- Performer Name:
- Theodore Hook
- Performance Venue:
- London
- Performance Date:
- Author:
- Hunt, Leigh
- Date Written:
- Language:
- English
- Publication Title:
- The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt
- Article Title:
- Page Numbers:
- 224-5
- Additional Info:
- Publisher:
- Oxford UP
- Place of Publication:
- Oxford
- Date Published:
- 1928
Text:
[224] [On Theodore Hook:] His extempore verses were really surprising. It is easy enough to extemporize in Italian—one only wonders how, in a language in which everything conspires to render verse-making easy, and it is difficult to avoid rhyming, this talent should be so much cried up—but in English it is another matter. I have [225] known but one other person besides Hook, who could extemporize in English, and he wanted the confidence to do it in public. Of course, I speak of rhyming. Extempore blank verse, with a little practice, would be found as easy in English as rhyming is in Italian. In Hook the faculty was very unequivocal. He could not have been pre-informed about all the visitors on the present occasion [at Sydenham], still less of the subject of conversation when he came in, and he talked his full share till called upon; yet he ran his jokes and his verses upon us all in the easiest manner, saying something characteristic of everybody, or avoiding it with a pun; and he introduced so agreeably a piece of village scandal upon which the party had been rallying Campbell, that the poet, though not unjealous of his dignity, was, perhaps, the most pleased of us all. Theodore afterwards sat down to the pianoforte, and, enlarging upon this subject, made an extempore parody of a modern opera, introducing sailors and their clap-traps, rustics, &c., and making the poet and his supposed flame the hero and heroine. He parodied music as well as words, giving us the most received cadences and flourishes, and calling to mind (not without some hazard to his filial duties) the commonplaces of the pastoral songs and duets of the last half-century…
Notes:
- Collected by:
- AE