al of such works as Mason on
"Self-Knowledge," Newton's "Cardiphonia," and a great variety of sermons
and religious essays. My mother, observing my tendency to reading on
religious subjects, proposed to me to take my first communion. She was a
member of the Swiss Protestant Church, the excellent pastor of which,
the Rev. Mr. S----, was our near neighbor, and we were upon terms of the
friendliest intimacy with him and his family. In his church I received
the sacrament for the first time, but I do not think with the most
desirable effect. The only immediate result that I can remember of this
increase of my Christian profession and privileges was, I am sorry to
say, a rigid pharisaical formalism, which I carried so far as to decline
accompanying my father and mother to our worthy clergyman's house, one
Sunday, when we were invited to spend the evening with him and his
family. This sort of acrid fruit is no uncommon first harvest of
youthful religious zeal; and I suppose my parents and my worthy pastor
thought it a piece of unripe, childish, impertinent conscientiousness,
hardly deserving a serious rebuke.

Another of my recollections which belong to this time is seeing several
times at our house that exceedingly coarse, disagreeable, clever, and
witty man, Theodore Hook. I always had a dread of his loud voice, and
blazing red face, and staring black eyes; especially as on more than one
occasion his after-dinner wit seemed to me fitter for the table he had
left than the more refined atmosphere of the drawing-room. One day he
dined with us to meet my cousin Horace Twiss and his handsome new wife.
Horace had in a lesser degree some of Hook's wonderful sense of humor
and quickness of repartee, and the two men brought each other out with
great effect. Of course I had heard of Mr. Hook's famous reply when,
after having returned from the colonies, where he was in an official
position, under suspicion of peculation, a friend meeting him said,
"Why, hallo, Hook! I did not know you were in England! What has brought
you back again?" "Something wrong about the _chest_," replied the
imperturbable wit. He was at this time the editor of the John Bull, a
paper of considerable ability, and only less scurrility than the _Age_;
and in spite of his _chest difficulty_ he was much sought in society for
his extraordinary quickness and happiness in conversation. His
outrageous hoax of the poor London citizen, from whom he extorted an
agonized inv