Hall, by fighting a duel--fortunately as harmless as that of Moore and
Jeffrey--
'When Little's leadless pistol met his eye,
And Bow-street myrmidons stood laughing by,'
as Byron says. The governor was sensible enough to wish to put down the
'Gothic appeal to arms,' and was therefore the more irate.
These circumstances must be taken into consideration in Hook's favour in
examining the charge of embezzlement. It must also be stated that the
information of the deficit was sent in a letter to the governor by a man
named Allan, chief clerk in the Treasury, who had, for irregular
conduct, been already threatened with dismissal. Allan had admitted that
he had known of the deficit for fifteen months, and yet he had not, till
he was himself in trouble, thought of making it known to the proper
authorities. Before his examination, which of course followed, could be
concluded, Allan committed suicide. Now, does it not, on the face of it,
seem of the highest probability that this man was the real delinquent,
and that knowing that Hook had all the responsibility, and having taken
fair precautions against his own detection, he had anticipated a
discovery of the affair by a revelation, incriminating the treasurer?
_Quien sabe_;--dead men tell no tales.
The chest, however, was examined, and the deficit found far greater yet
than had been reported. Hook could not explain, could not understand it
at all; but if not criminal, he had necessarily been careless. He was
arrested, thrown into prison, and by the first vessel despatched to
England to take his trial, his property of every kind having been sold
for the Government. Hook, in utter destitution, might be supposed to
have lost his usual spirits, but he could not resist a joke. At St.
Helena he met an old friend going out to the Cape, who, surprised at
seeing him on his return voyage after a residence of only five years,
said: 'I hope you are not going home for your health.'--'Why,' said
Theodore, 'I am sorry to say they think there is something wrong in the
_chest._ Something wrong in the chest' became henceforward the ordinary
phrase in London society in referring to Hook's scrape.
Arrived in England, he was set free, the Government here having decided
that he could not be criminally tried; and thus Hook, guilty or not, had
been ruined and disgraced for life for simple carelessness. True, the
custody of a nation's property makes negligence almost criminal; but
that does not excuse the punishment of a man before he is tried.
He was summoned, however, to the Colonial Audit Board, where he
underwent a trying examination; after which he was declared to be in the
debt of Government: a writ of extent was issued against him; nine months
were passed in that delightful place of residence--a Sponging-house,
which he then exchanged for the 'Rules of the Bench'--the only rules
which have no exception. From these he was at last liberated, in 1825,
on the understanding that he was to repay the money to Government if at
any time he should be in a position to do so.
His liberation was a tacit acknowledgment of his innocence of the charge
of robbery; his encumberment with a debt caused by another's
delinquencies was, we presume, a signification of his responsibility and
some kind of punishment for his carelessness. Certainly it was hard upon
Hook, that, if innocent, he should not have gone forth without a stain
on his character for honesty; and it was unjust, that, if guilty, he
should not have been punished. The judgment was one of those compromises
with stern justice which are seldom satisfactory to either party.
The fact was that, guilty or not guilty, Hook had been both incompetent
and inconsiderate. Doubtless he congratulated himself highly on
receiving, at the age of twenty-five, an appointment worth £2,000 a year
in the paradise of the world; but how short-sighted his satisfaction,
since this very appointment left him some ten years later a pauper to
begin life anew with an indelible stain on his character. It was absurd
to give so young a man such a post; but it was absolutely wrong in Hook
not to do his utmost to carry out his duties properly. Nay, he had
trifled with the public money in the same liberal--perhaps a _more_
liberal--spirit as if it had been his own--made advances and loans here
and there injudiciously, and taken little heed of the consequences.
Probably, at this day, the common opinion acquits Hook of a designed and
complicated fraud; but common opinion never did acquit him of
misconduct, and even by his friends this affair was looked upon with a
suspicion that preferred silence to examination.
