twenty pounds without a dessert. President Arbuthnot gave the society a dinner dressed in the queen's kitchen, and served at Ozinda's coffeehouse in St. James's-street. In May eighteen of them dined romantically in an arbour at Parson's-green. At another time the Brothers got up an impromptu subscription for a poor Tory poet who had lampooned Marlborough. Swift seems to have been sometimes deputed by the Brothers to visit sick poets in their garrets and relieve them.

After the Brothers came the SCRIBLERUS Club, which was more literary than political, and was started by Swift, St. John, Oxford, Arbuthnot, Pope, and Gay, to ridicule pedantry and other abuses of learning. The P. P. Clerk of the Parish, a satire on Burnet's fussy history, was one work of the society; and the Travels of Gulliver no doubt originated in the same circle.

The Calf's-Head Club does not need notice here, as it probably never existed but in the minds of frenzied High Churchmen. Nor, of course, did the Tattlers' Club, at the Trumpet Tavern in Shire-lane, ever meet but in the imagination of Steele. It was down that infamous lane, the houses in which are now all doomed, that Steele led the Twaddlers, Sir Harry Quickset, Sir Giles Wheelbarrow, and other country gentlemen, who all their way to Dick's coffee-house discussed the question of precedence.

That mean alley by Temple Bar was, however, really the site of a great club-the KIT-KAT. There, about 1700, thirty-nine Whig noblemen and gentlemen met to toast the beauties of the day and exult in the Revolution. Sir Robert Walpole, Arbuthnot, Steele, Hoadley, Addison, Garth, Vanbrugh, Congreve, the Duke of Marlborough, and the Earl of Dorset were among the chief members, and Jacob Tonson the bookseller, who first made Paradise Lost popular, was secretary. Pope told Steele that when the duellist Lord Mohun entered the club, and broke a gilt ornament off his chair, Tonson predicted the ruin of the Kit-kats. Sir Godfrey Kneller painted the portraits of the members for Tonson. They now belong to a gentleman at Bayfordbury, and were shown at the Manchester Art-Exhibition. In summer the club of wits and patriots met at the Upper Flask Tavern, Hampstead Heath. Many of the forced verses written on the toasting-glasses by Lord Halifax are still extant. In 1709 the society subscribed 400 guineas for the encouragement of good comedies. The club broke up about 1709.

Garth, the author of that now-forgotten poem, "The Dispensary," and physician to that almost-forgotten King, George I., was, according to bitter little Pope, "one of the most honest-hearted and real good men at the Kit-kat." He was a humorist, a sociable, kindly, unaffected man and clubbabilissimus. One night at the club, as it became late, Garth grew uneasy, and rising constantly for his sword and hat, declared he must be gone-must really be gone, as he had several patients waiting for him. Many times he was gently pressed

back into his arm-chair, and, some good Burgundy coming in, he soon forgot the sick men. Round-faced, black-visaged Steele at last reminding him of the sufferers expecting the sound of his square-toed shoes upon the stair, the flushed physician laughed loud, and, pulling out his list of patients (fifteen), "It's no great matter," he said, "after all, Dick, whether I see them to-night or to-morrow, for nine of them have such rotten constitutions that all the doctors in the world could not save them; and egad, man, the other six (lucky dogs!) have such good constitutions that all the physicians in the world could not kill them!"

