Transcriber’s Notes
This e-text is based on the print version of The Works of Thomas Hood, Vol. II, 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.
HOOD’S OWN.
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. II.
LONDON:
WARD, LOCK, & CO., WARWICK HOUSE,
SALISBURY SQUARE, E.C.
NEW YORK: 10 BOND STREET.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
The Boy at the Nore
The Run-Over
Johnsoniana
The Great Earthquake at Marylebone
Ode to St. Swithin
The Apparition. A True Story
A Blind Man
The Supper Superstition. A Pathetic Ballad
A Snake-Snack
A Storm at Hastings, and the Little Unknown
Lines to a Lady on her Departure for India
The Nelson
Sonnet to a Scotch Girl Washing Linen after her Country Fashion
My Apology
Sonnet to a Decayed Seaman
The Great Conflagration
Huggins and Duggins
Domestic Didactics. By an Old Servant
Pain in a Pleasure-Boat. A Sea Eclogue
A Spent Ball
Literary and Literal
Sonnet to Lord Wharncliffe, on his Game Bill
Literary Reminiscences. No. I.
Ode to Perry, the Inventor of the Patent Perryan Pen
Sketches on the Road
The Undying One
A Gipsy Party
Cockle v. Cackle
A Lawyer’s Letter
The Sweep’s Complaint
Letter from an Old Sportsman
The Sub-Marine
The Island
Dog-grel Verses. By a poor Blind
The Kangaroos. A Fable
Literary Reminiscences. No. II.
The Domestic Dilemma. A True Story from the German of Jean Paul Nemand
Ode for the Ninth of November
Sonnet
Rondeau. (Extracted from a Well-known Annual)
London Fashions for November. Remarks
Symptoms of Ossification
The Poacher. A Serious Ballad
Sketches on the Road. The Sudden Death
I cannot Bear a Gun
Trimmer’s Exercise for the Use of Children
Some Account of William Whiston
The Fox and the Hen. A Fable
The Comet. An Astronomical Anecdote
Literary Reminiscences. No. III.
The Ocean. Considered per se
Love and Lunacy
Those Evening Bells. “I’d be a Parody.”
Lines to a Friend at Cobham
Sketches on the Road. The Morning Call
The Lament of Toby, the Learned Pig
To a Bad Rider
My Son and Heir
Literary Reminiscences. No. IV.
The Carnaby Correspondence
A Rise at the Father of Angling
Right and Wrong. A Sketch at Sea
Patronage
Animal Magnetism
The Forlorn Shepherd’s Complaint. An Unpublished Poem, from Sidney
Anacreontic. By a Footman
“HAVE I A WOTE FOR GRINNAGE?”
HOOD’S OWN:
OR, LAUGHTER FROM YEAR TO YEAR.
THE ISLE OF MAN.
THE BOY AT THE NORE.
“Alone I did it!—Boy!”—CORIOLANUS.
I SAY, little Boy at the Nore,
Do you come from the small Isle of Man?
Why, your history a mystery must be,—
Come tell us as much as you can,
Little Boy at the Nore!
You live it seems wholly on water,
Which your Gambier calls living in clover;—
But how comes it, if that is the case,
You’re eternally half seas over,—
Little Boy at the Nore?
While you ride—while you dance—while you float—
Never mind your imperfect orthography;—
But give us as well as you can,
Your watery auto-biography,
Little Boy at the Nore!
LITTLE BOY AT THE NORE LOQUITUR.
I’m the tight little Boy at the Nore,
In a sort of sea negus I dwells;
Half and half ’twixt saltwater and Port,
I’m reckon’d the first of the swells—
I’m the Boy at the Nore!
I lives with my toes to the flounders,
And watches through long days and nights;
Yet, cruelly eager, men look—
To catch the first glimpse of my lights—
I’m the Boy at the Nore.
I never gets cold in the head,
So my life on salt water is sweet,—
I think I owes much of my health
To being well used to wet feet—
As the Boy at the Nore.