But why take such pains to exonerate Hook from a charge of robbery, when
he was avowedly guilty of as bad a sin, of which the law took no
cognizance, and which society forgave far more easily than it could have
done for robbing the State? Soon after his return from the Mauritius, he
took lodgings in the cheap, but unfashionable neighbourhood of Somers
Town. Here, in the moment of his misfortune, when doubting whether
disgrace, imprisonment, or what not awaited him, he sought solace in the
affection of a young woman, of a class certainly much beneath his, and
of a character unfit to make her a valuable companion to him. Hook had
received little moral training, and had he done so, his impulses were
sufficiently strong to overcome any amount of principle. With this
person--to use the modern slang which seems to convert a glaring sin
into a social misdemeanour--'he formed a connection.' In other words, he
destroyed her virtue. Hateful as such an act is, we must, before we can
condemn a man for it without any recommendation to mercy, consider a
score of circumstances which have rendered the temptation stronger, and
the result almost involuntary. Hook was not a man of high moral
character--very far from it--but we need not therefore suppose that he
sat down coolly and deliberately, like a villain in a novel, to effect
the girl's ruin. But the Rubicon once passed, how difficult is the
retreat! There are but two paths open to a man, who would avoid living a
life of sin: the one, to marry his victim; the other, to break off the
connection before it is too late. The first is, of course, the more
proper course; but there are cases where marriage is impossible. From
the latter a man of any heart must shrink with horror. Yet there _are_
cases, even, where the one sin will prove the least--where she who has
loved too well may grieve bitterly at parting, yet will be no more open
to temptation than if she had never fallen. Such cases are rare, and it
is not probable that the young person with whom Hook had become
connected would have retrieved the fatal error. She became a mother, and
there was no retreat. It is clear that Hook ought to have married her.
It is evident that he was selfish and wrong not to do so;--yet he shrank
from it, weakly, wickedly, and he was punished for his shrinking. He had
sufficient feeling not to throw his victim over, yet he was content to
live a life of sin, and to keep her in such a life. This is perhaps the
blackest stain on Hook's character. When Fox married, in consequence of
a similar connection, he 'settled down,' retrieved his early errors, and
became a better man, morally, than he had ever been. Hook _ought_ to
have married. It was the cowardly dread of public opinion that deterred
him from doing so, and, in consequence, he was never happy, and felt
that this connection was a perpetual burden to him.
Wrecked and ruined, Hook had no resource but his literary talents, and
it is to be deplored that he should have prostituted these to serve an
ungentlemanly and dishonourable party in their onslaught upon an
unfortunate woman. Whatever may be now thought of the queen of 'the
greatest gentleman'--or _roue_--of Europe, those who hunted her down
will never be pardoned, and Hook was one of those. We have cried out
against an Austrian general for condemning a Hungarian lady to the lash,
and we have seen, with delight, a mob chase him through the streets of
London and threaten his very life. But we have not only pardoned, but
even praised, our favourite wit for far worse conduct than this. Even if
we allow, which we do not, chat the queen was one half as bad as her
enemies, or rather her husband's parasites, would make her out, we
cannot forgive the men who, shielded by their incognito, and perfectly
free from danger of any kind, set upon a woman with libels, invectives,
ballads, epigrams, and lampoons, which a lady could scarcely read, and
of which a royal lady, and many an English gentlewoman, too, were the
butts.
The vilest of all the vile papers of that day was the 'John Bull,' now
settled down to a quiet periodical. Perhaps the real John Bull, heavy,
good-natured lumberer as he is, was never worse represented than in this
journal which bore his name, but had little of his kindly spirit. Hook
was its originator, and for a long time its main supporter. Scurrility,
scandal, libel, baseness of all kinds formed the fuel with which it
blazed, and the wit, bitter, unflinching, unsparing, which puffed the
flame up, was its chief recommendation.
No more disgraceful climax was ever reached by a disgraceful dynasty of
profligates than that which found a King of England--long, as Regent,
the leader of the profligate and degraded--at war with his injured
Queen. None have deserved better the honest gratitude of their country
than those who, like Henry Brougham, defended the oppressed woman in
spite of opposition, obloquy, and ridicule.
But we need not go deeply into a history so fresh in the minds of all,
as that blot which shows John Bull himself upholding a wretched
dissipated monarch against a wife, who, whatever her faults, was still a
woman, and whatever her spirit--for she had much of it, and showed it
grandly at need--was still a lady. Suffice it to say that 'John Bull'
was the most violent of the periodicals that attacked her, and that
Theodore Hook, no Puritan himself, was the principal writer in that
paper.
