Roundabout Papers - Penn State University

Roundabout Papersscripts to the publishers faster than they could acknowledgethe receipt thereof. I won’t say that they were allgood jokes, or that to read a great book full of them is awork at present altogether jocular. Writing to a friendrespecting some memoir of him which had been published,Hood says, “You will judge how well the authorknows me, when he says my mind is rather serious thancomic.” At the time when he wrote these words, he evidentlyundervalued his own serious power, and thoughtthat in punning and broad-grinning lay his chief strength.Is not there something touching in that simplicity andhumility of faith? “To make laugh is my calling,” says he;“I must jump, I must grin, I must tumble, I must turnlanguage head over heels, and leap through grammar;”and he goes to his work humbly and courageously, andwhat he has to do that does he with all his might, throughsickness, through sorrow, through exile, poverty, fever,depression—there he is, always ready to his work, andwith a jewel of genius in his pocket! Why, when he laiddown his puns and pranks, put the motley off, and spokeout of his heart, all England and America listened withtears and wonder! Other men have delusions of conceit,and fancy themselves greater than they are, and that theworld slights them. Have we not heard how Liston alwaysthought he ought to play Hamlet? Here is a manwith a power to touch the heart almost unequalled, andhe passes days and years in writing, “Young Ben he was anice young man,” and so forth. To say truth, I have beenreading in a book of “Hood’s Own” until I am perfectlyangry. “You great man, you good man, you true geniusand poet,” I cry out, as I turn page after page. “Do, do,make no more of these jokes, but be yourself, and takeyour station.”When Hood was on his death-bed, Sir Robert Peel,who only knew of his illness, not of his imminent danger,wrote to him a noble and touching letter, announcingthat a pension was conferred on him:“I am more than repaid,” writes Peel, “by the personalsatisfaction which I have had in doing that forwhich you return me warm and characteristic acknowledgments.82