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 their earliest miseries.  It was in learning Hook’s exercises, or primers, or whatever they were called, that they first had their fingers slapped over the piano-forte.  The father of Theodore, no doubt, was the unwitting cause of much unhappiness to many a young lady in her teens.  Hook pere was an organist at Norwich.  He came up to town, and was engaged at Marylebone Gardens and at Vauxhall; so that Theodore had no excuse for being of decidedly plebeian origin, and, Tory as he was, he was not fool enough to aspire to patricianism.

Theodore’s family was, in real fact, Theodore himself.  He made the name what it is, and raised himself to the position he at one time held.  Yet he had a brother whose claims to celebrity are not altogether ancillary.  James Hook was fifteen years older than Theodore.  After leaving Westminster School he was sent to immortal Skimmery (St. Mary’s Hall), Oxford, which has fostered so many great men—­and spoiled them.  He was advanced in the church from one preferment to another, and ultimately became Dean of Worcester.  The character of the reverend gentleman is pretty well known, but it is unnecessary here to go into it farther.  He is only mentioned as Theodore’s brother in this sketch.[12] He was a dabbler in literature, like his brother, but scarcely to the same extent a dabbler in wit.

[12:  Dr. James Hook, Dean of Worcester, was father to Dr. Walter Farquhar Hook, now the excellent Dean of Chichester, late Vicar of Leeds.]

The younger son of ‘Hook’s Exercises’ developed early enough a taste for ingenious lying—­so much admired in his predecessor—­Sheridan, He ‘fancied himself’ a genius, and therefore, from school-age, not amenable to the common laws of ordinary men.  Frequenters of the now fashionable prize-ring—­thanks to two brutes who have brought that degraded pastime into prominent notice—­will hear a great deal about a man ’fancying himself.’  It is common slang and heeds little explanation.  Hook ’fancied himself’ from an early period, and continued to ‘fancy himself,’ in spite of repeated disgraces, till a very mature age.  At Harrow, he was the contemporary, but scarcely the friend, of Lord Byron.  No two characters could have been more unlike.  Every one knows, more or less, what Byron’s was; it need only be said that Hook’s was the reverse of it in every respect.  Byron felt where Hook laughed.  Byron was morbid where Hook was gay.  Byron abjured with disgust the social vices to which he was introduced; Hook fell in with them.  Byron indulged in vice in a romantic way; Hook in the coarsest.  There is some excuse for Byron, much as he has been blamed.  There is little or no excuse for Hook, much as his faults have been palliated.  The fact is that goodness of heart will soften, in men’s minds, any or all misdemeanours.  Hook, in spite of many vulgar witticisms and cruel jokes, seems to have had a really good heart.