drowned in Theodore's resumption of the song-and window and chandelier, the peculiar shot of each individual destroyer, had apt commemoration. In walking home with Mr. Coleridge, he entertained me with a most excellent lecture on the distinction between talent and genius, and declared that Hook was as great a genius as Dante-that was his example.'

It was this extraordinary power of improvisation-of evolving, so to speak, a Corney Grain entertainment on the spur of the moment out of every dinner-party he went to-that impressed Hook's contemporaries more than anything else. He had complete command of every kind of metre, and a wonderful facility for making puns in rhyme; witness the famous stanza extemporised on seeing an unwelcome visitor approaching his front door

Here comes Mr. Winter, Collector of taxes;

I'd advise you to pay him whatever he axes.

You're down in his book-he won't stand no flummery,

And though his name's Winter, his presence is summary.

More studied was his reference to the burlesque duel between Tom Moore, the amatory poet, and Jeffrey, of the Edinburgh Review,' in which Moore's second is said to have supplied him with a blank cartridge.

When Anacreon would fight, as the poets have said,
A reverse he displayed in his vapour;

For while all his poems were loaded with lead,
His pistols were loaded with paper.

For excuses Anacreon old custom may thank-
Such a salvo he should not abuse,

For the cartridge, by rule, is always made blank
Which is fired away at Reviews.

And there is a very saturnalia of puns in the once famous

Ballade of London Streets.'

In Orange Street Lemon vends porter and ale;

In Hart Street Jack Deer keeps a stable;

In Hill Street located you'll find Mr. Dale,
In Blue Anchor Row Mr. Cable.

In Paradise Row Mr. Adam sells figs;

Eve in Apple-tree Yard rooms has taken,
Mr. Coltman in Foley Street fits you with wigs;
In Hog Lane you call upon Bacon.

My jingles and rhymes I've now written down-
But if for their meaning you tease me,
That they really have none I must candidly own,
And silence will therefore best please me.

If not witty or curious, they'll answer, I ween,
To get me asked out' by great ninnies,
And out of the firm of some new magazine

Procure me a couple of guineas.

So frank a confession may serve to appease those votaries of the New Humour who have taken Hook's own ironical advice, and

early learnt to shun

That very silly thing indeed which people call a pun.

And certainly the sparkle has died out of most of his witticisms in verse, though perhaps its delicious ineptitude ought to preserve his Epigram on Mr. Milton, the Livery Stable Keeper' :—

Two Miltons in separate ages were born,

The cleverer Milton, 'tis clear, we have got.
Though the other had talents the world to adorn,

This lives by his mews, which the other could not.

But some of his extempore flashes in prose reach a very much higher level. Everyone knows his epitaph on Lord de Ros, who died soon after his exposure for cheating at whist. 'Here lies John, -th Baron de Ros, in joyful expectation of the Last Trump.' Mr. Barham records a great reply to the pompous actor-manager, Abbott, who told him he was going to change the name of his theatre. Then call it the Abattoir,' said Hook, 'for you're sure to butcher everything you put on the stage.' Equally cruel, but well deserved, was his answer to one of the great lights of the Quarterly,' who mentioned that he was in the habit of reviewing books he had not read. In that case,' said Hook, 'you ought to be called a Hind-quarterly Reviewer.' Another time he was staying in the same house with an eminent professor much given to laying down the law on every conceivable subject. At last Hook could stand his omniscience no longer, and went off to his room with a volume of the Encyclopædia Britannica' under his arm. That night at dinner he amazed the table by asking the professor if he took any interest in the Precession of the Equinoxes. The Precession of the Equinoxes, Mr. Hook?' answered the learned man; 'I was not aware that you had so much as heard of them.' Indeed I have,' replied Theodore ; 'the most obvious of all the celestial motions is the diurnal revolution of the starry heavens,' &c., &c., and he reeled off as much of the Encyclopædia' article on astronomy as was enough

to reduce the professor to a state of bewildered and disgusted silence.

