From the Spectator. The Life and Remains of Theodore Hook. By the Rev. R. H. DALTON BARHAM, B. A., author of the "Life of Thomas Ingoldsby." THEODORE HOOK may be placed at the head of that class of "wits," almost peculiar to England, who applied their talents to political purposes, and contributed more perhaps than oratory or hope towards keeping their party together in bad times, by enlisting the laughers on its side, giving a bond of union to its followers by uttering their prejudices in a spicy and popular form, and feeding their anger or worse passions by peppering the sore places of their enemies. Single songs under the Stuarts (especially under Charles the Second) may display a deeper knowledge of men and much larger ideas of the English constitution and of government in general-in both which things poor Hook was rather deficient; Hanbury Williams, we think, had a nicer perception of the humorous in character, and Moore a more sparkling play of wit with refinement of manner ; but all these men were amateurs or guerillas. They wrote when they pleased, and what they pleased; they could wait for a subject and the vein to handle it, and not send it forth till they had worked it up to their ideas of finish. For some years Theodore Hook was at it week after week, as 66 regular as the Sunday came;" and if much was coarse, much trivial and dependent upon the time, and much animated by what he would have called the spirit of Flunkeyism, the palm of readiness and fluency must be awarded him; while a mere selection from his political jeux d'esprit rival or exceed in bulk the whole labors of his rivals, and in merit certainly equal, and we think surpass them. If he be compared with Moore especially, Theodore Hook will be found to excel in substance, directness, and vigor; he is thinking of his work and its object, not of the pretty way in which he is doing it; while, strange to say of such a farceur, he seems animated by a more earnest spirit than Moore to be really indignant against the follies or vices he assails; and probably he was for the time, or in theory. He appears to have had from inheritance and early association the player's notions of loyalty, and he got such ideas of religion as such a mind could entertain from the connection of "church and state," and the fact of his brother being a (political and polemical) dean. In his life Theodore Hook bore a strong generic resemblance to the race whom our ancestors called "wits;" especially in the indifference shown towards his difficulties by those whom he amused. The day had indeed gone by when a man of his varied and popular powers was frequently indebted to the "treats" of his friends for his meals, had often no other bed than a bulk or a bundle of straw in a lodging-house, and furnished the satirist with similes for the swiftness or dexterity with which he eluded the bailiffs. But his life, if less visibly poor and wretched, was as harassed as theirs; while the state he at one time affected, and "the appearances" he always kept up, introduced into his embarrassments an element of large and varied difficulties, from which the older authors were freed. In Hook's case the distresses seemed the result of folly produced by Fate. What could possess him to take the house of a lord, to live like a lord, and to entertain lords, it is difficult to tell; his literary celebrity, and his social powers of amusing-perhaps excelling those of Mathews himself, would always have procured him the lords and the living; and his domestic establishment was not, according to his biographer, one that could induce him to cultivate a connection for the purpose of introducing his family. In this gulf of magnificent living, was not only swallowed up the 2,0007. a year he drew from the John Bull during the zenith of its popularity, and the large sums he gained from his novels, but a good many future gains that were never realized. This was his way of doing things, according to Mr. Barham. the large sums they brought him in, proved, indiThe great success of Mr. Hook's first novels, and rectly, as is too often the case with literary men, the cause of much of his subsequent embarrassment; his better judgment was completely dazzled by the prospect that appeared to open; he seemed to think that by virtue of his pen an almost unlimited income was placed at his command; and he launched out accordingly into expenses, and adopted a style of hospitality, that induced the most disastrous consequences. His first step was to give up, in 1827, his moderate establishment at Putney, and hire a large and fashionable mansion in Cleveland Row, belonging to his friend Lord Lowther, but in the hands at that time of the late Captain Marryat. For this he paid 2007. a year, and immediately laid out between two and three thousand pounds in furniture and decorations; accepting bills for the amount, and trusting to the returns from the John Bull and other publications for the wherewith to meet them. This was his great error, and one which no amount of exertion sufficed to repair. Ready money became scarce, supplies were to be overdrawn, and the patience of his