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 of 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.