Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/325

285 HENRY COLBURN. 285 useless to dispel the block and crush, and long before the crowd was cleared away, the next day's papers were ringing with the " Berners Street Hoax." Again, we find him donning a scarlet coat, and, as the Prince Regent's messenger, delivering a letter to an obnoxious actor, eagerly inviting him to dine with that august personage ; and then joining in the crush outside Holland House, to see his enemy come away discom- fited as an impostor. No occasion was sacred from his jests, and his exuberant spirits were scarcely in accordance with the tranquillity of academic life. At his very matriculation the Vice-chancellor, struck by his youthful appearance, asked him if he was fully prepared to sign the thirty-nine articles. " Oh, cer- tainly, sir," replied Hook with cool assiduity, " forty, if you please." Indignantly he was told to with- draw, and it took weeks of friendly interposition to appease the outraged dignitary. At the age of twenty he wrote his first novel, but it was a failure, and he shortly afterwards received the appointment of accountant-general and treasurer at the Mauritius. Here he stayed for some years, leading a life of plea- sure, and going to the office only five times in the whole period, when suddenly a commission was ap- pointed to inquire into the accounts, and he was dragged off from a supper, given in his honour, to prison, charged with a theft of 20,000, and sent under arrest to England. This "complaint of the chest," as he observed to a friend who was astonished to see him back so soon, was afterwards reduced to 12,000, and for this he was judged to be accountable, and put into the debtors' prison. Here, from his diary, he seems to have enjoyed himself as much as ever, drinking as a loyal subject should, to the " health