co-proprietors raised at any cost; his account with the paper was exhausted; fresh engagements were in consequence entered into, and advances obtained from the publishers. The proceeds of his intellectual resources being thus mortgaged and forestalled, and his energies in consequence withdrawn from the Bull in favor of more pressing claimants, the sale of the paper, together with his clear profit of two thousand a year, began rapidly to sink. Straitened and reduced, he remained nevertheless, for a time, unwilling to retrench; there was but one alternative, and he became speedily entangled in the meshes of usurers and bill-discounters, and all the obscene tribe of vampires that feed on the extravagant and necessitous. It is not, however, without a feeling of satisfaction, that we are enabled to trace much of the pecuniary distress in which he became so early and apparently so inexplicably involved, to the imprudence or ill fortune of others. In 1831, we find him soliciting advances from his publishers, on the during the year by the bankruptcy of two or three "loss of upwards of 1,500l. sustained friends." His connection with one firm in particular plunged him into sudden and considerable difficulty; he had undertaken the editorship of some ground of a literary speculation, and had received large sums, whose father knew him well, gives a picture of in paper, on account, most of which had been paid his life during the latter part of it, which with a into the hands of his upholsterers; when the failure little softening might possibly apply to a large of the house, just as these bills were becoming due, entailed upon him quite unexpectedly the necessity portion of his career. of finding the money to meet them. a We may venture to supply, by way of specimen, sketch, by no means overcharged, of one of those ly iron energies of Theodore Hook were premarestless life-exhausting days in which the seemingturely consumed. A late breakfast-his spirits jaded by the exertions of yesterday, and further depressed by the impending weight of some pecuniary difficulty; large arrears of literary toil to be made up; the meal sent away untasted; every power of his mind forced and strained for the next be in hand-then a rapid drive to town and a visit, four or five hours upon the subject that happens to first to one club, where, the centre of an admiring circle, his intellectual faculties are again upon the stretch, and again aroused and sustained by arti ficial means; the same thing repeated at a second general meeting" at a third, the chair taken by —the same drain and the same supply; a ballot or Mr. Hook-who, as a friend observes, addresses the members, produces the accounts, audits and passes them, gives a succinct statement of the prospects and finances of the society, parries an awk ward question, extinguishes a grumbler, confounds an opponent, proposes a vote of thanks" to him self, seconds, carries it, and "returns thanks" with organized schemes of the minority; then a chop in a vivacious rapidity that entirely confounds the un the committee-room, and "just one tumbler of brandy and water," or two; and we fear the cata logue would not always close there. 66 Much of Hook's improvidence may be traced to the circumstances and training of his early years. He lost his mother in boyhood. His father, a prolific and popular musical composer in his day, allowed him to do pretty much as he pleased. After the education of boarding-schools and a short sojourn at Harrow, where he got such learning as he had, (for in a brief career at college, subsequently, he acquired nothing,) Mr. Hook impressed Theodore into the service of the theatre. In his sixteenth year he was associated with his father in the concoction of a musical drama in two acts, announced as "The Soldier's return, or What can Beauty do the Overture and Music entirely new, composed by Mr. Hook." The acting of an Irishman by Jack Johnstone floated the puerile piece, and Theodore received 507. as his share. This was in 1805; and henceforth the stripling became a dramatic author and "man upon town"-free of the theatres before and behind the curtain-the pet of the green-room; with a literary celebrity enough to introduce him into society, and amusing powers to enlarge his visiting-list, till it extended, Mr. Barham says, through Sheridan, to Carlton House; while he was known for fracas and "hoaxes" that would not have been tolerated in his later days. Off next to take his place at some lordly banquet, The expenses of this kind of life were maintained where the fire of wit is to be stirred again into dazon credit, till his appointment, in 1813, to the zling blaze, and fed by fresh supplies of potent treasurership of the Mauritius. The source of this his delightful extempores: the pianoforte is at hand stimulants. Lady A has never heard one of patronage is obscure; a more scandalous appoint-we have seen it established with malice prepense ment, be the source what it might, can scarcely in the dining-room when he has been expected; be imagined; and so it turned out. In 1817, a fresh and more vigorous efforts of fancy, memory, deficiency