We may be permitted to doubt this conclusion; we are as fond of laughter as ever, as ready to laugh if somebody will set us going.  Mr. Stevenson prefers of late to be thought grim in his fiction, but he has set the sides shaking, both over that “Wrong Box” which we spoke of, and in earlier days.  We are ready to laugh with Stockton from overseas, with our own Anstey, with anybody who has the heart to be merry, and the wit to make his mirth communicable.  But, it may be doubted if we read our Lever quite as much as a wise doctor, who happened also to be a wise man of letters, would recommend.  And we may well fancy that such a doctor dealing with a patient for whom laughter was salutary—­as for whom is it not salutary—­would exhibit Theodore Hook in rather large doses.

Undoubtedly the fun is a little old fashioned, but it is none the worse for that.  Those who share Mr. Hardcastle’s tastes for old wine and old books will not like Theodore Hook any the less, because he does not happen to be at all “Fin de Siecle”.  He is like Berowne in the comedy, the merriest man—­perhaps not always within the limits of becoming mirth—­to spend an hour’s talk withal.  There is no better key to the age in which Hook glittered, than Hook’s own stories.  The London of that day—­the London which is as dead and gone as Nineveh or Karnak or Troy—­lives with extraordinary freshness in Theodore Hook’s pages.  And how entertaining those pages are.  It is not always the greatest writers who are the most mirth provoking, but how much we owe to them.  The man must have no mirth in him if he fail to be tickled by the best of Labiche’s comedies, aye and the worst too, if such a term can be applied to any of the enchanting series; if he refuse to unbend over “A Day’s Journey and a Life’s Romance,” if he cannot let himself go and enjoy himself over Gilbert Gurney’s river adventure.  If the revival of the Whartons’ book were to serve no other purpose than to send some laughter loving souls to the heady well-spring of Theodore Hook’s merriment, it would have done the mirthful a good turn and deserved well of its country.

There is scarcely a queerer, or scarcely a more pathetic figure in the world than that of Beau Brummell.  He seems to belong to ancient history, he and his titanic foppishness and his smart clothes and his smart sayings.  Yet is it but a little while since the last of his adorers, the most devoted of his disciples passed away from the earth.  Over in Paris there lingered till the past year a certain man of letters who was very brilliant and very poor and very eccentric.  So long as people study French literature, and care to investigate the amount of high artistic workmanship which goes into even its minor productions, so long the name of Barbey D’Aurevilly will have its niche—­not a very large one, it is true—­in the temple.  The author of that strange and beautiful story “Le Chevalier des Touches,” was a great devotee of Brummell’s.  He was himself