There’s one thing, I’m never in debt:
Nay!—I liquidates more than I oughtor[1];
So the man to beat Cits as goes by,
In keeping the head above water,
Is the Boy at the Nore.
I’ve seen a good deal of distress,
Lots of Breakers in Ocean’s Gazette;
They should do as I do—rise o’er all;
Aye, a good floating capital get,
Like the Boy at the Nore!
THE BUOY AT THE NORE.
I’m a’ter the sailor’s own heart,
And cheers him, in deep water rolling;
And the friend of all friends to Jack Junk,
Ben Backstay, Tom Pipes, and Tom Bowling,
Is the Boy at the Nore!
Could I e’er but grow up, I’d be off
For a week to make love with my wheedles;
If the tight little Boy at the Nore
Could but catch a nice girl at the Needles,
We’d have two at the Nore!
They thinks little of sizes on water,
On big waves the tiny one skulks,—
While the river has Men of War on it—
Yes—the Thames is oppress’d with great Hulks,
And the Boy’s at the Nore!
But I’ve done—for the water is heaving
Round my body, as though it would sink it!
And I’ve been so long pitching and tossing,
That sea-sick—you’d hardly now think it—
Is the Boy at the Nore!
AS SAFE AS THE BANK.
[1] A word caught from some American Trader in passing.
THE RUN-OVER.
“DO you see that ’ere gentleman in the buggy, with the clipt un?” enquired Ned Stocker, as he pointed with his whip at a chaise, some fifty yards in advance. “Well, for all he’s driving there so easy like, and comfortable, he once had a gig-shaft, and that’s a fact, driv right through his body!”
“Rather him than me,” drawled a passenger on the box, without removing his cigar from his mouth.
“It’s true for all that,” returned Ned, with a nod of his head equal to an affidavit. “The shaft run in under one armpit, right up to the tug, and out again at t’other besides pinning him to the wall of the stable—and that’s a thing such as don’t happen every day.”
“Lucky it don’t,” said the smoker, between two puffs of his cigar.
“It an’t likely to come often,” resumed Ned, “let alone the getting over it afterwards, which is the wonderfullest part of it all. To see him bowling along there, he don’t look like a man pinned to a stable-wall with the rod through him, right up to the tug—do he?”
“Can’t say he does,” said the smoker.
“For my part,” said Ned, “or indeed any man’s part, most people in such a case would have said, it’s all up with me, and good reason why, as I said afore, with a shaft clean through your inside, right up to the tug—and two inches besides into the stable wall, by way of a benefit. But somehow he always stuck to it—not the wall, you know—but his own opinion, that he should get over it—he was as firm as flints about that—and sure enough the event came off exactly.”
“The better for him,” said the smoker.
“I don’t know the rights on it,” said Ned, “for I warn’t there—but they do say when he was dextricated from the rod, there was a regular tunnel through him, and in course the greatest danger was of his ketching cold in the lungs from the thorough draught.”
“Nothing more likely,” said the fumigator.
“Howsomever,” continued Ned, “he was cured by Dr. Maiden of Stratford, who give him lots of physic to provoke his stomach, and make him eat hearty; and by taking his feeds well,—warm mashes at first, and then hard meat, in course of time he filled up. Nobody hardly believed it, though, when they see him about on his legs again—myself for one—but he always said he would overcome it, and he was as good as his word. If that an’t game, I don’t know what is.”
“No more do I,” said the man with the Havannah.
“I don’t know the philosophy on it,” resumed Ned, “but it’s a remark of mine about recovering, if a man says he will, he will,—and if he says he won’t, he won’t—you may book that for certain. Mayhap a good pluck helps the wounds in healing kindly,—but so it is, for I’ve observed it. You’ll see one man with hardly a scratch on his face, and says he, I’m done for—and he turns out quite correct—while another as is cut to ribbons will say—never mind,—I’m good for another round, and so he proves, particularly if he’s one of your small farmers. I’ll give you a reason why.”
