In his latter years Hook took to the two dissipations most likely to bring him into misery-play and drink. He was utterly unfitted for the former, being too gay a spirit to sit down and calculate chances. He lost considerably, and the more he lost the more he played. Drinking became almost a necessity with him. He had a reputation to keep up in society, and had not the moral courage to retire from it altogether. Writing, improvising, conviviality, play, demanded stimulants. His mind was overworked in every sense. He had recourse to the only remedy, and in drink he found a temporary relief from anxiety, and a short-lived sustenance. There is no doubt that this man, who had amused London circles for many years, hastened his end by drinking.

It is not yet twenty years since Theodore Hook died. He left the world on August the 24th, 1841, and by this time he remains in the memory of men only as a wit that was, a punster, a hoaxer, a story-jester, with an ample fund of fun, but not as a great man in any way. Allowing every thing for his education-the times he lived in, and the unhappy error of his early life-we may admit that Hook was not, in character, the worst of the wits. He died in no odor of sanctity, but he was not a blasphemer or reviler, like others of his class. He ignored the bond of matrimony, yet he remained faithful to the woman he had betrayed; he was undoubtedly careless in the one responsible office with which he was intrusted, yet he can not be taxed, taking all in all, with deliberate peculation. His drinking and playing were bad-very bad. His improper connection was bad-very bad; but perhaps the worst feature in his career was his connection with "John Bull," and his ready giving in to a system of low libel. There is no excuse for this but the necessity of living; but Hook, had he retained any principle, might have made enough to live upon in a more honest manner. His name does, certainly, not stand out well among the wits of this country, but, after all, since all were so bad, Hook may be excused as not being the worst of them. Requiescat in pace.

SYDNEY SMITH.

"SMITH's reputation" to quote from Lord Cockburn's "Memorials of Edinburgh"-" here, then, was the same as it has been throughout his life, that of a wise wit." A wit he was, but we must deny him the reputation of being a beau. For that, nature, no less than his holy office, had disqualified him. Who that ever beheld him in a London drawing-room, when he went to so many dinners that he used to say he was a walking patty-who could ever miscall him a beau? How few years have we numbered since one perceived the large bulky form in canonical attire-the plain, heavy, almost ugly face, large, long, unredeemed by any expression, except that of sound hard sense-and thought, "can this be the Wit?" How few years is it since Henry Cockburn, hating London, and coming but rarely to what he called the "devil's drawing-room,' stood near him, yet apart, for he was the most diffident of men; his wonderful luminous eyes, his clear, almost youthful, vivid complexion, contrasting brightly with the gray, pallid, prebendal complexion of Sydney? how short a time since Francis Jeffrey, the smallest of great men, a beau in his old age, a wit to the last, stood hat in hand to bandy words with Sydney ere he rushed off to some still gayer scene, some more fashionable circle: yet they are all gone-gone from sight, living in memory alone.

Perhaps it was time: they might have lived, indeed, a few short years longer; we might have heard their names among us; listened to their voices; gazed upon the deep hazel, eversparkling eyes, that constituted the charm of Cockburn's handsome face, and made all other faces seem tame and dead: we might have marveled at the ingenuity, the happy turns of expression, the polite sarcasm of Jeffrey; we might have reveled in Sydney Smith's immense natural gift of fun, and listened to the "wise wit," regretting, with Lord Cockburn, that so much worldly wisdom seemed almost inappropriate in one who should have been in some freer sphere than within the pale of holy orders: we might have done this, but the picture might have been otherwise. Cockburn, whose intellect rose, and became almost sublime, as his spirit neared death, might have sunk into the depression of conscious weakness; Jeffrey might have repeated himself, or turned hypochondriacal; Sydney Smith

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ODDITIES OF THE FATHER.

have grown garrulous: let us not grieve; they went in their prime of intellect, before one quality of mind had been touched by the frost-bite of age.

Sydney Smith's life is a chronicle of literary society. He was born in 1771, and he died in 1845. What a succession of great men does that period comprise! Scott, Jeffrey, Mackintosh, Dugald Stewart, Horner, Brougham, and Cockburn were his familiars-a constellation which has set, we fear, forever. Our world presents nothing like it: we must look back, not around us, for strong minds, cultivated up to the nicest point. Our age is too diffused, too practical for us to hope to witness again so grand a spectacle.

