When Hood and his family were living at Ostend for economy’s sake, and with the same motive Mrs. Hood was doing her own work, as we phrase it, he wrote to a friend in England: “Jane is becoming an excellent cook and housemaid, and I intend to raise her wages. She had nothing a week before, and now I mean to double it.”
It has been estimated that of all possible or impossible ways of earning an honest livelihood, the most arduous, and at the same time the way which would secure the greatest good to the greatest number, would be to go around, cold nights, and get into bed for people! To this might be added, going around cold mornings and getting up for people; and, most useful and most onerous of all, going around among undecided people and making up their minds.
In these days of universal condensation—of condensed milk, condensed meats, condensed news—perhaps no achievement of that kind ought to surprise us; but it must be acknowledged that Thackeray’s condensing feat was the most extraordinary on record. To compress “The Sorrows of Werther”—that three volumed novel: a book of size—and tears, full of pathos and prettiness, of devotion and desperation—into four stanzas that tell the whole story, was a triumph of art which—which it is very possible GOETHE would admire less than we do.
Werther had a love for Charlotte
Such as words can never utter.
Would you know how first he met her?
She was cutting bread and butter.
Charlotte was a married lady,