“Now then,” said the smoker.
“My reason is,” replied Ned, “that they’re all as hard as nails—regular pebbles for game. They take more thrashing than their own corn, and that’s saying something. They’re all fortitude, and nothing else. Talk about punishment! nothing comes amiss to ’em, from butt-ends of whips and brickbats down to bludgeons loaded with lead. You can’t hurt their feelings. They’re jist like badgers, the more you welt ’em the more they grin, and when it’s over, maybe a turn-up at a cattle fair, or a stop by footpads, they’ll go home to their missises all over blood and wounds as cool and comfortable as cowcumbers, with holes in their heads enough to scarify a whole hospital of army surgeons.”
“The very thing Scott has characterised,” I ventured to observe, “in the person of honest Dandie.”
“Begging your pardon, Sir,” said Ned, “I know Farmer Scott very well, and he’s anything but a dandy. I was just a going to bring forward, as one of the trumps, a regular out-and-outer. We become friends through an axident. It was a darkish night, you see, and him a little lushy or so, making a bit of a swerve in his going towards the middle of the road, before you could cry Snacks! I was over him with the old Regulator.”
“Good God!” exclaimed my left-hand companion on the roof. “Was not the poor fellow hurt?”
“Why, not much for HIM,” answered Ned, with a very decided emphasis on the pronoun. “Though it would have been a quietus for nine men out of ten, and, as the Jews say, Take your pick of the basket. But he looked queer at first, and shook himself, and made a wryish face, like a man that hadn’t got the exact bit of the joint he preferred.”
“Looked queer!” ejaculated the compassionate passenger, “he must have looked dreadful! I remember the Regulator, one of the oldest and heaviest vehicles on the road. But of course you picked him up, and got him inside, and——”
“Quite the reverse,” answered Ned, quietly, “and far from it; he picked himself up, quite independent, and wouldn’t even accept a lift on the box. He only felt about his head a bit, and then his back, and his arms, and his thighs, and his lines, and after that he guv a nod, and says he, ‘all right,’ and away he toddled.”
“I can’t credit it,” exclaimed the man on the roof.
“That’s jist what his wife said,” replied Ned, with considerable composure, in spite of the slur on his veracity. “Let alone two black eyes, and his collar bone, and the broke rib, he’d a hole in his head, with a flint sticking in it bigger than any one you can find since Macadaming. But he made so light on it all, and not being very clear besides in his notions, I’m blest if he didn’t tell her he’d only been knockt down by a man with a truck!”
“Not a bad story,” said the smoker on the box.
I confess I made internally a parallel remark. Naturally robust as my faith is, I could not, as Hamlet says, let “Belief lay hold of me,” with the coachman’s narrative in his hand, like a copy of a writ. I am no stranger, indeed, to the peculiar hardihood of our native yeomanry; but Ned, in his zeal for their credit, had certainly overdrawn the truth. As to his doctrine of presentiments, it had never been one of the subjects of my speculations; but on a superficial view, it appeared to me improbable that life or death, in cases of casualty, could be predetermined with such certainty as he had averred; and particularly as I happen to know a certain lady, who has been accepting the Bills of Mortality at two months’ date, for many years past—but has never honoured them when due. It was fated, however, that honest Ned was to be confirmed in his theories and corroborated in his facts.
We had scarcely trotted half a mile in meditative silence, when we overtook a sturdy pedestrian, who was pacing the breadth as well as the length of the road, rather more like a land surveyor than a mere traveller. He evidently belonged to the agricultural class, which Ned had distinguished by the title of Small Farmers. Like Scott’s Liddesdale yeoman, he wore a shaggy dreadnought, below which you saw two well-fatted calves, penned in a pair of huge top-boots—the tops and the boots being of such different shades of brown as you may observe in two arable fields of various soil, a rich loam and a clay. In his hand he carried a formidable knotted club-stick, and a member of the Heralds’ College would have set him down at once a tenant of the Earl of Leicester, he looked so like a bear with a ragged staff.
