402

IN THE HOSPICE DU BON SAUVEUR.

and when asked for the amount of his bill, answering very vaguely, "Oui, Madame, à la pleine lune, à la pleine lune."

The drivelings of old age are no fit subject for ridicule, yet in the case of a man who had sneered so freely at his fellowcreatures, they may afford a useful lesson. One of his fancies was to give imaginary parties, when his tallow dips were all set alight and his servant announced with proper decorum, "The Duchess of Devonshire," "Lord Alvanley," "Mr. Sheridan," or whom not. The poor old idiot received the imaginary visitors with the old bow, and talked to them in the old strain, till his servant announced their imaginary carriages, and he was put driveling to bed. At last the idiocy became mania. He burnt his books, his relics, his tokens. He ate enormously, and the man who had looked upon beer as the ne plus ultra of vulgarity, was glad to imagine it champagne. Let us not follow the poor maniac through his wanderings. Rather let us throw a veil over all his driveling wretchedness, and find him at his last gasp, when coat and collar, hat and brim, were all forgotten, when the man who had worn three shirts a day was content to change his linen once a month. What a lesson, what a warning! If Brummell had come to this pass in England, it is hard to say how and where he would have died. He was now utterly penniless, and had no prospect of receiving any remittances. It was determined to remove him to the Hospice du Bon Sauveur, a Maison de Charité, where he would be well cared for at no expense. The mania of the poor creature took, as ever, the turn of external preparation. When the landlord of his inn entered to try and induce him to go, he found him with his wig on his knee, his shaving apparatus by his side, and the quondam beau deeply interested in lathering the peruke as a preliminary to shearing it. He resisted every proposal to move, and was carried down stairs kicking and shrieking. Once lodged in the Hospice, he was treated by the sœurs de charité with the greatest kindness and consideration. An attempt was made to recall him to a sense of his future peril, that he might at least die in a more religious mood than he had lived; but in vain. It is not for us, erring and sinful as we are, to judge any fellow-creature; but perhaps poor Brummell was the last man to whom religion had a meaning. His heart was good; his sins were more those of vanity than those of hate; it may be that they are regarded mercifully where the fund of mercy is unbounded. God grant that they may be so; or who of us would escape? None but devils will triumph over the death of any man in sin. Men are not devils; they must and will always feel for their fellow-men, let them die as they will. No doubt

O YOUNG MEN OF THIS AGE, BE WARNED!

403

Brummell was a fool-a fool of the first water-but that he was equally a knave is not so certain. Let it never be certain to blind man, who can not read the heart, that any man is a knave. He died on the 30th of March, 1840, only twenty years ago, and so the last of the Beaux passed away. People have claimed, indeed, for D'Orsay, the honor of Brummell's descending mantle, but D'Orsay was not strictly a beau, for he had other and higher tastes than mere dress. It has never been advanced that Brummell's heart was bad, in spite of his many faults. Vanity did all. Vanitas vanitatum. O young men of this age, be warned by a Beau, and flee his doubtful reputation! Peace then to the coat-thinker. Peace to allto the worst. Let us look within and not judge. It is enough that we are not tried in the same balance.

THEODORE EDWARD HOOK.

If it be difficult to say what wit is, it is well-nigh as hard to pronounce what is not wit. In a sad world, mirth hath its full honor, let it come in rags or in purple raiment. The age that patronizes a "Punch" every Saturday, and a pantomime every Christmas, has no right to complain if it finds itself barren of wits, while a rival age has brought forth her dozens. Mirth is, no doubt, very good. We would see more, not less, of it in this unmirthful land. We would fain imagine_the_shrunkencheeked factory-girl singing to herself a happy burden, as she shifts the loom-the burden of her life-and fain believe that the voice was innocent as the skylark's. But if it be not so— and we know it is not so-shall we quarrel with any one who tries to give the poor care-worn, money-singing public a little laughter for a few pence? No, truly; but it does not follow that a man who raises a titter is, of necessity, a wit. The next age, perchance, will write a book of "Wits and Beaux," in which Mr. Douglas Jerrold, Mr. Mark Lemon, and so on, will represent the wit of this passing day; and that future age will not ask so nicely what wit is, and not look for that last solved of riddles, its definition.

Hook has been, by common consent, placed at the head of modern wits. When kings were kings, they bullied, beat, and browbeat their jesters. Now and then they treated them to a few years in the Tower for a little extra impudence. Now that the people are sovereign, the jester fares better-nay, too well. His books or his bon-mots are read with zest and grins; he is invited to his Grace's and implored to my Lord's; he is waited for, watched, pampered like a small Grand Llama, and, in one sentence, the greater the fool, the more fools he makes.

If Theodore Hook had lived in the stirring days of King Henry VIII., of blessed (?) memory, he would have sent Messrs. Patch and Co. sharply to the right-about, and been presented with the caps and bells after his first comic song. No doubt he was a jester, a fool in many senses, though he did not, like Solomon's fool, "say in his heart" very much. He jested away even the practicals of life, jested himself into disgrace, into prison, into contempt, into the basest employment-that of a libeler tacked on to a party. He was a mimic, too, to whom none could send a challenge; an improvisa

406

WHAT COLERIDGE SAID OF HOOK.

tore, who beat Italians, Tyroleans, and Styrians hollow, sir, hollow. And lastly-oh! shame of the shuffle-tongued-he was, too, a punster. Yes, a glorier in puns, a maker of pun upon pun, a man whose whole wit ran into a pun as readily as water rushes into a hollow, who could not keep out of a pun, let him loathe it or not, and who made some of the best and some of the worst on record, but still puns.

If he was a wit withal, it was malgré soi, for fun, not wit, was his "aspiration." Yet the world calls him a wit, and he has a claim to his niche. There were, it is true, many a man in his own set who had more real wit. There were James Smith, Thomas Ingoldsby, Tom Hill, and others. Out of his set, but of his time, there was Sydney Smith, ten times more a wit; but Theodore could amuse, Theodore could astonish, Theodore could be at home any where; he had all the impudence, all the readiness, all the indifference of a jester, and a jester he was.

Let any one look at his portrait, and he will doubt if this be the king's jester, painted by Holbein, or Mr. Theodore Hook, painted by Eddis. The short, thick nose, the long upper lip, the sensual, whimsical mouth, the twinkling eyes, all belong to the regular maker of fun. Hook was a certificated jester, with a lenient society to hear and applaud him, instead of an irritable tyrant to keep him in order: and he filled his post well. Whether he was more than a jester may well be doubted; yet Coleridge, when he heard him, said, "I have before in my time met with men of admirable promptitude of intellectual power and play of wit, which, as Stillingfleet says,

"The rays of wit gild wheresoe'er they strike,’

but I never could have conceived such readiness of mind and resources of genius to be poured out on the mere subject and impulse of the moment." The poet was wrong in one respect. Genius can in no sense be applied to Hook, though readiness was his chief charm.

The famous Theodore was born in the same year as Byron, 1788, the one on the 22d of January, the other on the 22d of September; so the poet was only nine months his senior. Hook, like many other wits, was a second son. Ladies of sixty or seventy well remember the name of Hook as that which accompanied their earliest miseries. It was in learning Hook's exercises, or primers, or whatever they were called, that they first had their fingers slapped over the pianoforte. The father of Theodore, no doubt, was the unwitting cause of much unhappiness to many a young lady in her teens. Hook père was an organist at Norwich. He came up to town, and was en