e down. He was haunted by pecuniary
difficulties, yet compelled to daily work, not only for himself, but for
a family of children by a person to whom he was not married. He then
lived almost entirely on brandy, and became incapable of digesting
animal food.

Well may his friend Lockhart say, "He came forth, _at best_, from a long
day of labor at his writing-desk, after his faculties had been at the
stretch,--feeling, passion, thought, fancy, excitable nerves, suicidal
brain, all worked, perhaps wellnigh exhausted."

And thus, "at best," while "seated among the revellers of a princely
saloon," sometimes losing at cards among his great "friends" more money
than he could earn in a month, his thoughts were laboring to devise some
mode of postponing a debt only from one week to another. Well might he
have compared, as he did, his position to that of an alderman who was
required to relish his turtle-soup while forced to eat it sitting on a
tight rope!

The last time he went out to dinner was with Colonel Shadwell Clarke, at
Brompton Grove. While in the drawing-room he suddenly turned to the
mirror and said, "Ay! I see I look as I am,--done up in purse, in mind,
and in body, too, at last!"

He died on the 24th of August, 1841.

Yes, when I knew most of him, he was approaching the close, not of a
long, but of a "fast" life; he had ill used Time, and Time was not in
his debt! He was tall and stout, yet not healthfully stout; with a round
face which told too much of jovial nights and wasted days,--of toil when
the head aches and the hand shakes,--of the absence of self-respect,--of
mornings of ignoble rest to gather strength for evenings of useless
energy,--of, in short, a mind and constitution vigorous and powerful:
both had been sadly and grievously misapplied and misused.

No writer concerning Hook can claim for him an atom of respect. His
history is but a record of written or spoken or practical jokes that
made no one wiser or better; his career "points a moral" indeed, but it
is by showing the wisdom of virtue. In the end, his friends, so called,
were ashamed openly to give him help,--and although bailiffs did not, as
in the case of Sheridan,

"Seize his last blanket,"

his death-bed was haunted by apprehensions of arrest; and it was a
relief, rather than a loss to society, when a few comparatively humble
mourners laid him in a corner of Fulham churchyard.

Alas! let not those who read the records of many dist