It is a pity that their humour has not managed to keep his novels alive' Maxwell,' 'Gilbert Gurney,' and the rest of the thirty-eight volumes he turned out in less than sixteen years. The books had vogue enough in their day. Mr. Barham does not think it paradoxical to hint at a comparison with Dickens; the blaspheming Lockhart goes a step farther, and talks of Hook in the same breath with Jane Austen. But the novels are dead beyond recall. Could anyone but a Laureate of the Higher Locals name off-hand the heroine of 'Peregrine Bunce,' or say how, when, where, and why the Duchess doctored the macaroons ? The truth is that the novels are alike too simple and too rich for the public of to-day-too rich, in the sense that Aléxis Soyer's cookery is too rich. Joke is piled on joke, and comic incident on comic incident, until, as Lockhart judiciously puts it, 'the imagination is smothered in the over-crowdings of an inebriated fancy.' Hook is too simple, because he sets down his emotions just as they come, without giving the slightest warning to his readers. If, as is most usual, he intends to be funny, he expects them to hold their sides; if the spirit moves him to denounce the Radicals, he denounces them with vigour; if the thought of his heroine moves him to pathos, he becomes immediately pathetic. It is this last-named quality that grates most painfully on modern nerves. Ordinary readers find it a bore; subtle psychologists begin to ask whether all this sentiment is genuine, or whether it comes, like the morning's penitential soda-water, after last night's debauch of jests.

The psychologists might have saved themselves the trouble: there was nothing maudlin about Theodore Hook. Apart from his jokes, he was a commonplace Englishman enough, whose higher feelings are as annoyingly conventional as they are undoubtedly sincere. A few sounding phrases about preferring the exquisite charm of the quiet repose of home to the splendour of feathers, finery, dress, and diamonds, represent the level of his achievements as a practical moralist. Much more touching are such homely extracts from his diary as-To-day my dear mother's favourite dish, a boiled leg of mutton and turnips, which I have not had for many weeks, and enjoyed much.' As the years drew on, such extracts grew in number. More and more painfully Hook was beginning to feel that, as he said to the clergyman

who attended him in his last illness- Well, you see me as I am, at last. All the paddings and bucklings, and washings and brushings are dropped for ever-a poor old grey-haired man, with my belly about my knees.' On August 24, 1841, he died, pitifully convinced of his own failure in life. He was wrong. At the worst, stern moralists could only describe him as being 'no man's enemy but his own.' As things really are, we have the warranty of Coleridge for holding him as great a genius as Dante.

IN A VICEREGAL CITY.

BY MRS. ARCHIBALD LITTLE.

IT is the charm of association, rather than actual beauty, that attaches us to a city or a scene. Quebec, Chungking, and Edinburgh are alike beautifully situated, but were it not for the associations that cluster round Holyrood and the Castle and the Tolbooth, Princes Street might still be as fine a promenade, yet how infinitely less interesting! Thus though Chentu, the capital of China's westernmost and largest province, is not endowed with the beauties of mountain and water' (mountain and water-landscape in Chinese) of the commercial centre, Chungking, yet its historical memories give it at once a sentimental value, only accentuated by its stately groves, its great flights of birds, the tense attitude of its officialdom since the advent of the present Viceroy, its population of artisan shopkeepers working late and early, together with its centuries-old, all-enchaining Chinese customs, each to us stranger than the other. Amongst all the many cities of China that I have visited, this is the first of which I could understand even a foreigner saying that he would by choice live there.

Situated on the well-irrigated plain that owes its riches to Li Ping, who some 200 years B.C. conceived the idea of cutting a way through a hill for the river of Ouanhsien, thus adapting the plateau for rice-growing, unknown there during the previous Chin Dynasty, Chentu is the centre of a rich agricultural population yearly reaping three crops of a greatly varied nature. Its walls can only be compared with those of Peking; 27 feet high, 37 feet broad, so that twenty-five men can walk abreast on the top, they are unlike those at Peking in that they are not overgrown with grass and bushes and decayed by time, but kept in capital condition. Only interspersed with occasional guard-houses, they present an unbroken promenade save for the one interruption of the Manchu city sheltering crescent-wise under the wall beneath the west and north gates. There are but four gates or outlets to the world for all this crowded city full of three hundred thousand persons, and the consequent over-pressure at the east