of many thousands in the colonial chest and application, are called for-all the wondrous was discovered; and after an inquiry of several machinery of the brain taxed and strained to the months, Hook was sent in custody to England; very utmost-smiles and applause reward the exerwhere he arrived in January, 1819. Upon this in- shown himself thoroughly i' the vein, is craved as tion and perhaps one more chanson, if he has cident the present work throws no new light, as a special favor; or possibly, if the call has been to whether Hook or his subordinate was the de-made too early or too late, some dull-witted gentlefaulter; all that is clear is the loss of the money. But when Mr. Barham acquits Hook on the score of the difficulty of getting through so large a sum (between 9,000l. and 12,0007.) in a small colony without attracting attention, he forgets his English debts and his taste for gaming. man hints that he is a little disappointed in Mr. Hook; and the host admits that he has not been so happy as he has known him. He retires at last, Crockford's is proposed by some gay companion as but not to rest-not to home. Half an hour at they quit together: we need not continue the picture; the half hour is quadrupled, and the exciteOn his return to England, Hook at first re- ment of the preceding evening is as nothing to that mained under a cloud, and took quiet lodgings in which now ensues; whether he rises from the taSomers Town. There he continued, notwith-ble winner or loser, by the time he has reached standing the success of the John Bull, started in 1820, until his arrest as a defaulter in 1823. In 1825 he was discharged from custody, and took a house at Putney, on a scale not incommensurate with his then income; but removed in 1827, as The result might have been predicted. Notwe have seen already, to Cleveland Row, and at a withstanding an iron constitution, he died at the time when his income, we suspect, was not in- age of fifty-one, apparently of "gin-liver," a discreasing. During those years, he appears to have ease which, originating in immoderate doses of allived a life of continual excitement from literary cohol, impairs the digestion, destroys the function exertion, social improvisation, the pleasures of the of the liver, and induces death by something like table, and embarrassed affairs. Mr. Barham, inanition. Fulham the reaction is complete, and in a state of utter prostration, bodily and mental, he seeks his pillow; to run, perhaps, precisely a similar course on the morrow. The Life of Theodore Hook is rather a slight affair. Mr. Barham is deficient in largeness and plan; there is no method, and some chronological confusion in his structure. As a dramatist, Hook is rather underrated by his biographer: his novels are much overrated; for in their "humors" they were not much better than clever caricatures, and his serious parts were substantially melodramas; he founded no school of his own, and was not eminent in any other. Hook's fame must rest upon his political jeux d'esprit; and that kind of celebrity is continually waning. Even now, many of his fugitive pieces can only be read with zest by those who remember the time when they were produced and the persons they satirized. But many, it should be said, have a humor, a breadth, and a felicity, that promise as much permanence as such productions can attain. The second volume, devoted to what is called the Remains, consists of prose and poetical selections from the John Bull, made by Hook himself before his death, but the publication of which was suspended. The papers were subsequently considered by Mr. Barham, who omitted some as too , personal; but it is probable that he lopped too freely. We miss several things that were better and not more personal than some which are printed; and after all, perhaps, Hook's personalities have been exaggerated. There was, no doubt, a sensual coarseness about the nature of Hook, which made his attacks offensive to taste and sometimes to propriety; but those who remember the caricatures and other assaults upon George the Fourth and his Court, or read the Satirical and Humorous Poems of Thomas Moore, may doubt whether Hook stands alone in personality. The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain. A fancy for Christmas-time. By CHARLES DICKENS. Harper & Brothers. was the charity that forgave it. Nor only this. With both are connected, inseparably, so many thoughts that soften and exalt whatever else is in the sense or memory, that what is good and pleasurable in life would cease to continue so if these were forgotten. The old proverb does not tell you to forget that you may forgive, but to forgive that you may forget. It is forgiveness of wrong, for forgetfulness of the evil that was in it such as poor old Lear begged of Cordelia. The thought has been handled by true and great thinkers in various ways. Much of one of Landor's noble imaginary dialogues turns upon it, where Cicero speaks to his brother of the death of his wife, and surprises him by saying that it is sorrow which best inhibits and checks the ruder passions as they grow and swell within