friendly effort; and when Hood's son grew to manhood he became, like his father, a laborer in the world of letters, and made it the means of gaining an honorable livelihood.

CHAPTER XLIV.

SOME MINOR POETS.

HARLES DIBDIN (1748-1814) excelled as a writer of sea-songs, which he set to music.

Thomas Dibdin (1771-1841), son of the above, is said to have written more than one thousand songs, but none of them attained the popularity of his father's.

It is not often given to a poet to be a millionaire, but such was the case with Samuel Rogers (1763-1855). Born to a fortune, and increasing it by his business as a banker, his house became a centre of entertainment for all the literary celebrities of the day. Nor did he confine his good offices to the exercise of hospitality; his purse was always open for the encouragement of struggling authors, and many such an one has owed his relief from distress and encouragement to effort to the generosity of Samuel Rogers.

Of his own contributions to literature, the first was "The Pleasures of Memory," written in the last century, and in the style of that age. Polished and pleasing, and abounding in graceful thoughts, it lacks fire, and is now read mainly as a matter of literary history. His poem on

Italy is a series of pen - pictures of that lovely country, mingled with legends and rich in historical illusions. "Human Life," and "The Voyage of Columbus," are his only other long poems. Some of the shorter ones are very charming.

Rogers lived to the good old age of ninety-two, preserving his faculties almost to the end. The art - treasures with which his house was filled were chosen with faultless judgment, and he possessed a remarkably fine library. He was never married.

As the world grows older and larger, the number of wri