I observed that Ned seemed anxious. One of his leaders was a bolter, and his wheelers were far from steady; and the man ahead walked not quite so straightly as if he had been ploughing a furrow. We were almost upon him—Ned gave a sharp halloo—the man looked back, and wavered. A minute decided the matter. He escaped Scylla, but Charybdis yawned for him—in plain prose, he cleared the Rocket, but contrived to get under the broad wheel of a Warwickshire waggon, which was passing in the opposite direction. There was still a chance,—even a fly-waggon may be stopped without much notice—but the waggoner was inside, sweethearting with three maids that were going to Coventry. Every voice cried out Woh! but the right one. The horses plodded on—the wheels rumbled—the bells jingled—we all thought a knell.
Ned instantly pulled up, with his team upon their haunches—we all alighted, and in a moment the sixteen the Rocket was licensed to carry were at the fatal spot. In the midst of the circle lay, what we considered a bundle of last linen just come home from the mangle.
“That’s a dead un,” said the smoker, throwing away as he spoke the butt-end of a cigar.
“Poor wretch,” exclaimed the humane man from the roof, “what a shocking spectacle!”
“It’s over his chest,” said I.
“It’s all over,” said the passenger on my right.
“And a happy release,” said a lady on my left; “he must have been a cripple for life.”
“He can’t have a whole rib in his body,” said a man from the dicky.
“Hall to hattums,” said a gentleman from the inside.
“The worst I ever see, and I’ve had the good luck to see many,” said the guard.
“No, he can’t get over that,” said Ned himself.
To our astonishment, however, the human mass still breathed. After a long sigh it opened one eye—the right—then the other—the mouth gasped—the tongue moved—and at last even spoke, though in disjointed syllables.
“We’re nigh—hand—an’t we—the nine—milestun?”
“Yes—yes—close to it,” answered a dozen voices, and one in its bewilderment asked, “Do you live there?” but was set right by the sufferer himself.
“No—a mile fudder.”
“Where is there a surgeon?” asked the humane man, “I will ride off for him on one of the leaders.”
“Better not,” said the phlegmatic smoker, who had lighted a fresh cigar with some German tinder and a lucifer—“not used to saddle—may want a surgeon yourself.”
“Is there never a doctor among the company?” inquired the guard.
“I am a medical man,” replied a squat vulgar-looking personage. “I sell Morison’s pills—but I haven’t any about me.”
“Glad of it,” said the smoker, casting a long puff in the other’s face.
“THIS IS THE TIME WHEN CHURCH-YARDS YAWN.”
“Poor wretch!” sighed the compassionate man. “He is beyond human aid. Heaven help the widow and the fatherless—he looks like a family man!”
“I were not to blaame,” said the waggoner. “The woife and childerin can’t coom upon I.”
“Does anyone know who he is?” inquired the coachman, but there was no answer.
“Maybe the gemman has a card or summut,” said the gentleman from the inside.
“Is there no house near?” inquired the lady.
“For to get a shutter off on,” added the gentleman.
“Ought we not to procure a postchaise,” inquired a gentleman’s footman.
“Or a shell, in case,” suggested the man from the dicky.
“Shell be hanged!” said the sufferer, in a tone that made us all jump a yard backward. “Stick me up agin the milestun—there, easy does it—that’s comfortable—and now tell me, and no nonsense,—be I flat?”
“A little pancakey,” said the man with the cigar.
“I say,” repeated the sufferer, with some earnestness, “be I flat—quite flat—as flat like as a sheet of paper? Yes or no?”
“No, no, no,” burst from sixteen voices at once, and the assurance seemed to take as great a load off his mind as had lately passed over his body. By an effort he contrived to get up and sit upon the milestone, from which he waved us a good-bye, accompanied by the following words:—
“Gentlefolk, my best thanks and my sarvice to you, and a pleasant journey. Don’t consarn yourselves about me, for there’s nothing dangerous. I shall do well, I know I shall; and I’ll tell you what I’ll go upon—if I bean’t flat I shall get round.”
