A Miserable Old Age.

161 him still, jeered at by the gamins, and remarkable now, not for the cleanliness, but the filthiness and raggedness of his attire.

Poor old fool! one cannot but pity him, when wretched, friendless, and miserable as he was, we find him, still graceful, in a poor café near the Place Royale, taking his cup of coffee, and when asked for the amount of his bill, answering very vaguely, 'Oui, Madame, à la pleine lune, à la pleine lune.'

The drivellings 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 drivelling 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 drivelling 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

162

In the Hospice du Bon Sauveur.

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 fiends will triumph over the death of any man in sin. Men are not fiends; they must and will always feel for their fellow-men, let them die as they will. No doubt Brummell was a fool-a fool of the first water, but that he was equally a knave was not so certain. Let it never be certain to blind man, who cannot read the heart, that any man is a knave. He died on the 30th of March, 1840, and so the last of the Beaux passed away. People have claimed, indeed for D'Orsay, the honour 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 all. Vanitas vanitatem.

spite of his many faults. Vanity did

O young men of this age, be warned by a Beau, and flee his doubtful reputation! Peace then to the coat-thinker. Peace to all-to the worst. Let us look within and not judge. It is enough that we are not tried in the same balance.

THEODORE EDWARD HOOK.

The Greatest of Modern Wits.-What Coleridge said of Hook.-Hook's Family. -Redeeming Points.-Versatility.-Varieties of Hoaxing. --The Blackwafered 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.

阿

F 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 sky-lark'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 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 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.

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The Greatest of Modern Wits.

Hook has been, by common consent, placed at the head of modern wits. When kings were kings, they bullied, beat, and 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 shuffletongued 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 for 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 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

What Coleridge said of Hook.

165

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: of wit gild wheresoe'er they strike,"

"The rays

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 piano-forte. 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.

Theodore's family was, in real fact, Theodore himself. He 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