He is described as a man of "iron energies," and certainly must have had an iron constitution; for his was a life of perpetual stimulants, intellectual as well as physical. When I saw him last,--it was not long before his death,--he was aged, more by care than time; his face bore evidence of what is falsely termed "a gay life"; his voice had lost its roundness and force, his form its buoyancy, his intellect its strength,-- "Alas! how changed from him, That life of pleasure, and that soul of whim!" Yet his wit was ready still; he continued to sparkle humor even when exhausted nature failed; and his last words are said to have been a brilliant jest. At length the iron frame wore down. He was haunted by pecuniary difficulties, yet compelled to daily work, not only for himself, but for a family of children by a person to whom he was not married. He then lived almost entirely on brandy, and became incapable of digesting animal food. Well may his friend Lockhart say, "He came forth, _at best_, from a long day of labor at his writing-desk, after his faculties had been at the stretch,--feeling, passion, thought, fancy, excitable nerves, suicidal brain, all worked, perhaps wellnigh exhausted." And thus, "at best," while "seated among the revellers of a princely saloon," sometimes losing at cards among his great "friends" more money than he could earn in a month, his thoughts were laboring to devise some mode of postponing a debt only from one week to another. Well might he have compared, as he did, his position to that of an alderman who was required to relish his turtle-soup while forced to eat it sitting on a tight rope! The last time he went out to dinner was with Colonel Shadwell Clarke, at Brompton Grove. While in the drawing-room he suddenly turned to the mirror and said, "Ay! I see I look as I am,--done up in purse, in mind, and in body, too, at last!" He died on the 24th of August, 1841. Yes, when I knew most of him, he was approaching the close, not of a long, but of a "fast" life; he had ill used Time, and Time was not in his debt! He was tall and stout, yet not healthfully stout; with a round face which told too much of jovial nights and wasted days,--of toil when the head aches and the hand shakes,--of the absence of self-respect,--of mornings of ignoble rest to gather strength for evenings of useless energy,--of, in short, a mind and constitution vigorous and powerful: both had been sadly and grievously misapplied and misused. No writer concerning Hook can claim for him an atom of respect. His history is but a record of written or spoken or practical jokes that made no one wiser or better; his career "points a moral" indeed, but it is by showing the wisdom of virtue. In the end, his friends, so called, were ashamed openly to give him help,--and although bailiffs did not, as in the case of Sheridan, "Seize his last blanket,"