A note of one of honest Steele's most reckless revels at the Kit-kat the recording angel has not yet found good reason to expunge. The ex-trooper of King William once brought staid Addison to the club to celebrate the great Whig festival of the Orange accession. Addison was silent and cold till he had had his bottle; and Steele had to drink "The immortal memory," till his own began to be rather flustered, and at the same time to encourage the quiet observant Spectator in his more prudent cups. There was good fooling that night; for John Sly, a tipsy hatter and an irrepressible humorist, pushed into the room on his knees with a tankard of ale in his hand, and, after that ancient fashion, tossed off his ale to "The immortal memory," and then worked himself out again painfully on his knees. This was done in perfect bonâ fide, and Steele whispered to his neighbour, Bishop Hoadley, "Do laugh; it is humanity to laugh." Eventually Steele laughed so much that he got thirstier, and then he drank so much that he could not stop laughing; so, after laughing till he fell under the table, he was carted home in a sedanchair, escorted by friends who were at least able to walk. But Steele all the way kept thrusting his head out of window, and shouting and insisting on being carried to his "echshelent frensh, Bishp Bangor." The obdurate Irish chairmen, however, deaf to all appeals, hurried him home and got him upstairs; but there he grew polite as a drunken Louis XIV., and insisted on waiting on them downstairs; and after that effort went quietly, entirely satisfied, and placidly smiling, to bed. The next morning, roused by a fierce headache, the repentant author, over his teaand-brandy, penned the tolerant bishop the following graceful couplet:

"Virtue with so much ease on Bangor sits,

All faults he pardons, though he none commits."

When Addison established Daniel Button, a faithful old servant of the Countess of Warwick, in a coffee-house on the south side of Russellstreet, Covent-garden (Wills', previously the haunt of Dryden, being on the north side), he frequented the place, and became its lordly Atticus; but he established no direct club there. He worked at his stately poems or the exquisite Spectators all the morning; dined at a tavern with Steele, Budgell, Philips, Carey, or Colonel Brett; then repaired to Button's; and ended by supper there or at some tavern.

VOL. VII.

E

Every writer on clubs, especially including industrious Mr. Timbs, who rejects nothing, has collected much nonsense about the eccentric clubs of London; borrowing what they copy chiefly from Ned Ward's ribald but clever sketches of the Lying Club, the Golden-Fleece Club, and other caricatures; and also from the Spectator's and Guardian's fanciful description of the Mummers, the Twopenny, the Ugly, the Fighting, the Humdrum, the Doldrum, the Lovers, the Fat Men, Tall Men, One-eyed Men, Lawyers, Old Everlastings, the Little, and the Men of the same Street. But among clubs that really did exist there certainly was an equally odd lot-the Humbugs, the Bucks, the Pilgrims, the Great Bottles, the Je ne scais quoi (the Prince of Wales was in this batch, so it must have been bad), the Sons of the Thames, and the No Pay no Liquor. But then we must remember that in our own time we have had, or have, the scientific Red Lions, the Eccentrics, the noble and charitable Savages, the Mulberry Club, Our Club, the Hooks and Eyes, and the Museum Club.

And now we come to the Johnson period, when Goldsmith used to joke and blunder and strut at the Robin-Hood debating-club in Essexstreet in the Strand, where any member was allowed to speak for seven minutes, and a rich City baker generally took the chair-a baker whom Burke alone ever overthrew or silenced. Derrick, who succeeded Beau Nash at Bath, took Goldsmith to the Robin Hood.

"Nature meant the president for a lord chancellor," said Goldsmith, astonished at a glibness which often passes for eloquence with clever men who have sluggish tongues.

"No," said Derrick, who knew the baker,-" only for a master of the rolls."

Goldsmith also belonged to a shilling whist-club that met near the Devil Tavern. He was, moreover, a frequenter of the Wednesday Club at the Globe Tavern, Fleet-street, where a hogshead of a man named Gordon used to delight him by his jovial singing of the song of " Nottingham Ale." The company was merry, but not select: a pig-butcher, who was too familiar; Glover, an ex-actor and physician, who had restored to life a highwayman that had been hung; Hugh Kelly, a humble rival of Goldsmith as a reviewer; and Tom King the comedian, so famous as Lord Ogleby. It was on his way from the Temple to the Wednesday Club that Goldsmith wrote his epitaph on his old friend Ned Purdon, the poor bookseller's hack, who had just dropped down dead in Smithfield.

