“Oh, certainly, sir,” replied Hook with cool assiduity, “forty, if you please.” Indignantly he was told to withdraw, and it took weeks of friendly interposition to appease the outraged dignitary. At the age of twenty he wrote his first novel, but it was a failure, and he shortly afterwards received the appointment of accountant-general and treasurer at the Mauritius. Here he stayed for some years, leading a life of pleasure, and going to the office only five times in the whole period, when suddenly a commission was appointed to inquire into the accounts, and he was dragged off from a supper, given in his honour, to prison, charged with a theft of £20,000, and sent under arrest to England. This “complaint of the chest,” as he observed to a friend who was astonished to see him back so soon, was afterwards reduced to £12,000, and for this he was judged to be accountable, and put into the debtors’ prison. Here, from his diary, he seems to have enjoyed himself as much as ever, drinking as a loyal subject should, to the “health of my august detainer, the king.” However, political influence was brought to bear upon the Government, and he was set at liberty with the burden of the debt hanging very lightly round his neck. In 1820 he founded the _John Bull_ newspaper, strongly in favour of the king’s interests, scurrilous as it was witty; everybody read it, and for some years it yielded him £2000 per annum. His life we see had been sufficiently various, and not an incident of it was ever forgotten, for his memory was probably unrivalled. He made a bet that he would repeat in order the names of all the shops on one side of Oxford Street, and he only misplaced one; and he gained another wager by saying from memory a whole column of _Times_ advertisement, which he had only once conned over; and on another occasion he utterly discomfited a universal critic, by engaging him in a conversation anent lunar eclipses, and then discharging three columns of the “Encyclopædia Britannica” at him, without pause or hesitation. He had, too, the gift of improvising verse in our stubborn English tongue, and was known on one occasion to introduce the names of fifty guests at a supper-table, in a song of fifty verses--each verse a rhymed epigram.