never displayed to so much advantage as in this scurrilous, scandalous, but irresistibly facetious, and for a time exceedingly potent journal. No man with a particle of chivalry could have written as Hook did, but no such man could have been equally effective in exposing a pernicious, though generous, popular delusion. He undoubtedly proved himself the prince of lampooners. The exuberance of his impetuous fun sweeps away the studied and polished sarcasms of refined satirists like Moore; he hurls ridicule and invective right and left with a Titanic vigour so admirable in itself as a manifestation of energy that we almost forget that after all it is only mud that he is showering. Most of it, however, stuck where it was meant to stick, and his disreputable paper must be named with the ‘Craftsman’ and the ‘North Briton’ among those which have contributed to mould English history. ‘It is impossible to deny,’ says the ‘Quarterly Review,’ ‘that “Bull” frightened the Whig aristocracy from countenancing the Court of Brandenburgh House. The national movement was arrested, and George IV had mainly “John Bull” to thank for that result.’ It produced another result less satisfactory to the editor; when his long-concealed identity leaked out, it became impossible for the treasury to show him the indulgence which would have been represented as the price of his pen, and pique perhaps concurred with carelessness in preventing him from endeavouring to make his defalcations good. He had further encumbered himself with family cares in a very unfortunate manner, having formed an irregular connection, to which he adhered with such strict fidelity that it is surprising he should never have legalised it. Another great mistake was the dissipation of his energies in a number of abortive literary projects, instead of their concentration in his journal, which, after some years of almost unparalleled success, gradually ceased to be a remunerative property. Among these unsuccessful undertakings, however, must not be reckoned his nine volumes of novels published from 1826 to 1829 under the collective title of ‘Sayings and Doings,’ for which he received little less than 3,000l. ‘Passion and Principle,’ with its pendant ‘Cousin William,’ ‘Gervase Skinner,’ and ‘Martha the Gipsy’ are the best known. Hook estimated his own ability as a novelist very accurately. ‘Give me,’ he said, ‘a story to tell, and I can tell it, but I cannot create.’ This deficiency in invention made him an habitual copyist from the life. The hero of ‘Maxwell’ (1830), his next and most carefully constructed novel, is a close portrait of his friend Cannon, and his later works, ‘Gilbert Gurney’ and ‘Gurney Married’ (1836 and 1838), are little else than a gallery of thinly disguised portraits and a string of anecdotes from real life, so excellently told, however, that these slight performances seem likely to survive his more ambitious writings. They appeared in the ‘New Monthly Magazine,’ of which he had become editor in 1836. In the interval he had written (1833) ‘The Parson's Daughter’ and ‘Love and Pride,’ and (1832) a life of Sir David Baird, a work apparently quite out of his line, but which satisfied the family and the public. ‘Jack Brag,’ 1836, is a successful parasite's mockery of an unsuccessful one. He also rewrote the reminiscences of Michael Kelly and commenced a life of Charles Mathews, which was discontinued from differences with the family. His last novel of importance was ‘Births, Marriages, and Deaths,’ 1839; subsequent publications, the dregs of his failing powers, were believed to be only partially from his own hand. During the last six or seven years of his life Hook was steadily sinking in health, in circumstances, and in literary power, and the inner history of his life is truly tragic. Received into the highest circles, admired, caressed, applauded for his unequalled social talent, he was, as he knew well, regarded merely as a hired jester, whose failure to amuse his patrons would be visited by prompt expulsion from their society. While apparently the soul of gaiety abroad, at home he led the life of the hunted and harassed author; while the dissipations of the gay world broke down his health, domestic cares weighed heavily upon his really affectionate disposition; and the scenes where he shone and sparkled were darkened by the great shadow of his unredeemed and unredeemable debt. Lockhart has raised the veil in a most powerful passage in the ‘Quarterly,’ reinforced by significant extracts from Hook's diary. Portraits of him as he appeared at this time to those who chiefly knew him as Lord Hertford's parasite appear in ‘Coningsby,’ where he is introduced as ‘Lucian Gay,’ and in ‘Vanity Fair,’ where he figures as ‘Mr. Wagg.’ ‘Done up in purse, in mind, and in body,’ as he said himself, he expired at his house at Fulham on 24 Aug. 1841. His effects were seized by the crown as preferential creditor, but his family were provided for by a subscription, in which the names of his aristocratic patrons, the king of Hanover's excepted, were not to be found.
Hook was a better man than would be easily discovered from his writings. ‘He was,’ says Lockhart, ‘humane, charitable, generous. There was that about him which
