e 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.

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 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. 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 o