Meanwhile, the historical novel did not by any means absorb the attention of the crowds of aspirants who hurried to try their fortune in the wake of Scott. Lady Morgan (or rather Miss Sydney Owenson) did, in _The Wild Irish Girl_ (1806) and other things, some "rattling Hibernian stories" quite early; John Banim (1798-1842) coincided with the two Englishmen and exceeded them in _gout du terroir_; and the _Fairy Legends_ (1826) of Crofton Croker (1798-1854) are at their best simply exquisite. But the older styles continued after a fashion, or underwent slight changes, before the novel of purely ordinary life, on a plan midway between Scott and Miss Austen, triumphed in the middle of the century. One of the most popular of novelists in the reigns of George IV. and William IV. was Theodore Hook (1788-1841), a man of respectable connections and excellent education, who, having made himself a favourite with the Regent and many persons of quality as a diner-out and improvisatore, received a valuable appointment at the Mauritius, laid himself open by carelessness to a prosecution for malversation, and, returning to England, never entirely escaped from the effects of this, though he was extremely successful both as a novelist, and as a newspaper writer and editor, in the _John Bull_ chiefly. Some of Hook's political squibs and light verses still retain attraction; and the tradition of his extraordinary faculties in improvising both words, music, and dramatic arrangement remains. But his novels (_Sayings and Doings_, _Gilbert Gurney_, _Gurney Married_, _Maxwell_, etc.) have become very dead-alive. They have little plot; a sort of rattling adventure in a modernised following of Smollett, which is their chief source of interest; manners true enough to their own day to be out-of-date now, but not handled with sufficient art ever to regain the attraction of revived antiquity; and a very careless and undistinguished style.