Hood was a small, rather saturnine-looking man, with very weak and watery eyes.
Though so very witty upon paper, he was by no means happy in spoken, impromptu puns or other jokes. His puns required time, long thought, and elaboration. Those which he elaborated were innumerable, and about the best that were ever made. In conversation, I have heard him make very bad ones. One evening, at Horace Smith’s—himself a pitiless punster—Colonel Cradock, now Lord Howden, was quietly relating how he had been attacked and wounded by an Arab while travelling to the ruins of Baalbec in the desert. “Colonel,” said Tommy, “if you were a Scotsman, you might say that you were spiering your way.” “No,” said Cradock, “I was not spearing, I was speared.”
Most people know that the Scottish verb, “to spier,” means to ask, or to inquire. If a Scotsman does not know his way, he “spiers.”
Cradock, though not much given to punning, could keep
his own with most men; and, in conversation, was far too much for either Hood or Smith. I
confess that I have always felt two puns in an evening—both taken after dinner—to be a
dose. Horace had no discretion, and would give you twenty, one after
the other, rat-tat-tat, like the shots of a
| 106 | THOMAS HOOD | [CHAP. X |
The house was seldom devoid of guests, the distance was so convenient, and
Tommy’s cockney friends liked to breathe
country air, and took up quite a romantic passion for the scenery of the Forest. His
household expenses were treble what they had been in the snug, pretty little cottage at
Winchmore Hill; and then the farm ran away with a world of money. It may be imagined how a
thorough cockney, one born and bred in the Poultry, Cheapside, a poet and a punster, would
farm! What with his hospitalities, and what with his agricultural expenditure, he became
seriously embarrassed, and not having nerve to face his creditors, he quitted the
| CHAP. X] | HOOD AS FARMER | 107 |
Some arrangements were made with his creditors, by means of his brother-in-law, Reynolds, himself a poet and a debtor, and by some other friends, and Tommy returned to London with his wife and children. It was kind, it was noble, in Sir Robert Peel, to grant Hood the pension the moment he knew his sad condition.
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