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.
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