us, and keeps the gentler passions in their proper play. Immoderate grief, he continues, like everything else immoderate, is useless and pernicious; but if we did not consent to tolerate and endure grief, if we did not prepare for it, meet it, commune with it, if we did not even cherish it in its season, much of what is best in our faculties, much of our tenderness, much of our generosity, much of our patriotism, much also of our genius, would be stifled and extinguished. "When I hear any one call upon another to be manly and restrain his tears, if they flow from the social and the kind affections, I doubt the humanity and distrust the wisdom of the counsellor. * * Philosophy, we may be told, would prevent the tears by turning away the sources of them, and by raising up a rampart against pain and sorrow. I am of opinion that philosophy, quite pure and totally abstracted from our appetites and passions, instead of serving us the better, would do us little or no good at all. We may receive so much light as not to see, and so much philosophy as to be worse than foolish." The hero of Mr. Dickens' story, Redlaw, is an illustration of the latter remark. He is a great THERE is no writer, we have often said, who has so much of the spirit of Christmas in his writ-chemist, a lecturer at an old foundation, a man of ings as Mr. Dickens. He has its mirth and imagination, its tolerance and kindliness, its cheerful and solemn thoughts. Christmas "fancies" are in all his books, because grave glad fancies are in them all, touches of nature that bring tears to the eye, lessons of charity that thrill through the heart, life and laughter in the utmost exuberance, kindness to the poor, and manly consideration for all. In the little story before us, Mr. Dickens repeats once again, this Christmas-time, its always seasonable, untiring truths. Perhaps never more pleasantly. The more often he deals with thein, the more he knows to vary them, and render them delightful. The fancy on which the story turns is that no man should so far question the mysterious dispensations of evil in the world, as to desire to lose the memory of such evil as the world may have visited upon himself. There may have been sorrow, but there was the kindness that assuaged it; there may have been wrong, but there studious, philosophic habits, haunted with recollections of the past "o'er which his melancholy sits on brood," thinking his knowledge of the present a worthier substitute, and at last parting with that portion of himself which he thinks he can safely cast away. The recollections are of a great wrong done him in early life, and of all the sorrow consequent upon it; and the ghost he holds nightly conference with, is the darker presentiment himself embodied in those bitter recollections. This part of the tale is beautifully managed. Out of images of gloomy and wintery fancies heaped up, the supernatural takes a shape which is not violent or forced; and the dialogue, which is no dialogue, but a kind of a dreary dreamy echo, is a piece of ghostly imagination finer than any in Mrs. Radcliff. The boon desired is granted, and the bargain struck. Redlaw is not only to lose his own recollection of sorrow and wrong, but to destroy the like memory in all whom he approaches. By this means the effect is shown in humble as well as higher minds, in the worst poverty as in ease and competence, and with the same result in all. Redlaw loses his affections and sympathy, sees them crushed in others, and is brought to the level of the only creature whom he cannot influence or change, an outcast of the streets, a boy who has nothing but the brutish appetites. Never having had his mind awakened, evil is this creature's good, sorrow has no place in his memory, and from his brutish ignorance the philosopher can take nothing away. The gift bestowed, diffused, and withdrawn, constitutes the story; and we have a contrast in the means by which Redlaw's error is redeemed, not less thoughtful than that by which its folly is exposed. What the highest exercise of the intellect has missed, is found in the simplest form of the affections. The wife of the custodian of the college where the chemist is professor, in whom are all the unselfish virtues which can beautify and endear the humblest condition of life, becomes the instrument of the change. Such sorrow as she has suffered had made her only zealous to relieve others' sufferings, and the discontented wise man learns from her example that the world is, after all, a much happier compromise than it seems to be, and life easier than wisdom is apt to think it; that grief gives joy its relish, purifying what it touches truly; and that "sweet are the uses of adversity,' where its clouds are not the shadow of dishonor. In the few pages that compose the sketch these things can be shown but lightly; perhaps there is sometimes hardly space to work the thought fairly out; but the desired impression is made, and the greatest effect which the story is likely to produce will probably not be felt at the moment it is read. or of courtiers. He had found, on the other hand, in the huts of the poorest, true