"Miss Kilmansegg and her Precious Leg: a Golden Legend," is perhaps one of the best, as it is certainly the longest, of Hood's poems, remarkable, indeed, for its puns and ingenious play upon words, its felicitous rhyming, and its underlying moral. Miss Kilmansegg was born with a golden spoon in her mouth, and her condition is shown in the charming drawing with which Leech illustrates the following lines:
"What wide reverses of fate are there!
Whilst Margaret, charmed by the Bulbul rare,
In a Garden of Gull reposes,
Poor Peggy hawks nosegays from street to street,
Till—think of that, who find life so sweet!—
She hates the smell of roses!
"What wide reverses of Fate are there!"
"Not so with the infant Kilmansegg—
She was not born to steal or beg,
Or gather cresses in ditches;
To plait the straw, or bind the shoe,
Or sit all day to hem and sew,
As females must—and not a few!—
To fill their insides with stitches."
The christening of the golden child was an affair so splendid as to tax the poet's invention for tropes and figures worthy of the occasion:
"Gold! and gold! and nothing but gold!
The same auriferous shine behold
Wherever the eye could settle!
On the walls—the sideboard—the ceiling—sky—,
On the gorgeous footmen standing by,
In coats to delight a miner's eye
With seams of precious metal.
"Gold! and gold! and besides the gold,
The very robe of the infant told
A tale of wealth in every fold—
It lapped her like a vapour!
So fine! so thin! the mind at a loss,
Could compare it to nothing except a cross
Of cobweb with banknote paper."
Powerful as the poet's imagination shows in these glittering rhymes, it fails him in his endeavour to find a prefix in the form of a name worthy of accompanying Kilmansegg. He says: