“O! there’s nothing half so sweet in life.”
Mr. Hood introduces another “sweet pleasure,” with another equally apt quotation:—
“Tell me, my heart, can this be Love?”
This figure of “The Popular Cupid,” Mr. Hood copied, “by permission, from a lady’s Valentine;” and he says, “in the romantic mythology it is the image of the divinity of Love.” He inquires, “Is this he, that, in the mind’s eye of the poetess, drifts adown the Ganges—
Pillow’d in a lotus flow’r,
Gather’d in a summer hour,
Floats he o’er the mountain wave,
Which would be a tall ship’s grave?
—Does Belinda believe that such a substantial Sagittarius lies ambushed in her perilous blue eye?—I can believe in his dwelling alone in the heart—seeing that he must occupy it to repletion: in his constancy—because he looks sedentary, and not apt to roam: that he is given to melt—from his great pinguitude: that he burneth with a flame—for so all fat burneth: and hath languishings—like other bodies of his tonnage: that he sighs—from his size. I dispute not his kneeling at ladies’ feet—since it is the posture of elephants—nor his promise, that the homage shall remain eternal. I doubt not of his dying—being of a corpulent habit, and a short neck: of his blindness—with that inflated pig’s cheek. But, for his lodging in Belinda’s blue eye, my whole faith is heretic—for she hath never a sty in it.”
Mr. Hood, doubtless, desires that the world should know his “Whims and Oddities” through his own work; its notice here, therefore, while it affords a winter evening’s half hour entertainment, is not to mar his hopes. But it is impossible to close its merry-making leaves without shadowing forth a little more of the volume.
It ought to be observed, that the prints just presented are from engravings in Mr. Hood’s book, of which there are forty drawn by his own pencil; and, that he attaches a motto to each, so antithetical, as to constitute the volume a pocket portfolio of designs to excite risibility. For example:—
He tells a story of his “Aunt Shakerly,” a lady of enormous bulk, who placed Mr. Hood’s baby cousin in the nursing-chair while she took in the news, and then, in her eagerness to read the accidents and offences, unthinkingly sat, with the gravity of a coroner’s inquest, in the aforesaid chair, and thereby unconsciously suppressed “an article of intelligence”—an occurrence which there is little reason to doubt appeared among the “horribles,” in the favourite department of her paper, the next morning. The engraving that pictures this is mottoed, “The Spoiled Child!”