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.