a
dark, foggy night. These "enterprises of great pith and moment" are
detailed by himself in full. The most "glorious" of them has been often
told: how he sent through the post some four thousand letters, inviting
on a given day a huge assemblage of visitors to the house of a lady of
fortune, living at 54, Berners Street. They came, beginning with a dozen
sweeps at daybreak, and including lawyers, doctors, upholsterers,
jewellers, coal-merchants, linen-drapers, artists, even the Lord Mayor,
for whose behoof a special temptation was invented. In a word, there was
no conceivable trade, profession, or calling that was not summoned to
augment the crowd of foot-passengers and carriages by which the street
was thronged from dawn till midnight; while Hook and a friend enjoyed
the confusion from a room opposite.[B] Lockhart, in the "Quarterly,"
states that the hoax was merely the result of a wager that Hook would in
a week make the quiet dwelling the most famous house in all London. Mr.
Barham affirms that the lady, Mrs. Tottenham, had on some account fallen
under the displeasure of the formidable trio, Mr. Hook and two unnamed
friends.

His conversation was an unceasing stream of wit, of which he was
profuse, as if he knew the source to be inexhaustible. He never kept it
for display, or for company, or for those only who knew its value: wit
was, indeed, as natural to him as commonplace to commonplace characters.
It was not only in puns, in repartees, in lively retorts, in sparkling
sentences, in brilliant illustrations, or in apt or exciting anecdote,
that this faculty was developed. I have known him string together a
number of graceful verses, every one of which was fine in composition
and admirable in point, at a moment's notice, on a subject the most
inauspicious, and apparently impossible either to wit or rhyme,--yet
with an effect that delighted a party, and might have borne the test of
criticism the most severe. These verses he usually sang in a sort of
recitative to some tune with which all were familiar,--and if a piano
were at hand, he accompanied himself with a gentle strain of music.

Mrs. Mathews relates that she was present once when Hook dined with the
Drury-Lane Company, at a banquet given to Sheridan in honor of his
return for Westminster. The guests were numerous, yet he made a verse
upon every person in the room:--"Every action was turned to account;
every circumstance, the look, the gesture, or any other ac