Life & Wisdom Quote by Thomas Hood

Hood’s line lands like a polite cough that turns into an accusation. “A certain portion” is faux-modest phrasing, a gentleman’s euphemism that pretends not to generalize while clearly indicting a broad, recognizable public. The punch is in the word “taste”: being swindled isn’t merely tolerated, it’s desired, even cultivated. Hood isn’t describing victimhood as pure misfortune; he’s skewering the appetite for comforting deception, the craving to be told a flattering story and pay for it.

“Diddled” does crucial tonal work. It’s comic, almost nursery-like, which makes the act of fraud feel routine rather than monstrous. That lightness is the barb: if the language of the con is cozy, the conscience can stay clean. You can be robbed and still feel entertained, even superior for having participated in the spectacle. Hood’s satire targets the whole ecosystem that makes grift possible: not just the grifter, but the crowd that wants the performance, the easy promise, the miracle cure, the shortcut to status.

Context matters. Writing in a Britain buzzing with expanding consumer culture, speculative schemes, and an increasingly literate public hungry for print, Hood is diagnosing a modern vulnerability: the marketplace of attention. The line implies that persuasion doesn’t always overpower reason; sometimes it partners with desire. People aren’t only fooled. They collaborate, because being “diddled” can spare you the harder labor of skepticism, or the humiliation of admitting you wanted the lie.