When Hastings really did begin to rise it grew quickly, and speedily overspread, not merely the old-time site, but brought into existence the twin town of St. Leonards as well. Theodore Hook was as it seems to us—strangely enthusiastic on the subject of those never-ending terraces, squares, and streets of stucco, new in his day. Says he: “Under the superintendence of Mr. Burton, a desert has become a thickly peopled town. Buildings of an extensive nature and elegant character rear their heads”—he meant, in plainer English, that they had been built, only perhaps a phrase without those eloquent frills would not have been “literature” as then understood—“where but a few years since the barren cliffs presented their chalky fronts to the storm and wave; and rippling streams and hanging groves adorn the valley which twenty years since was a sterile and shrubless ravine.” Something is decidedly wrong in that description. The “extensive”—might he not equally well have said the “expensive”(?)—buildings and the “thickly peopled town” we allow, but those “hanging groves” and “rippling streams” are just the delightful objects the coming of the octopus streets abolished, and Hook sacrificed truth to a showy antithetical outburst. I do not think Hook was sincere. I hope he was not, for surely one would sooner forgive literary insincerity than such a perverse taste. Lamb, who wrote of Hastings in 1823, we know was sincerity itself when he said he loved town or country; “but,” he says, “if this detestable Cinque Port is neither. I hate these scrubbed shoots, thrusting out their starved foliage from between the horrid fissures of dusty, innutritious rocks, which the amateur calls ‘verdure to the edge of the sea.’ I require woods, and they show me stunted coppices. I cry out for the water-brooks, and pant for fresh streams, and inland murmurs.” _He_, at any rate, saw nothing of Theodore Hook’s “rippling streams and hanging groves.” “There is,” continues Lamb, “no sense of home at Hastings. It is a place of fugitive resort, an heterogeneous assemblage of sea-mews and stockbrokers, Amphitrites of the town, and misses that coquet with the ocean, if it were what it was in its primitive shape, and what it ought to have remained, a fair honest fishing-town, and no more, it were something—with a few straggling fishermen’s huts scattered about, artless as its cliffs, and with their materials filched from them, it were something.”