HOOD'S COMIC ANNUAL.
Hoon this year hands his Comic Annual down to us from out the fog of a mountain in Germany ; whither he was driven, he tells us, by the smoke of the people below. HOOD following HEAD, has been swallowing soup of nature's own making from the Brun- Dens, and wallowing in the mire with the German hogs. He has moreover endured a complication of German doctors, homceopa- thics, magnetisers, and other " bad " advisers as he calls them. Hoon's account of Dr. FARBE'S system is one of the most amusing passages in the book. He also hints in his preface—which, though serious in its matter, is lively and humorous in its style—at deli- cate health, a perilous sea-voyage, and that heart sickness maladie du pays. We wish there were not so grave an apology to offer for any falling off in the fun. The author, however, exhausts his subjects'of the jokes, if he appears sometimes exhausted himself. The puns are plenty, if not always so good ; and we still wonder where he finds them : and for the cuts, if not so sharp and well- aimed, they are as boldly made and with as much gusto as ever.
The best things in the volume are the " Domestic Dilemma," a German story ; " The Quaker's Conversazione," the " Ode to Perry" the Pen-maker, and the verses entitled " Poetry, Prose,
and Worse." The anecdote of the high-born spinster who is cast away in her one-horse carriage in a rural desert, by the horse
dropping down dead—and who is obliged to remain in the wreck of the vehicle because she is too aristocratic to move in any vehicle less stately than a coach, and is at last carried off by a pig- sticker, in his pork-cart, by main force—is capitally told.
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