In reply to a look of astonished inquiry, he explained,—
"I knew my affairs there were so intricate and involved that no one but myself could unravel them; so I ran the risk, and took my chance. I am back with ample funds to pay all my debts, and to live comfortably for the rest of my days."
Mr. Hook did not say if the gentleman had obtained from his securities a license for what he had done; but the anecdote illustrates the extreme laxity enjoyed by prisoners in the Rules, (which extended to several streets,) as compared with the doleful incarceration to which poor debtors were subjected, who in those days often had their miserable home in a jail for debts that might have been paid by shillings.
Hook then took up his residence at Putney, from which he afterwards removed to a "mansion" in Cleveland Street, but subsequently to Fulham, where the remainder of his life was passed, and where he died. It was a small, detached cottage. It is of this cottage that Lockhart says, "We doubt if its interior was ever seen by half a dozen people besides the old confidential worshippers of Bull's mouth."
He resided here in comparative obscurity. It gave him a pleasant prospect of Putney Bridge, and of Putney on the opposite side of the river. As the Thames flowed past the bottom of his small and narrow garden, he had a perpetually cheerful and changing view of the many gay passers-by in small boats, yachts, and steamers. The only room of the cottage I ever saw was somewhat coarsely furnished: a few prints hung on the walls, but there was no evidence of those suggestive refinements which substitute intellectual for animal gratifications, in the internal arrangements of a domicile that becomes necessarily a workshop.
Hook's love of practical joking seems to have commenced early. Almost of that character was his well-known answer to the Vice-Chancellor at Oxford, when asked whether he was prepared to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles,—"Certainly, to forty of them, if you please"; and his once meeting the Proctor dressed in his robes, and being questioned, "Pray, Sir, are you a member of this University?" he replied, "No, Sir; pray are you?"
In the Memoirs of Charles Mathews by his widow abundant anecdotes are recorded of these practical jokes; but, in fact, "Gilbert Gurney," which may be regarded as an autobiography, is full of them. Mr. Barham, his biographer, also relates several, and states, that, when a young man, he had a "museum" containing a large and varied collection of knockers, sign-paintings, barbers' poles, and cocked hats, gathered together during his predatory adventures; but its most attractive object was "a gigantic Highlander," lifted from the shop-door of a tobacconist on a dark, foggy night. These "enterprises of great pith and moment" are detailed by himself in full. The most "glorious" of them has been often told: how he sent through the post some four thousand letters, inviting on a given day a huge assemblage of visitors to the house of a lady of fortune, living at 54, Berners Street. They came, beginning with a dozen sweeps at daybreak, and including lawyers, doctors, upholsterers, jewellers, coal-merchants, linen-drapers, artists, even the Lord Mayor, for whose behoof a special temptation was invented. In a word, there was no conceivable trade, profession, or calling that was not summoned to augment the crowd of foot-passengers and carriages by which the street was thronged from dawn till midnight; while Hook and a friend enjoyed the confusion from a room opposite.[B] Lockhart, in the "Quarterly," states that the hoax was merely the result of a wager that Hook would in a week make the quiet dwelling the most famous house in all London. Mr. Barham affirms that the lady, Mrs. Tottenham, had on some account fallen under the displeasure of the formidable trio, Mr. Hook and two unnamed friends.
His conversation was an unceasing stream of wit, of which he was profuse, as if he knew the source to be inexhaustible. He never kept it for display, or for company, or for those only who knew its value: wit was, indeed, as natural to him as commonplace to commonplace characters. It was not only in puns, in repartees, in lively retorts, in sparkling sentences, in brilliant illustrations, or in apt or exciting anecdote, that this faculty was developed. I have known him string together a number of graceful verses, every one of which was fine in composition and admirable in point, at a moment's notice, on a subject the most inauspicious, and apparently impossible either to wit or rhyme,—yet with an effect that delighted a party, and might have borne the test of criticism the most severe. These verses he usually sang in a sort of recitative to some tune with which all were familiar,—and if a piano were at hand, he accompanied himself with a gentle strain of music.
Mrs. Mathews relates that she was present once when Hook dined with the Drury-Lane Company, at a banquet given to Sheridan in honor of his return for Westminster. The guests were numerous, yet he made a verse upon every person in the room:—"Every action was turned to account; every circumstance, the look, the gesture, or any other accidental effect, served as occasion for wit." Sheridan was astonished at his extraordinary faculty, and declared that he could not have imagined such power possible, had he not witnessed it.
People used to give him subjects the most unpromising to test his powers. Thus, Campbell records that he once supplied him with a theme, "Pepper and Salt," and that he amply seasoned the song with both.