Theodore Hook (1788-1841) belonged to that singularly fortunate class of writers whose fame was greater while they lived than after death closed the book of life. To present-day readers Hook is known only as the subject of many a merry anecdote, the coiner of epigrams, and one of the most celebrated practical jokers of his time. But among his contemporaries Theodore Hook was something more. Before he was twenty years old farces and comic operas from his pen had been successfully produced on the London stage, and he was a pet of London society. When he was thirty he was the editor of the Tory paper _John Bull_, and the novels that he published at this period attained a high degree of popularity. As a punster Hook had few equals, and "A Chapter on Puns," which is herewith reprinted for the readers of THE SCRAP BOOK, constitutes an excellent specimen of the sort of humor for which its author was famous. There is one class of people who, with a depravity of appetite not excelled by that of the celebrated Anna Maria Schurman, who rejoiced in eating spiders, thirst after puns. If you fall in with these, you have no resource but to indulge them to their heart's content; but in order to rescue yourself from the imputation of believing punning to be wit, quote the definition of Swift, and be, like him, as inveterate a punster as you possibly can, immediately after resting everything, and hazarding all, upon the principle that the worse the pun the better. In order to be prepared for this sort of _punic_ war (for the disorder is provocative and epidemic), the moment any one gentleman or lady has, as they say in Scotland, "let a pun," everybody else in the room who can or cannot do the same sets to work to endeavor to emulate the example. From that period all rational conversation is at an end, and a jargon of nonsense succeeds which lasts till the announcement of coffee, or supper, or the carriages puts a happy termination to the riot. Addison says, "One may say of a pun, as the countryman described his nightingale, that it is _vox et præterea nihil_, a sound, and nothing but a sound;" and in another place he tells us that "the greatest authors in their most serious works make frequent use of puns; the sermons of Bishop Andrews and the tragedies of Shakespeare are full of them; if a sinner was punned into repentance as in the latter, nothing is more usual than to see a hero weeping and grumbling for a dozen lines together;" but he also says, "It is indeed impossible to kill a weed which the soil has a natural disposition to produce. The seeds of punning are in the minds of all men, and though they may be subdued by reason, reflection, and good sense, they will be very apt to shoot up in the greatest genius that is not broken and cultivated by the rules of art."