From his progenitors Sydney Smith inherited one of his best gifts, great animal spirits-the only spirits one wants in this racking life of ours; and his were transmitted to him by his father. That father, Mr. Robert Smith, was odd as well as clever. His oddities seem to have been coupled with folly; but that of Sydney was soberized by thought, and swayed by intense common sense. The father had a mania for buying and altering places: one need hardly say that he spoiled them. Having done so, he generally sold them; and nineteen various places were thus the source of expense to him and of injury to the pecuniary interests of his family.

This strange spendthrift married a Miss Olier, the daughter of a French emigrant from Languedoc. Every one may remember the charming attributes given by Miss Kavanagh, in her delicious tale, "Nathalie," to the French women of the South. This Miss Olier seems to have realized all one's ideas of the handsome, sweet-tempered, high-minded Southrons of la belle France. To her Sydney Smith traced his native gayety; her beauty did not, certainly, pass to him as well as to some of her other descendants. When Talleyrand was living in England as an emigrant, on intimate terms with Robert Smith, Sydney's brother, or Bobus, as he was called by his intimates, the conversation turned one day on hereditary beauty. Bobus spoke of his mother's personal perfections: "Ah! mon ami," cried Talleyrand, "c'était apparemment, monsieur: votre "père qui n'était pas bien."

This Bobus was the schoolfellow at Eaton of Canning and Frere; and, with John Smith and those two youths, wrote the "Microcosm." Sydney, on the other hand, was placed, on the Foundation, at Winchester, which was then a stern place of instruction for a gay, spirited, hungry boy. Courtenay, his younger brother, went with him, but ran away twice. To owe one's education to charity was, in those days, to be half starved. Never was there enough, even of the coarsest food, to satisfy

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VERSE-MAKING AT WINCHESTER.

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the boys, and the urchins, fresh from home, were left to fare as they might. "Neglect, abuse, and vice were," Sydney used to say, "the pervading evils of Winchester; and the system of teaching, if one may so call it, savored of the old monastic narrowness. I believe, when a boy at school, I made above ten thousand Latin verses, and no man in his senses would dream of ever making another in after-life. So much for life and time wasted." The verse-inciting process is, nevertheless, remorselessly carried on during three years more at Oxford, and is much oftener the test of patient stupidity than of aspiring talent. Yet of what stupendous importance it is in the attainment of scholarships and prizes; and how zealous, how tenacious are dons and "coaches" in holding to that which far higher classics, the Germans, regard with contempt!

Sydney's proficiency promoted him to be captain of the school, and he left Winchester for New College, Oxford-one of the noblest and most abused institutions then of that grand university. Having obtained a scholarship, as a matter of course, and afterward a fellowship, he remarked that the usual bumpers of port wine at college were as much the order of the day among the Fellows as Latin verses among the under-graduates. We may not, however, picture to ourselves Sydney as partaking in the festivities of the common room; with more probability let us imagine him wandering with steady gait, even after Hall—a thing not either then or now certain in colleges in those evergreen, leafy, varied gardens, flanked by that old St. Peter's church on the one side, and guarded by the high wall, once a fortification, on the other. He was poor, and therefore safe, for poverty is a guardian angel to an undergraduate, and work may protect even the Fellow from utter deterioration.

He was turned out into the world by his father with his hundred a year from the Fellowship, and never had a farthing from the old destroyer of country-seats afterward. He never owed a sixpence; nay, he paid a debt of thirty pounds, which Courtenay, who had no iron in his character, had incurred at Winchester, and had not the courage to avow. The next step was to choose a profession. The bar would have been Sydney's choice; but the Church was the choice of his father. It is the cheapest channel by which a man may pass into genteel poverty; "wit and independence do not make bishops," as Lord Cockburn remarks. We do not, however, regard, as he does, Sydney Smith as "lost" by being a churchman. He was happy, and made others happy; he was good, and made others good. Who can say the same of a successful barrister, or of a popular orator? His first sphere was in a curacy on Salis

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