will represent the _wit_ of this passing day; and that future age will
not ask so nicely what wit is, and not look for that last solved of
riddles, its definition. Hook has been, by common consent, placed at the
head of modern wits. When kings were kings, they bullied, beat, and and
brow-beat their jesters. Now and then they treated them to a few years
in the Tower for a little extra impudence. Now that the people are
sovereign, the jester fares better--nay, too well. His books or his
bon-mots are read with zest and grins; he is invited to his Grace's and
implored to my Lord's; he is waited for, watched, pampered like a small
Grand Lama, and, in one sentence, the greater the fool, the more fools
he makes.

If Theodore Hook had lived in the stirring days of King Henry VIII., he
would have sent Messrs. Patch and Co. sharply to the right-about, and
been presented with the caps and bells after his first comic song. No
doubt he was a jester, a fool in many senses, though he did not, like
Solomon's fool, 'say in his _heart_' very much. He jested away even the
practicals of life, jested himself into disgrace, into prison, into
contempt, into the basest employment--that of a libeller tacked on to a
party. He was a mimic, too, to whom none could send a challenge; an
improvisatore, who beat Italians, Tyroleans, and Styrians hollow, sir,
hollow. And lastly--oh! shame of the shuffle-tongued--he was, too, a
punster. Yes, one who gloried in puns, a maker of pun upon pun, a man
whose whole wit ran into a pun as readily as water rushes into a hollow,
who could not keep out of a pun, let him loathe it or not, and who made
some of the best and some of the worst on record, but still--puns.

If he was a wit withal, it was _malgré soi_, for fun, not for wit, was
his 'aspiration.' Yet the world calls him a wit, and he has a claim to
his niche. There were, it is true, many a man in his own set who had