THEODORE EDWARD HOOK.

The Greatest of Modern Wits.-What Coleridge said of Hook.-Hook's Family.Redeeming Points.-Versatility.-Varieties of Hoaxing.-The Black-wafered Horse. The Berners Street Hoax.-Success of the Scheme.-The Strop of Hunger. Kitchen Examinations.-The Wrong House.-Angling for an Invitation. The Hackney-coach Device.-The Plots of Hook and Mathews.-Hook's Talents as an Improvisatore.-The Gift becomes his Bane.--Hook's Novels. College Fun.-Baiting a Proctor.-The Punning Faculty.--Official Life Opens.-Troublesome Pleasantry.-Charge of Embezzlement.-Misfortune, -Doubly Disgraced.-No Effort to remove the Stain.-Attacks on the Queen.An Incongruous Mixture.-Specimen of the Ramsbottom Letters.-Hook's Scurrility. Fortune and Popularity.-The End.

Ir 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 honour, let it come in rags or in purple raiment. The age that patronises 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 shrunken-cheeked factory-girl singing to herself a happy burthen, as she shifts the loom,-the burthen 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 careworn, money-singing public a little laughter for a few pence? No, truly, but it does not follow that the 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

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THE GREATEST OF MODERN WITS.

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 brow-beat 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 Lama, 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., 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 libeller tacked on to a party. He was a mimic, too, to whom none could send a challenge; an improvisatore, who beat Italians, Tyroleans, and Styrians hollow, sir, hollow. And lastly--oh! shame of the shuffle-tongued-he was, too, a punster. Yes, one who gloried 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

WHAT COLERIDGE SAID OF HOOK.

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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 anywhere; 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 22nd of January, the other on the 22nd 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 engaged at Marylebone Gardens and at Vauxhall; so that Theodore had no excuse for being of decidedly plebeian origin, and, Tory as he was, he was not fool enough to aspire to patricianism.

He

Theodore's family was, in real fact, Theodore himself. made the name what it is, and raised himself to the position he at one time held. Yet he had a brother whose claims to celebrity are not altogether ancillary. James Hook was fifteen years older than Theodore. After leaving Westminster School, he was sent to immortal Skimmery (St. Mary's Hall), Oxford, which has fostered so many great men-and spoiled them. He was advanced in the church from one preferment to another, and ultimately became Dean of Worcester. The character of the reverend gentleman is pretty well known, but it is unnecessary here to go into it farther. He is only mentioned as Theodore's brother in this sketch.* He was a dabbler in literature, like his brother, but scarcely to the same extent a dabbler in wit.

The younger son of 'Hook's Exercises' developed early enough a taste for ingenious lying-so much admired in his predecessor, Sheridan. He fancied himself' a genius, and therefore, from school-age, not amenable to the common laws of ordinary men. Frequenters of the now fashionable prizering-thanks to two brutes who have brought that degraded pastime into prominent notice-will hear a great deal about a man fancying himself.' It is common slang and needs little explanation. Hook 'fancied himself' from an early period, and continued to 'fancy himself,' in spite of repeated disgraces, till a very mature age. At Harrow, he was the contemporary, but scarcely the friend, of Lord Byron. No two characters could have been more unlike. Every one knows, more or less, what Byron's was; it need only be said that

* Dr. James Hook, Dean of Worcester, was father to Dr. Walter Farquhar Hook, now the excellent Dean of Chichester, late Vicar of Leeds.

Hook's was the reverse of it in every respect. Byron felt where Hook laughed. Byron was morbid where Hook was gay. Byron abjured with disgust the social vices to which he was introduced; Hook fell in with them. Byron indulged in vice in a romantic way; Hook in the coarsest. There is some excuse for Byron, much as he has been blamed. There is little or no excuse for Hook, much as his faults have been palliated. The fact is that goodness of heart will soften, in men's minds, any or all misdemeanours. Hook, in spite of many vulgar witticisms and cruel jokes, seems to have had a really good heart.

I have it on the authority of one of Hook's most intimate friends, that he was capable of any act of kindness, and by way of instance of his goodness of heart, I am told by the same person that he on one occasion quitted all his town amusements to solace the spirit of a friend in the country who was in serious trouble. I, of course, refrain from giving names; but the same person informs me that much of his time was devoted, in a like manner, to relieving, as far as possible, the anxiety of his friends, often, indeed, arising from his own carelessness. It is due to Hook to make this impartial statement before entering on a sketch of his Sayings and Doings,' which must necessarily leave the impression that he was a heartless man.

Old Hook, the father, soon perceived the value of his son's talents; and, determined to turn them to account, encouraged his natural inclination to song-writing. At the age of sixteen Theodore wrote a kind of comic opera, to which his father supplied the music. This was called The Soldier's Return.' It was followed by others, and young Hook, not yet out of his teens, managed to keep a Drury Lane audience alive, as well as himself and family. It must be remembered, however, that Liston and Mathews could make almost any piece amusing. The young author was introduced behind the scenes through his father's connection with the theatre,