Who can ever forget "The Lost
Heir," or remember it but to laugh at its rich breadth of natural, yet
farcical, absurdity? The very opening begins the giggle:--
"One day, as I was going by
That part of Holborn christened High," etc.
Then there is that broadest of broad, but morally inoffensive stories,
in which the laundress, in trying to cure a smoking chimney, blows
herself to death, having merely power to speak a few words to
Betty,--who gaspingly explains to her mistress "The Report from Below":--
"Well, Ma'am, you won't believe it,
But it's gospel fact and true,
But these words is all she whispered,--
_'Why, where is the powder blew?_'"
For other examples refer to "The Ode to Malthus" and "The Blow-up,"
which pain the sides while they cheer the heart.
Again, we find the grotesque through Hood's writings in union with
the fantastic and the fanciful. His fertility in the most unexpected
analogies becomes to the reader of his works a matter of continual
wonder. Strange and curious contrasts and likenesses, both mental and.
verbal, which might never once occur even to a mind of more than common
eccentricity and invention, seem to have been in his mind with the
ordinary flow of thinking. Plenteous and sustained, therefore, as his
wit is, it never fails to startle. We have no doubt of his endless
resources, and yet each new instance becomes a new marvel.
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