JOHNSONIANA.
“None despise puns but those who cannot make them.”—SWIFT.
To the Editor of the Comic Annual.
SIR,
As I am but an occasional reader in the temporary indulgence of intellectual relaxation, I have but recently become cognizant of the metropolitan publication of Mr. Murray’s Mr. Croker’s Mr. Boswell’s Dr. Johnson: a circumstance the more to be deprecated, for if I had been simultaneously aware of that amalgamation of miscellaneous memoranda I could have contributed a personal quota of characteristic colloquial anecdotes to the biographical reminiscences of the multitudinous lexicographer, which although founded on the basis of indubitable veracity, has never transpired among the multifarious effusions of that stupendous complication of mechanical ingenuity, which, according to the technicalities in usage in our modern nomenclature, has obtained the universal cognomen of the press. Expediency imperiously dictates that the nominal identity of the hereditary kinsman, from whom I derive my authoritative responsibility, shall be inviolable and umbrageously obscured; but in future variorum editions his voluntary addenda to the already inestimable concatenation of circumstantial particularisation might typographically be discriminated from the literary accumulations of the indefatigable Boswell and the vivacious Piozzi, by the significant classification of Boz, Poz, and Coz.
In posthumously eliciting and philosophically elucidating the phenomena of defunct luminaries, whether in reference to corporeal, physiognomical, or metaphysical attributes, justice demands the strictest scrupulosity, in order that the heterogeneous may not preponderate over the homogeneous in the critical analysis. Metaphorically speaking, I am rationally convinced that the operative point I am about to develop will remove a pertinacious film from the eye of the biographer of the memorable Dr. Johnson; and especially with reference to that reiterated verbal aphorism so preposterously ascribed to his conversational inculcation, namely, that “he who would make a pun would pick a pocket;” however irrelevant such a doctrinarian maxim to the irrefragable fact, that in that colossal monument of etymological erudition erected by the stupendous Doctor himself (of course implying his inestimable Dictionary), the paramount gist, scope, and tendency of his laborious researches was obviously to give as many meanings as possible to one word. In order, however, to place hypothesis on the immutable foundation of fact, I will, with your periodical permission, adduce a few Johnsonian repartees from my cousin’s anecdotical memorabilia, which will perspicuously evolve the synthetical conclusion, that the inimitable author of Rasselas did not dogmatically predicate such an aggravated degree of moral turpitude in the perpetration of a double entendre.
Apologistically requesting indulgence for the epistolary laxity of an unpremeditated effusion,
I remain, Sir,
Your very humble obedient servant,
SEPTIMUS REARDON.
Lichfield, October 1, 1833.
“Do you really believe, Dr. Johnson,” said a Lichfield lady, “in the dead walking after death?”—“Madam,” said Johnson, “I have no doubt on the subject; I have heard the Dead March in Saul.” “You really believe then, Doctor, in ghosts?”—“Madam,” said Johnson, “I think appearances are in their favour.”
The Doctor was notoriously very superstitious. The same lady once asked him—“if he ever felt any presentiment at a winding-sheet in the candle.”—“Madam,” said Johnson, “if a mould candle, it doubtless indicates death, and that somebody will go out like a snuff; but whether at Hampton Wick or in Greece, must depend upon the graves.”
Dr. Johnson was not comfortable in the Hebrides. “Pray, Doctor, how did you sleep?” inquired a benevolent Scotch hostess, who was so extremely hospitable that some hundreds always occupied the same bed.—“Madam,” said Johnson, “I had not a wink the whole night long; sleep seemed to flee from my eyelids, and to bug from all the rest of my body.”
The Doctor and Boswell once lost themselves in the Isle of Muck, and the latter said they must “spier their way at the first body they met.” “Sir,” said Dr. Johnson, “you’re a scoundrel: you may spear anybody you like, but I am not going to ‘run a-Muck and tilt at all I meet.’”