The Choice Humorous Works, Ludicrous Adventures, Bons Mots, Puns, and Hoaxes of Theodore HookHook, Theodore Edward
General
The Choice Humorous Works, Ludicrous Adventures, Bons Mots, Puns, and Hoaxes of Theodore Hook
Hook, Theodore Edward
English wit and humor
The substantial veracity of this narrative who can doubt? but that no
preacher at Radcliffe Church ever took the slightest notice of his
highness we will venture to affirm; the pew-opener might have thought
that such a fine man as his highness would like to sit down, or the
beadle might have thought it civil to an Israelite--for which he
seems to have generally been mistaken--to show him a little Christian
charity.
Passing over his highness's account of Bath, and Mr. Beckford, "a
sort of Lord Byron in prose, who pays fifty guineas a week for leave
to walk in a nursery garden and pick what flowers he chooses;"--of
Salisbury, where the prince meets another specimen--"a very pretty
young girl," a dress-maker,--and of course takes an opportunity of
libelling the bishop, the venerable and excellent Dr. Burgess,--who
"never preaches, and draws 15,000_l._ a-year from his see!"--of
Wilton, to which house he obtains admission by a story, and under
an assumed name, which he rejoices to hear the housekeeper could
neither pronounce nor write;--and some other seats and towns,--we
reach London,--his highness's description of which is to occupy the
two first, but as yet unpublished, volumes of this work. When he
has sufficiently reinspected the "grand foyer," he again mounts the
box for Canterbury, criticises the cathedral, the peculiar beauty
of which he considers to arise from its not having a screen! and
satirizes the archbishop, who enjoys "the rank of a prince" within
his jurisdiction, "but not in London,"--as if London were not in the
heart of his Grace's jurisdiction,--"moreover, he has sixty thousand
a-year! and may marry!" (in the teeth, we presume, of the statute
against bigamy.) The "illustrious stranger" proceeds to Dover--thence
to Calais--dines with, and of course abuses, Mr. Brummel,--having,
by-the-bye, gained admission to his table, as he had done to Lord
Pembroke's gallery, under a feigned name! The "thorough lustre" of
his principality is then enshrined in the cabriolet of a diligence;
he eats smoking hot plinzen with the coachman, and arrives in Paris,
where for the present we shall leave him,--and that "sweltering
venom" which is luckily neutralized by an unfailing effusion of
dulness.
We are sorry that the first Prussian castigator of our manners should
have been a prince! We had, at one time, been led to expect the
notice of a personage, who, though of not quite princely rank, could
have told a much more amusing story,--described "specimens" of a
higher order than bar-maids--pecuniary incidents more important than
the loss of a ten-pound note out of a sac-de-nuit,--and even wound up
his "picture of insular existence" with an interesting appendix to
the "Mémoires d'un Homme d'Etat."
PROSPECTUS FOR A GENERAL BURYING COMPANY.
CAPITAL, £500,000. SHARES, £50.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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