On Dr. Johnson's lesser clubs we will not touch at much length. The club at the King's Head, a beefsteak-house in Ivy-lane, was founded when the wise Doctor was toiling at his Dictionary in Gough-square, Fleet-street. Dr. Richard Bathurst, Mr. Hawkesworth the writer, and Mr. Hawkins, an attorney (afterwards spiteful Sir John), were also members.

On one great and inspired occasion Dr. Johnson gave a feast to

celebrate the production of Mrs. Lennox's first book. Mrs. Lennox, a friend, and her husband were there, and twenty members met to welcome them. Johnson had specially decorated a magnificent apple-pie with bay-leaves, and, after fitting ceremonies, at a crowning moment he placed a wreath of laurel on the lady's fair brows. The supper

was at eight, and it was eight again before the Doctor and his friends loomed away in the dawning. A year before his death, Johnson tried to revive the club; but the landlord was gone, and the house shut up.

About this time Johnson also instituted a City club at the Queen's Arms in St. Paul's-churchyard. He would have no Wilkite patriots admitted. Boswell, always disposed to be pleased with his great friend's friends, found the members "very sensible, well-behaved men."

The year before he died, Dr. Johnson established a small evening club at the Essex Head (now No. 40, Mr. Timbs says), Essex-street, a house kept by "Sam" Greaves, an old servant of Johnson's steady friend Thrale. Reynolds would not join because his detestation, Barry, was a member. Daines Barrington, Murphy, John Nichols, Dr. Horsley, and Mr. Windham were all members; and Boswell, though absent in Scotland, was chosen, as being "very clubbable." The excellent motto of the Essex-street club was :

"To-day deep thoughts with me resolve to drench

In mirth, which after no repenting draws."

The meetings were three times a week; forfeit, threepence a time. The club was kept up for more than eight years after the death of the illustrious founder.

The club at Tom's Coffee-House, No. 17, on the north side of Russell-street, was founded in 1764, and consisted of nearly 700 members-noblemen, ambassadors, gentlemen, and men of talent. The large front room of the house, pulled down in 1865, was the card-room. Among the many celebrities enrolled in the books at Tom's, still preserved, are Goldsmith, Dr. Dodd, Lord Clive, Garrick, Murphy, Beard the singer, George Colman, Lord Brougham's father, (Long) Sir Thomas Robinson, Sir John Fielding (the blind justice), Dr. Johnson, the Marquis of Granby, &c. The original Tom threw himself out of a second-floor window into the street and was killed in 1722. The coffee-house closed in 1814.

In 1801 "Bobus" Smith, the brother of Sydney Smith, a great humorist and moreover a Platonist, founded the KING OF CLUBS at the Crown and Anchor Tavern in the Strand. Bobus, so called at Eton, was an excellent club-man, and a perfect headsman of blockheads. Then there was "Conversation Sharp," a partner in a West-Indian house, who often brought his friend Sir James Mackintosh. Scarlett, too, attended, with Rogers the poet, and John Allen, brother of Lady Mackintosh; and it was at this club Curran met Erskine, but to their mutual dissatisfaction.

Few debating-clubs in London-not even the Cogers or the Green Dragon-have ever equalled the CLIFFORD-STREET Club, where young Canning made his maiden speech. At the meetings, which took place once a month, the chief champions were Mackintosh, Richard Sharp, Mr. Ollyett Woodhouse, Charles Moore, and Lord Charles Townshend, fourth son of the eccentric Marquis (the family was even then eccentric). On one celebrated night Canning, usually on the Liberal side, to make the fight equal, took the Tory side of this question: "The justice and expediency of resuming the ecclesiastical property of France." A foaming pot of porter was brought in and placed before the president just as Canning was loudly denouncing Mirabeau. The speaker continued: "To the steady eye of a sagacious criticism the eloquence of Mirabeau will appear to be as empty and vapid as his patriotism. It is like the beverage that stands, sir, so invitingly before you-foamy and frothy on the top, heavy and muddy within."

The ECCENTRICS, "an offshoot of the Brilliants," according to Mr. