Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/323

283 HENRY C OLE URN. 283 the issues went off very rapidly, and Colburn obtained a very handsome profit on the 2200 he had paid for the copyright. In the fourth edition of 1848 Lord Braybrooke was urged to restore those characteristic passages which he had before condemned, and the full value of the work, as a photographic picture of an amusing, though dissolute, time was firmly established. Evelyn had before given us the history of Charles the Second's Court, with a gravity and openly-expressed reprobation which finely suited his character of a worthy and dignified old English country gentleman ; but still it is now to the pages of Pepys that all the world turns for an account of the royal domestic life of certainly the most infamous period of our annals. He is so charmingly garrulous, jotting down each night such quaint thoughts on what he had seen during the day, writing them by his fireside, with the same nonchalance with which he put on his night-cap, and with as little suspicion of ever being surprised in the one act as the other, that his truthfulness, his open* ness, and his scarcely-concealed partiality for as much vagabonding and frolicsome society as Mrs. Pepys would permit, carry the reader irresistibly along with him. It is, however, when we come to the novels that Colburn ushered into the world, that we strike upon the one vein of profitable ore that he made so pecu- liarly his own ; toi& facile princeps of all his novelistic clients, stands Theodore Hook. To understand the genius of all Hook's works, it is essential to take a short retrospective view of his life and character. Two things, above all else, strike us in regarding him that he possessed the greatest love of joke and frolic, and the most marvellous memory with which 1 8 2