Thomas Hood, ‘true poet and true humorist,’ was born in The Poultry, London, in the tail-end of the eighteenth century. He died at Devonshire Lodge, Finchley Road, in the middle of the nineteenth. He lived, to be precise, from May 23rd, 1799, to May 3rd, 1845. I was a shortish, sickly life, and had to be beaten out, as it were, very thin to last for forty-six years.

On Hood’s birthday George III, aged sixty-one, and for the time being in his sober senses, rested after the levee of the day before. Queen Charlotte held a Drawing-room. News came that our noble allies, the Russians and Austrians, under Marshall Suwarrow and General Hohenzollern, had taken the best part of the Milanese from the French; that General Buonaparte had met with a check near Acre in consequence of which the Sultan had ordered a solemn thanksgiving in the seraglio; and that the Success frigate had fallen in with the French fleet passing the rock of Lisbon, and an engagement was hourly expected. On Hood’s birthday the second reading of a bill to restrict slavery was fiercely opposed by the Liverpool merchants in the Commons. Mr. Castlereagh and Mr. Ponsonby fought a duel near Dublin. Carriages waited at the Bull, Bishopsgate, to take the friends of Mr. J. Frere to the Norwich election to vote on the whole policy or impolicy of the war. A highwayman with crape on his face, mounted on a bay mare, stopped a post-chaise on Uxbridge Common.