It is, however, when we come to the novels that Colburn ushered into the world, that we strike upon the one vein of profitable ore that he made so peculiarly his own; and _facile princeps_ of all his novelistic clients, stands Theodore Hook. To understand the genius of all Hook’s works, it is essential to take a short retrospective view of his life and character. Two things, above all else, strike us in regarding him--that he possessed the greatest love of joke and frolic, and the most marvellous memory with which ever man was gifted. As a boy of seventeen, he dashed off an amusing comedy; this, he tells us in the really autobiographical sketch of “Gilbert Gurney,” was the process. “To work I went, bought three or four French vaudevilles, and filching an incident from each, made up my very effective drama, the ‘Soldier’s Return.’” And for this bantling he received the handsome first-earnings of fifty pounds. Living, at a time when other boys were at school, in the gayest of all society in London, a welcome guest behind the curtain at every theatre, and hailed as a good fellow in every literary coterie, young Hook led a rollicking, devil-may-care life, giving the world back with interest the rich amusement he gathered from it. Now, making a random bet that a corner house in Berners Street should, within a week, be the most famous house in London; and within the time taking his opponent to a commanding window, that he might acknowledge that the wager had been fairly won; and the strange scene in the thoroughfare must have soon convinced him. The Duke of York, drawn by six grey horses, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord Mayor in formal state, every woman of notorious virtue, every man of any fame or notoriety, porters bustling up with wine-casks and beer-barrels, milliners with bonnet-boxes crushed and battered, pastry-cooks with dainty dishes that the street gamins soon picked out of the gutters, undertakers with rival coffins, variously made to exact measurement, hackney-coaches, and vans, and waggons by the hundred--in fact, half the world of London was there by invitations especially adapted to move each individual case, and the other half soon came as spectators. The impotent “Charleys” of the day found their efforts useless to dispel the block and crush, and long before the crowd was cleared away, the next day’s papers were ringing with the “Berners Street Hoax.” Again, we find him donning a scarlet coat, and, as the Prince Regent’s messenger, delivering a letter to an obnoxious actor, eagerly inviting him to dine with that august personage; and then joining in the crush outside Holland House, to see his enemy come away discomfited as an impostor. No occasion was sacred from his jests, and his exuberant spirits were scarcely in accordance with the tranquillity of academic life. At his very matriculation the Vice-chancellor, struck by his youthful appearance, asked him if he was fully prepared to sign the thirty-nine articles.