To this statement in the Cornhill Magazine are appended the following reflections:—"O sad, marvellous picture of courage, of honesty, of patient endurance, of duty struggling against pain! How noble Peel's figure is standing by that sick-bed, how generous his words, how dignified and sincere his compassion! And the poor dying man, with a heart full of natural gratitude towards his noble benefactor, must turn to him and say—'If it be well to be remembered by a Minister, it is better still not to be forgotten by him in a 'hurly Burleigh!' Can you laugh? Is not the joke horribly pathetic from the poor dying lips? As dying Robin Hood must fire a last shot with his bow—as one reads of Catholics on their death-bed putting on a Capuchin dress to go out of the world—here is poor Hood at his last hour putting on his ghastly motley, and uttering one joke more. He dies, however, in dearest love and peace with his children, wife, friends: to the former especially his whole life had been devoted, and every day showed his fidelity, simplicity, and affection. In going through the record of his most pure, modest, honourable life, and living along with him, you come to trust him thoroughly, and feel that here is a most loyal, affectionate, and upright soul, with whom you have been brought into communion. Can we say as much of all lives of all men of letters? Here is one at least without guile, without pretension, without scheming, of pure life, to his family and little modest circle of friends tenderly devoted."
After a lethargy, which continued four days, Hood died May 3rd, 1845. He was buried in Kensal Green Cemetery, where a poetical monument has been erected to his memory. He left a son, who inherits much of his father's genius.
"Hood," says one of his biographers, "was undoubtedly a man of genius. His mind was stored with a vast collection of materials drawn from a great variety of sources, but especially his own observations; and he possessed the power of working up those materials into combinations of wit and humour and pathos of the most original and varied kinds. He has wit of the highest quality, as original and as abundant as Butler's or Cowley's, drawn from as extensive an observation of nature and life, if not from so wide a reach of learning, and combined with a richness of humour of which Butler had little and Cowley none. His humour is frequently as extravagantly broad as that of Rabelais, but he has sometimes the delicate touches of that of Addison. As a punster he stands alone. His puns do not consist merely of double meanings of words—a low kind of punning, of which minds of a low order are capable, and with which his imitators have deluged English comedy and comic literature—but of double meanings of words combined with double meanings of sense in such a manner as to produce the most extraordinary effects of surprise and admiration. His power of exciting laughter is wonderful, his drollery indescribable, inimitable. His pathetic power is not equal to his comic, but it is very great. The moral tendency of Hood's works is excellent. In the indulgence of his spirit of fun, he is anything but strait-laced as regards the introduction of images and phrases which a fastidious person might call vulgar or coarse; but an indecent description or even allusion will not easily be found. He is liberal-minded, a warm eulogist as well as a glowing depicter of the good feelings of our nature and the generous actions which those feelings prompt, and he is an unsparing satirist of vice, pretension, and cant in all their forms.
"Hood, in his person, was thin, pale, and delicate; in his temper he was kind and cheerful; he seems to have imbibed the social and benevolent feeling of his friend Lamb, and he was no less than Lamb a favourite among his friends. His long-continued sufferings only stimulated him to amuse himself and others by the exercise of his extraordinary imagination; and when at last he could no longer bear up under his bodily pains, his complaint was simple, but it indicated a terrible degree of suffering—'I cannot die, I cannot die.'"
[A Witty Archbishop.]
An industrious student, a deep thinker, an acute reasoner, a learned mind, a correct and at times elegant writer—these are titles of honour which the mere out-side-world, travelling in its flying railway-carriage, will gladly award to the late Archbishop of Dublin (Dr. Whately). Not so familiar are certain minor and more curious gifts, which he kept by him for his own and his friends' entertainment, which broke out at times on more public occasions. He delighted in the oddities of thought, in queer quaint distinctions; and if an object had by any possibility some strange distorted side or corner, or even point, which was undermost, he would gladly stoop down his mind to get that precise view of it, nay, would draw it in that odd light for the amusement of the company.
Thus he struck Guizot, who described him as "startling and ingenious, strangely absent, familiar, confused, eccentric, amiable, and engaging, no matter what unpoliteness he might commit, or what propriety he might forget." In short, a mind with a little of the Sydney Smith's leaven, whose brilliancy lay in precisely these odd analogies. It was his recreation to take up some intellectual hobby, and make a toy of it. Just as, years ago, he was said to have taken up that strange instrument the boomerang, and was to be seen on the sands casting it from him, and watching it return. It was said, too, that at the dull intervals of a visitation, when ecclesiastical business languished, he would cut out little miniature boomerangs of card, and amuse himself by illustrating the principle of the larger toy by shooting them from his finger.
The even, and sometimes drowsy, current of Dublin society was almost always enlivened by some little witty boomerang of his, fluttering from mouth to mouth, and from club to club. The Archbishop's last was eagerly looked for. Some were indifferent, some were trifling; but it was conceded that all had an odd extravagance, which marked them as original, quaint, queer. In this respect he was the Sydney Smith of the Irish capital, with this difference—that Sydney Smith's king announced that he would never make the lively Canon of St. Paul's a Bishop.
Homœopathy was a medical paradox, and was therefore welcome. Yet in this he travelled out of the realms of mere fanciful speculation, and clung to it with a stern and consistent earnestness faithfully adhered to through his last illness. Mesmerism, too, he delighted to play with. He had, in fact, innumerable dadas, as the French call them, or hobby-horses, upon which he was continually astride.
This led him into a pleasant affection of being able to discourse de omnibus rebus, &c., and the more recondite or less known the subject, the more eager was he to speak. It has been supposed that the figure of the "Dean," in Mr. Lever's pleasant novel of Roland Cashel, was sketched from him. Indeed, there can be no question but that it is an unacknowledged portrait.