nobility of soul. When wealth was offered to any who would betray him, when death was denounced against all who should shelter him, cottagers and serving men had kept his secret truly, and had kissed his hand under his mean disguises with as much reverence as if he had been seated on his ancestral throne. From such a school it might have been expected that a young man who wanted neither abilities nor amiable qualities would have come forth a great and good king. Charles came forth from that school with social habits, with polite and engaging manners, and with some talent for lively conversation, addicted beyond measure to sensual indulgence, fond of sauntering and of frivolous amusements, incapable of self-denial and of exertion, without faith in human virtue or in human attachment, without desire of renown, and without sensibility to reproach. According to him, every person was to be bought. But some people haggled more about their price than others; and when this haggling was very obstinate and very skilful it was called by some fine name. The chief trick by which clever men kept up the price of their abilities was called integrity. The chief trick by which handsome women kept up the price of their beauty was called modesty. The love of God, the love of country, the love of family, the love of friends, were phrases of the same sort, delicate and convenient synonymes for the love of self. Thinking thus of mankind, Charles cared very little what they thought of him. Honor and shame were scarcely more to him than light and darkness to the blind. contempt of flattery has been highly commended, but seems, when viewed in connection with the rest of his character, to deserve no commendation. It is possible to be below flattery as well as above THE restored king was at this time more loved it. One who trusts nobody will not trust sycoby the people than any of his predecessors had phants. One who does not value real glory will ever been. The calamities of his house, the not value its counterfeit. It is creditable to heroic death of his father, his own long sufferings Charles' temper, that, ill as he thought of his and romantic adventures, made him an object of species, he never became a misanthrope. He saw tender interest. His return had delivered the little in men but what was hateful. Yet he did country from an intolerable bondage. Recalled not hate them. Nay, he was so far humane that it by the voice of both the contending factions, he was highly disagreeable to him to see their sufferwas the very man to arbitrate between them; and ings or to hear their complaints. This, however, in some respects he was well qualified for the task. is a sort of humanity which, though amiable and He had received from nature excellent parts and a laudable in a private man whose power to help or happy temper. His education had been such as hurt is bounded by a narrow circle, has in princes might have been expected to develop his under- often been rather a vice than a virtue. More than standing, and to form him to the practice of every one well-disposed ruler has given up whole provpublic and private virtue. He had passed through inces to rapine and oppression, merely from a wish all varieties of fortune, and had seen both sides of to see none but happy faces round his own board human nature. He had, while very young, been and in his own walks. No man is fit to govern driven forth from a palace to a life of exile, penury, great societies who hesitates about disobliging the and danger. He had, at an age when the mind few who have access to him for the sake of the and body are in their highest perfection, and when many whom he will never see. The facility of the first effervescence of boyish passions should Charles was such as has perhaps never been found have subsided, been recalled from his wanderings in any man of equal sense. He was a slave withto wear a crown. He had been taught by bitter out being a dupe. Worthless men and women, to experience how much baseness, perfidy, and in- the very bottom of whose hearts he saw, and gratitude may be hid under the obsequious demean- whom he knew to be destitute of affection for him THE CHARACTER OF CHARLES THE SECOND. His and undeserving of his confidence, could easily to give reluctant attendance at endless prayers and wheedle him out of titles, places, domains, state sermons, and might think himself fortunate when secrets, and pardons. He bestowed much; yet he was not insolently reminded from the pulpit of he neither enjoyed the pleasure nor acquired the his own frailties, of his father's tyranny, and of fame of beneficence. He never gave spontaneous- his mother's idolatry. Indeed, he had been so ly; but it was painful to him to refuse. The miserable during this part of his life that the consequence was that his bounty generally went, defeat which made him again a wanderer might not to those who deserved it best, nor even to be regarded as a deliverance rather than as a those whom he liked best, but to the most shame- calamity. Under the influence of such feelings less and importunate suitor who could obtain an as these, Charles was desirous to depress the party audience. The motives which governed the polit- which had resisted his father.