f 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 _malgre 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 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