If you can imagine 'Punch' turned Conservative, incorporated in one
paper with the 'Morning Herald,' so that a column of news was printed
side by side with one of a jocular character, and these two together
devoted without principle to the support of a party, the attack of
Whiggism, and an unblushing detraction of the character of one of our
princesses, you can form some idea of what 'John Bull' was in those
days. There is, however, a difference: 'Punch' attacks public
characters, and ridicules public events; 'John Bull' dragged out the
most retired from their privacy, and attacked them with calumnies for
which, often, there was no foundation. Then, again, 'Punch' is not
nearly so bitter as was 'John Bull:' there is not in the 'London
Charivari' a determination to say everything that spite can invent
against any particular set or party; there is a good nature, still, in
master 'Punch.' It was quite the reverse in 'John Bull,' established for
one purpose, and devoted to that. Yet the wit in Theodore's paper does
not rise much higher than that of our modern laughing philosopher.
Of Hook's contributions the most remarkable was the 'Ramsbottom
Letters,' in which Mrs. Lavinia Dorothea Ramsbottom describes all the
_memory billions_ of her various tours at home and abroad, always, of
course, with more or less allusion to political affairs. The 'fun' of
these letters is very inferior to that of 'Jeames' or of the 'Snob
Papers,' and consists more in Malaprop absurdities and a wide range of
bad puns, than in any real wit displayed in them. Of the style of both,
we take an extract anywhere:--
'Oh! Mr. Bull, Room is raley a beautiful place. We entered it by the
Point of Molly, which is just like the Point and Sally at Porchmouth,
only they call Sally there Port, which is not known in Room. The Tiber
is a nice river, it looks yellow, but it does the same there as the
Thames does here. We hired a carry-lettz and a cocky-olly, to take us to
the Church of Salt Peter, which is prodigious big; in the centre of the
pizarro there is a basilisk very high, on the right and left two
handsome foundlings; and the farcy, as Mr. Fulmer called it, is
ornamented with collateral statutes of some of the Apostates.'
We can quite imagine that Hook wrote many of these letters when excited
by wine. Some are laughable enough, but the majority are so deplorably
stupid, reeking with puns and scurrility, that when the temporary
interest was gone, there was nothing left to attract the reader. It is
scarcely possible to laugh at the Joe-Millerish mistakes, the old world
puns, and the trite stories of Hook 'remains.' Remains! indeed; they had
better have remained where they were.
Besides prose of this kind, Hook contributed various jingles--there is
no other name for them--arranged to popular tunes, and intended to
become favourites with the country people. These like the prose
effusions, served the purpose of an hour, and have no interest now.
Whether they were ever really popular remains to be proved. Certes, they
are forgotten now, and long since even in the most Conservative corners
of the country. Many of these have the appearance of having been
originally _recitati_, and their amusement must have depended chiefly on
the face and manner of the singer--Hook himself; but in some he
displayed that vice of rhyming which has often made nonsense go down,
and which is tolerable only when introduced in the satire of a 'Don
Juan' or the first-rate mimicry of 'Rejected Addresses.' Hook had a most
wonderful facility in concocting out-of-the-way rhymes, and a few verses
from his song on Clubs will suffice for a good specimen of his talent:--
'If any man loves comfort, and has little cash to buy it, he
Should get into a crowded club--a most select society;
While solitude and mutton-cutlets serve _infelix uxor_, he
May have his club (Like Hercules), and revel there in luxury.
Bow, wow, wow, &c.
'Yes, clubs knock houses on the head; e'en Hatchett's can't demolish
them;
Joy grieves to see their magnitude, and Long longs to abolish them.
The inns are out; hotels for single men scarce keep alive on it;
While none but houses that are in the family way thrive on it.
Bow, wow, wow, &c.
'There's first the Athenaeum Club, so wise, there's not a man of it,
That has not sense enough for six (in fact, that is the plan of it);
The very waiters answer you with eloquence Socratical;
And always place the knives and forks in order mathematical.
Bow, wow, wow, &c.
* * * * *
'E'en Isis has a house in town, and Cam abandons her city.
The master now hangs out at the Trinity University.
* * * * *
'The Union Club is quite superb; its best apartment daily is,
The lounge of lawyers, doctors, merchants, beaux, _cum multis aliis_.