-Macaulay's Hisical conduct of Charles the Second differed widely tory. from those by which his predecessor and his successor were actuated. He was not a man to be imposed upon by the patriarchal theory of government and the doctrine of divine right. He was utterly without ambition. He detested business, and would sooner have abdicated his crown than have undergone the trouble of really directing the administration. Such was his aversion to toil, and such his ignorance of affairs, that the very clerks who attended him when he sat in council could not refrain from sneering at his frivolous remarks, and at his childish impatience. THE AMERICAN PANORAMA. A VERY extraordinary exhibition is open at the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly, under the title of "Banvard's Geographical Panorama of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers." With one or two excep tions, its remarkable claims to public notice seem scarcely to have been recognized as they deserve. We recommend them to the consideration of all holiday-makers and sight-seers this Christmas. not remarkable for accuracy of drawing, or for brilliancy of color, or for subtle effects of light and shade, or for any approach to any of the qualities of those delicate and beautiful pictures by Mr. Stanfield which used once upon a time to pass before our eyes in like manner. It is not very skil fully set off by the disposition of the artificial light; it is not assisted by anything but a pianoforte and a seraphine. It may be well to say what the panorama is not. Neither It is not a refined work of art (nor does it claim gratitude nor revenge had any share in determin- to be, in Mr. Banvard's modest description ;) it is ing his course; for never was there a mind on which both services and injuries left such faint and transitory impressions. He wished merely to be a king such as Louis the Fifteenth of France afterwards was; a king who could draw without limit on the treasury for the gratification of his private tastes, who could hire with wealth and honors persons capable of assisting him to kill the time, and who, even when the state was brought by maladministration to the depths of humiliation But it is a picture three miles long, which ocand to the brink of ruin, could still exclude un-cupies two hours in its passage before the audiwelcome truth from the purlieus of his own serag- ence. It is a picture of one of the greatest streams lio, and refuse to see and hear whatever might in the known world, whose course it follows for disturb his luxurious repose. For these ends, and upwards of three thousand miles. It is a picture for these ends alone, he wished to obtain arbitrary irresistibly impressing the spectator with a conviepower, if it could be obtained without risk or tion of its plain and simple truthfulness, even trouble. In the religious disputes which divided though that were not guaranteed by the best testihis Protestant subjects, his conscience was not at monials. It is an easy means of travelling night all interested. For his opinions oscillated in a and day, without any inconvenience from climate, state of contented suspense between infidelity and steam-boat company, or fatigue, from New Orpopery. But, though his conscience was neutral leans to the Yellow Stone Bluffs, (or from the in the quarrel between the Episcopalians and the Yellow Stone Bluffs to New Orleans, as the case Presbyterians, his taste was by no means so. His may be,) and seeing every town and settlement favorite vices were precisely those to which the upon the river's banks, and all the strange wild Puritans were least indulgent. He could not get ways of life that are afloat upon its waters. To through one day without the help of diversions see this painting is, in a word, to have a thorough which the Puritans regarded as sinful. As a man understanding of what the great American river eminently well bred, and keenly sensible of the is-except, we believe, in the color of its waterridiculous, he was moved to contemptuous mirth and to acquire a new power of testing the descripby the Puritan oddities. He had indeed some tive accuracy of its best describers. reason to dislike the rigid sect. He had, at the age when the passions are most impetuous, and when levity is most pardonable, spent some months in Scotland, a king in name, but in fact a state prisoner in the hands of austere Presbyterians. Not content with requiring him to conform to their worship and to subscribe their covenant, they had watched all his motions, and lectured him on all his youthful follies. He had been compelled These three miles of canvass have been painted by one man, and there he is, present, pointing out what he deems most worthy of notice. This is his history. Poor, untaught, wholly unassisted, he conceives the idea-a truly American ideaof painting "the largest picture in the world.” Some capital must be got for the materials, and the acquisition of that is his primary object. First, he starts "a floating diorama" on the Wabash |