He resided here in comparative obscurity. It gave him a pleasant prospect of Putney Bridge, and of Putney on the opposite side of the river. As the Thames flowed past the bottom of his small and narrow garden, he had a perpetually cheerful and changing view of the many gay passers-by in small boats, yachts, and steamers. The only room of the cottage I ever saw was somewhat coarsely furnished: a few prints hung on the walls, but there was no evidence of those suggestive refinements which substitute intellectual for animal gratifications, in the internal arrangements of a domicile that becomes necessarily a workshop. Hook's love of practical joking seems to have commenced early. Almost of that character was his well-known answer to the Vice-Chancellor at Oxford, when asked whether he was prepared to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles,--"Certainly, to forty of them, if you please"; and his once meeting the Proctor dressed in his robes, and being questioned, "Pray, Sir, are you a member of this University?" he replied, "No, Sir; pray are you?" In the Memoirs of Charles Mathews by his widow abundant anecdotes are recorded of these practical jokes; but, in fact, "Gilbert Gurney," which may be regarded as an autobiography, is full of them. Mr. Barham, his biographer, also relates several, and states, that, when a young man, he had a "museum" containing a large and varied collection of knockers, sign-paintings, barbers' poles, and cocked hats, gathered together during his predatory adventures; but its most attractive object was "a gigantic Highlander," lifted from the shop-door of a tobacconist on a dark, foggy night. These "enterprises of great pith and moment" are detailed by himself in full. The most "glorious" of them has been often told: how he sent through the post some four thousand letters, inviting on a given day a huge assemblage of visitors to the house of a lady of fortune, living at 54, Berners Street. They came, beginning with a dozen sweeps at daybreak, and including lawyers, doctors, upholsterers, jewellers, coal-merchants, linen-drapers, artists, even the Lord Mayor, for whose behoof a special temptation was invented. In a word, there was no conceivable trade, profession, or calling that was not summoned to augment the crowd of foot-passengers and carriages by which the street was thronged from dawn till midnight; while Hook and a friend enjoyed the confusion from a room opposite.[B] Lockhart, in the "Quarterly," states that the hoax was merely the result of a wager that Hook would in a week make the quiet dwelling the most famous house in all London. Mr. Barham affirms that the lady, Mrs. Tottenham, had on some account fallen under the displeasure of the formidable trio, Mr. Hook and two unnamed friends.