* * * * *
'The Travellers are in Pall Mall, and smoke cigars so cosily,
And dream they climb the highest Alps, or rove the plains of Moselai.
* * * * *
'These are the stages which all men propose to play their parts upon,
For _clubs_ are what the Londoners have clearly set their _hearts_
upon.
Bow, wow, wow, tiddy-iddy-iddy-iddy, bow, wow, wow, &c.
This is one of the harmless ballads of 'Bull.' Some of the political
ones are scarcely fit to print in the present day. We cannot wonder that
ladies of a certain position gave out that they would not receive any
one who took in this paper. It was scurrilous to the last degree, and
Theodore Hook was the soul of it. He preserved his incognito so well,
that in spite of all attempts to unearth him, it was many years before
he could be certainly fixed upon as a writer in its columns. He even
went to the length of writing letters and articles against himself, in
order to disarm suspicion.
Hook now lived and thrived purely on literature. He published many
novels--gone where the bad novels go, and unread in the present day,
unless in some remote country town, which boasts only a very meagre
circulating library. Improbability took the place of natural painting in
them; punning supplied that of better wit; and personal portraiture was
so freely used, that his most intimate friends--old Mathews, for
instance--did not escape.
Meanwhile Hook, making a good fortune, returned to his convivial life,
and the enjoyment--if enjoyment it be--of general society. He 'threw out
his bow window' on the strength of his success with 'John Bull,' and
spent much more than he had. He mingled freely in all the London circles
of thirty years ago, whose glory is still fresh in the minds of most of
us, and everywhere his talent as an improvisatore, and his
conversational powers, made him a general favourite.
Unhappy popularity for Hook! He, who was yet deeply in debt to the
nation--who had an illegitimate family to maintain, who owed in many
quarters more than he could ever hope to pay--was still fool enough to
entertain largely, and receive both nobles and wits in the handsomest
manner. Why did he not live quietly? why not, like Fox, marry the
unhappy woman whom he had made the mother of his children, and content
himself with trimming vines and rearing tulips? Why, forsooth? because
he was Theodore Hook, thoughtless and foolish to the last. The jester of
the people must needs be a fool. Let him take it to his conscience that
he was not as much a knave.
In his latter years Hook took to the two dissipations most likely to
bring him into misery--play and drink. He was utterly unfitted for the
former, being too gay a spirit to sit down and calculate chances. He
lost considerably, and the more he lost the more he played. Drinking
became almost a necessity with him. He had a reputation to keep up in
society, and had not the moral courage to retire from it altogether.
Writing, improvising, conviviality, play, demanded stimulants. His mind
was overworked in every sense. He had recourse to the only remedy, and
in drinking he found a temporary relief from anxiety, and a short-lived
sustenance. There is no doubt that this man, who had amused London
circles for many years, hastened his end by drinking.
It is not yet thirty years since Theodore Hook died. He left the world
on August the 24th, 1841, and by this time he remains in the memory of
men only as a wit that was, a punster, a hoaxer, a sorry jester, with an
ample fund of fun, but not as a great man in any way. Allowing
everything for his education--the times he lived in, and the unhappy
error of his early life--we may admit that Hook was not, in character,
the worst of the wits. He died in no odour of sanctity, but he was not a
blasphemer or reviler, like others of this class. He ignored the bond of
matrimony, yet he remained faithful to the woman he had betrayed; he was
undoubtedly careless in the one responsible office with which he was
intrusted, yet he cannot be taxed, taking all in all, with deliberate
peculation. His drinking and playing were bad--very bad. His improper
connection was bad--very bad; but perhaps the worst feature in his
career was his connection with 'John Bull,' and his ready giving in to a
system of low libel. There is no excuse for this but the necessity of
living; but Hook, had he retained any principle, might have made enough
to live upon in a more honest manner. His name does, certainly, not
stand out well among the wits of this country, but after all, since all
were so bad, Hook may be excused as not being the worst of them.
_Requiescat in pace_.
SYDNEY SMITH.
