Text: N. P. Willis (?), Sketch of Thomas Hood, Weekly Mirror (New York), November 17, 1844, vol. 1, no. 6, p. 94, cols. 1-2

[page 94, top of column 1:]

Tom Hood is no tom-tit in the fraternity of Tom-birds; he is a great man in the generation of Toms — Tom Sternhold, Tom Nash, Tom May, Tom Killigrew, Tom Shadwell, Tom Otway, Tom Southerne, Tom Creech, Torn Brown, Tom Campbell, Tom Moore, Torn Little, Torn Jones; nor is he of smaller stature in the class of Tho. masses — from free Thomas, or Thomas the Rhymer, to Thomas Gray and Thomas Chatterton. How strange are our associations with the name of Tom! Tom-tits we have already mentioned; Tom cats, Tom fools, and Tom o’Bedlams deserve notice.

Tom Hood is a writer after our own heart; he has a large sympathy with human nature — honest, manly and unaffected. He is none of your maudlin whiners, but writes from an abundance o good feeling and the dictation of his own generous impulses. He is the poet of sorrow and of fun; Reynolds’ picture of Garrick between Tragedy and Comedy is nothing to him. His “Dream of Eugene Aram,” and his “Epping Hunt,” could scarcely have come from the same pen: “L’Allegro,” and “II Penseroso” did, and might, but surely not “Eugene Aram,” and the “Epping Hunt.” Here Hood and Sorrow sit; here Hood and

He has the pathos of Otway in the one, the quiet humor of Cowper, and all his own merriment, in he other.

It was said of Dyer, who wrote a clever poem called “The Fleece,” that he deserved to be buried in woollen. Hood, for his “Song of the Shirt,” deserves to live and die in what poor poets are unaccustomed to wear — good linen. He deserves a shirt front every sempstress in London, so that his wardrobe of Irish made up might exceed the long catalogue of different dresses which “England's Elizabeth,” at her death, is said to have possessed. His “Bridge of Sighs” might hang in Sir Peter Laurie's front parlor, written in letters of gold.

Hood's own under-current of feeling makes him a poet of sympathy and sorrow, his own upper-play of thought, a humorist and a wit. We prefer, for our own part, his serious to his humorous vein. The pathetic power is the rarer and the higher quality; and though he has not risen to the utmost pitch of excellence attained by others in what has been called, for want of a better name, the serious portions of our poetry; and, on the other hand, has invented for himself a new species of lighter verse — madcap of fun, playfulness, alliteration and wit — yet, as a poet, he must stand upon his graver productions, sure as they are, to our thinking, of an undisturbed hereafter.

Bulwer has given the highest commendation to his “Eugene Aram;” and the unbought approbation of every paper in the three kingdoms has recognised his “Song of the Shirt,” as the production of a true poet. True and touching as it is, with its fine moral tendency, and, we feel assured, its fine moral effects, yet we have found ourselves giving the preference to the “Bridge of Sighs;” not after one hasty perusal, but upon reperusal, and after well weighing the excellences of them both. The “Song of the Shirt” was a well-timed little poem — a picture of oppression thrown off at a heat, in the full swing and vigor of its writer's genius, and printed in a popular paper while public sympathy and public indignation were pretty well at the highest. The “Bridge of Sighs” had no such adventitious circumstances to recommend it; suicides had become less common, the city commissioners had caged and con. fined the Monument, and Sir Peter Laurie had taken the bridge at Blackfriars under his special protection. If the living members of a west-end milliner's establishment had made their exeunt from Westminster or Waterloo Bridge just as the poem appeared, the effect had been different; but the poetry had been the same. A real tragedy beforehand had been what Bayes calls insinuating the plot into the boxes.

Mr. Hood was born under Gresham's grasshopper, in the city of London, in the year 1798; the son of Hood, of the firm of Verner and Hood, in the Poultry, the publishers of Bloomfield and Kirke White, and the booksellers to whom we are indebted for the “Beauties of England and Wales.” One of his biographers has told us, that he completed [column 2:] his education at a finishing school at Camberwell; upon which Tom has some twenty good jokes in his “Literary Reminiscences.” From Camberwell he went to Dundee, and soon after was apprenticed to his uncle, Mr. Robert Sands, to learn the art and mystery of engraving. Here he soon found out the drift of his own genius; he left the burin for the pen, composed a few light pieces of poetry, got into notice, and, after Scott's death in 1821, became a sort of sub-editor of the “London Magazine.” It was at this time that he acquired the friendship of Lamb, Hazlitt, Cary, Allan Cunningham, Clare, and others, so delightfully pictured by Mr. Hood himself in his two short “Literary Reminiscences.” A volume of “Odes and Addresses to Great People” gave him a rank and reputation in literature for something done in a better kind of Colman vein. It was some time, however, before the real author was known; and Coleridge, after two perusals, wrote and taxed Lamb with the authorship of the work. There was high praise, and, as the young lady said of Dr. Johnson, from one who could not lie, and could not be mistaken.

“A Plea for the Midsummer Fairies” was followed by a volume of “Whims and Oddities,” inscribed to Sir Walter Scott; then came the “Comic Annual,” with it six or seven years of clever and lively existence; then “Tylney Hall,” a story in three volumes, with one super-excellent character in it, called “Unlucky Joe;” then “Up the Rhine,” the result of a residence on the banks of that hurrying river; then “Hood's Own,” a volume of cullings from his comic lucubrations, with what he calls a new infusion of blood for general circulation. Here he gave us his two short “Literary Reminiscences” already alluded to. On Hook's death, Hood became editor of the “New Monthly Magazine;” and, upon some disagreement with Mr. Colburn, editor of a magazine of his own, bearing his own name, and of which the first number appeared in January of the present year.

Mr. Williams tells us in his “Life of Lawrence,” that “the exact height of Sir Thomas was a little below the middle size.” Now, we wish to indicate in this way the exact height of our friend Tom Hood. He is a little below the middle size, with a face, as he calls it, better fitted for a number of the “Evangelical Magazine” than a volume of the “Comic Annual.” He was mistaken more than once in Germany, he tells us, for a regimental chaplain. His mouth, he informs us, is a little wry, as if it had always laughed on the wrong side. But Hood's is no willow-pattern face. He is silent in mixed company; a kind of Puritan in look till an opportunity for a joke appears, which he rises at like a trout — not, however, to be caught, but to catch others; his countenance brightens up with the rising wit, you see a play around his mouth, his eyes sparkle, and all the genius of the man stands full in the face before you. His health, we are sorry to say, is very far from good, though the bracing airs of Blackheath have done something for him of late. He was residing of late in that goosepie of a castle which Vanbrugh built for himself, on the park side of the heath. Hood deserves to reside in the dwelling of a wit like Vanbrugh.

Many of the cuts of the “Comic Annual” have been designed by Mr. Hood himself. We would instance, as capital in their way, Meeting a Settler, Last in Bed put out the Light; How lucky, Bill, we are up here; Protecting the Fare — so full of wit of the very finest description.

Mr. Dickens has a herd of imitators, so has Mr. Hood. There are many, as the old Scotch woman said, who glean in the field, of Boz, (Boaz,) and many besides Ritson who live by Robin Hood.