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.