The 'Wise Wit.'--Oddities of the Father.--Verse-making at Winchester.--
Curate Life on Salisbury Plain.--Old Edinburgh.--Its Social and
Architectural Features.--Making Love Metaphysically.--The Old Scottish
Supper.--The Men of Mark passing away---The Band of Young Spirits.--
Brougham's Early Tenacity.--Fitting up Conversations.--'Old School'
Ceremonies.--The Speculative Society.--A Brilliant Set.--Sydney's Opinion
of his Friends.--Holland House.--Preacher at the 'Foundling.'--Sydney's
'Grammar of Life.'--The Picture Mania.--A Living Comes at Last.--The
wit's Ministry.--The Parsonage House at Foston-le-Clay.--Country Quiet.
The Universal Scratcher.--Country Life and Country Prejudice.--The Genial
Magistrate.--Glimpse of Edinburgh Society.--Mrs. Grant of Laggan. A
Pension Difficulty.--Jeffrey and Cockburn.--Craigcrook.--Sydney Smith's
Cheerfulness.--His Rheumatic Armour.--No Bishopric.--Becomes Canon of St.
Paul's.--Anecdotes of Lord Dudley.--A Sharp Reproof.--Sydney's
Classification of Society.--Last Strokes of Humour.
Smith's reputation--to quote from Lord Cockburn's 'Memorial of
Edinburgh'--'here, then, was the same as it has been throughout his
life, that of a wise wit.' A wit he was, but we must deny him the
reputation of being a beau. For that, nature, no less than his holy
office, had disqualified him. Who that ever beheld him in a London
drawing-room, when he went to so many dinners that he used to say he was
a walking patty--who could ever miscall him a beau? How few years have
we numbered since one perceived the large bulky form in canonical
attire--the plain, heavy face, large, long, unredeemed by any
expression, except that of sound hard sense--and thought, 'can this be
the Wit?' How few years is it since Henry Cockburn, hating London, and
coming but rarely to what he called the 'devil's drawing room,' stood
near him, yet apart, for he was the most diffident of men; his wonderful
luminous eyes, his clear, almost youthful, vivid complexion, contrasting
brightly with the gray, pallid, prebendal complexion of Sydney? how
short a time since Francis Jeffery, the smallest of great men, a beau in
his old age, a wit to the last, stood hat in hand to bandy words with
Sydney ere he rushed off to some still gayer scene, some more
fashionable circle: yet they are all gone--gone from sight, living in
memory alone.
Perhaps it was time: they might have lived, indeed, a few short years
longer; we might have heard their names amongst us; listened to their
voices; gazed upon the deep hazel, ever-sparkling eyes, that constituted
the charm of Cockburn's handsome face, and made all other faces seem
tame and dead: we might have marvelled at the ingenuity, the happy turns
of expression, the polite sarcasm of Jeffrey; we might have revelled in
Sydney Smith's immense natural gift of fun, and listened to the 'wise
wit,' regretting with Lord Cockburn, that so much worldly wisdom seemed
almost inappropriate in one who should have been in some freer sphere
than within the pale of holy orders: we might have done this, but the
picture might have been otherwise. Cockburn, whose intellect rose, and
became almost sublime, as his spirit neared death, might have sunk into
the depression of conscious weakness; Jeffery might have repeated
himself, or turned hypochondriacal; Sydney Smith have grown garrulous:
let us not grieve; they went in their prime of intellect, before one
quality of mind had been touched by the frostbite of age.
Sydney Smith's life is a chronicle of literary society. He was born in
1771, and he died in 1845. What a succession of great men does that
period comprise! Scott, Jeffrey, Mackintosh, Dugald Stewart, Homer,
Brougham and Cockburn were his familiars--a constellation which has set,
we fear, for ever. Our world presents nothing like it: we must look
back, not around us, for strong minds, cultivated up to the nicest
point. Our age is too diffused, too practical for us to hope to witness
again so grand a spectacle.
From his progenitors Sydney Smith inherited one of his best gifts, great
animal spirits--the only spirits one wants in this racking life of ours;
and his were transmitted to him by his father. That father, Mr. Robert
Smith, was odd as well as clever. His oddities seem to have been coupled
with folly but that of Sydney was soberized by thought, and swayed by
intense common sense. The father had a mania for buying and altering
places: one need hardly say that he spoiled them. Having done so, he
generally sold them; and _nineteen_ various places were thus the source
of expense to him, and of injury to the pecuniary interests of his
family.