Undoubtedly the fun is a little old fashioned, but it is none the worse for that. Those who share Mr. Hardcastle's tastes for old wine and old books will not like Theodore Hook any the less, because he does not happen to be at all "Fin de Siecle". He is like Berowne in the comedy, the merriest man--perhaps not always within the limits of becoming mirth--to spend an hour's talk withal. There is no better key to the age in which Hook glittered, than Hook's own stories. The London of that day--the London which is as dead and gone as Nineveh or Karnak or Troy--lives with extraordinary freshness in Theodore Hook's pages. And how entertaining those pages are. It is not always the greatest writers who are the most mirth provoking, but how much we owe to them. The man must have no mirth in him if he fail to be tickled by the best of Labiche's comedies, aye and the worst too, if such a term can be applied to any of the enchanting series; if he refuse to unbend over "A Day's Journey and a Life's Romance," if he cannot let himself go and enjoy himself over Gilbert Gurney's river adventure. If the revival of the Whartons' book were to serve no other purpose than to send some laughter loving souls to the heady well-spring of Theodore Hook's merriment, it would have done the mirthful a good turn and deserved well of its country. There is scarcely a queerer, or scarcely a more pathetic figure in the world than that of Beau Brummell. He seems to belong to ancient history, he and his titanic foppishness and his smart clothes and his smart sayings. Yet is it but a little while since the last of his adorers, the most devoted of his disciples passed away from the earth. Over in Paris there lingered till the past year a certain man of letters who was very brilliant and very poor and very eccentric. So long as people study French literature, and care to investigate the amount of high artistic workmanship which goes into even its minor productions, so long the name of Barbey D'Aurevilly will have its niche--not a very large one, it is true--in the temple. The author of that strange and beautiful story "Le Chevalier des Touches," was a great devotee of Brummell's. He was himself the "last of the dandies". All the money he had--and he had very little of it--he spent in dandification. But he never moved with the times. His foppishness was the foppishness of his youth, and to the last he wandered through Paris clad in the splendour of the days when young men were "lions," and when the quarrel between classicism and romanticism was vital. He wrote a book about Beau Brummell and a very curious little book it is, with its odd earnest defence of dandyism, with its courageous championship of the arts which men of letters so largely affect to despise.