_--Mr. Hood's announcement of his
forthcoming volume is in the very vein of the work itself. He writes
to his publisher:--"The report of my death, I can assure you is
premature, but I am equally obliged to you for your tribute of putting
up shutters and wearing a crape hatband. I suspect your friend and
informant, Mr. Livingstone--(it should be Gravestone)--drew his
inference from a dark passage in Miss Sheridan's Preface which states
that, 'of the three _Comic Annuals_ which started at the same time,
the Comic Offering alone remains.' The two defuncts therein referred
to are the 'Falstaff' and 'The Humorist,' which I understand have put
an end to themselves.
"If you should still entertain any doubts, you will shortly have ten
thousand impressions to the contrary; for I intend to contradict my
_demys_ by fresh _octavos_. The Comic Annual for 1833, with its usual
complement of plates--mind, not coffin-plates--to appear as
heretofore, in November, will give the lie, I trust, not merely to my
departure, but even to anything like a _serious_ illness: and a novel,
about the same time, will help to prove that I am not in a state of
de-composition.
"I should have relieved your joint anxieties some days earlier, but
till I met Mr. Livingstone, at Bury, I was really not alive to my
death."
* * * * *
_Cartoons at Hampton Court_.
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