villa. Much wine had been absorbed, when the Ancient Mariner declared he could drink no more wine, and if anything more was to be drunk it must be punch. The bowl was brought, and the punch duly brewed by the poet. Meanwhile Hook seated himself at the piano and burst into a bacchanal song, every line of which had reference to Coleridge. The room was hot, and when a glass of the new compound was handed to Hook he drank it off, and, exclaiming that he was stifled, flung his glass through the window. Coleridge rose with the aspect of a benign patriarch and demolished another pane, and the example was followed until the window became a sieve. The host in flinging his goblet struck the chandelier, and the roar of laughter was drowned in Hook's resumption of his song, in which he described the peculiar shot of each individual in his most exquisite style, rhyming their names with the feats they performed. In walking home Mr. Coleridge entertained his companions with a lecture on the distinction between talent and genius and declared that Hook was as true a genius as Dante. A judgment with which posterity does not agree. Many other instances of this kind might be given that are within the fair limits of practical jokes, but the so-called Berners Street hoax was of a very different stamp and was little less than criminal. This occurred in 1809, when Hook was in his twenty-first year. He, with the help of two confederates, wrote one thousand letters to various tradesmen in London, ordering them to deliver certain goods on a day and hour named at a particular house in Berners Street. The house was occupied by a respectable widow. On various pretexts invitations were sent to the Lord Mayor, the Chief Justice, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Duke of York, and other people of distinction to call at the same place. The result was the street was blocked up, wagons were overturned, carriages were smashed, and an immense amount of property was lost or destroyed, while the good lady of the house was frightened almost to death. Such an enraged multitude of people had been seldom seen, and it would have gone hard with the perpetrator of the hoax could hands have been laid upon him. Safely ensconced in a lodging opposite, he and his confederates had laughed heartily all day at the scene, but they found it convenient to absent themselves from London for some time afterward. Hook did not reveal himself as the instigator of this brutal hoax until years afterward, when he related it in his novel of " Gilbert Gurney." That novel is more or less his own autobiography with some fancy mingled with the facts. Hook is satirized by Disraeli in "Coningsby in the character of Lucian Gay, and by Thackeray in "Vanity Fair" and " Pendennis" as Mr. Wagg. They are not pleasant portraits. He made large sums of money out of his newspaper, and later equally large sums from his novels, but money flowed from him like water. To the last he was a butterfly, and always a miserable butterfly at that. Gayety he had in abundance, but no happiness. THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK. (1785-1866.) THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK was the last and one of the best of the convivial poets and masters of the English drinking song. The following has been called by critics of the highest order the perfection in that sort of writing : If I drink water while this doth last, For how can a man, in his life of a span, We'll dine and drink, and say if we think That anything better can be ; And when we have dined, wish all mankind And though a good wish will fill no dish, And brim no cup with sack, Yet thoughts will spring as the glasses ring To illumine our studious track. O'er the brilliant dreams of our hopeful schemes; The light of the flask shall shine, And we'll sit till day, but we'll find the way To drench the world with wine. at Miss Agnes Repplier, in one of her most charming essays, says of this song, that it is once the kindest and the most scandalous that poet ever wrote-a song which is the final, definite, unrepentant expression of heterodoxy." Another of Peacock's songs is "The Ghost," In life three ghostly friars were we, Three merry ghosts-three merry ghosts-three merry Let the ocean be port and we'll think it good sport With songs that jovial specters chaunt Our old refectory still we haunt, The traveler hears our midnight mirth ; "Oh, list," he cries, "the haunted choir ; The merriest ghost that walks the earth Is now the ghost of ghostly friar,” Three merry ghosts-three merry ghosts-three merry ghosts are we ; Let the ocean be port and we'll think it good sport To be laid in that Red sea. It is probable that there are not many readers. of Peacock's novels and poems in these days, but it is their loss. "Headlong Hall," "Night |