Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/324

284 284 HENR Y COLB URN. ever man was gifted. As a boy of seventeen, he dashed off an amusing comedy ; this, he tells us in the really autobiographical sketch of " Gilbert Gur- ney," was the process. "To work I went, bought three or four French vaudevilles, and filching an inci- dent from each, made up my very effective drama, the ' Soldier's Return.'" And for this bantling he received the handsome first-earnings of fifty pounds. Living, at a time when other boys were at school, in the gayest of all society in London, a welcome guest behind the curtain at every theatre, and hailed as a good fellow in every literary coterie, young Hook led a rollicking, devil-may-care life, giving the world back with interest the rich amusement he gathered from it. Now, making a random bet that a corner house in Berners Street should, within a week, be the most famous house in London ; and within the time taking his opponent to a commanding window, that he might acknowledge that the wager had been fairly won ; and the strange scene in the thoroughfare must have soon convinced him. The Duke of York, drawn by six grey horses, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord Mayor in formal state, every woman of notorious virtue, every man of any fame or notoriety, porters bustling up with wine-casks and beer-barrels, milliners with bonnet-boxes crushed and battered, pastry-cooks with dainty dishes that the street gamins soon picked out of the gutters, undertakers with rival coffins, variously made to exact measurement, hackney- coaches, and vans, and waggons by the hundred in fact, half the world of London was there by invita- tions especially adapted to move each individual case, and the other half soon came as spectators. The impotent " Charleys " of the day found their efforts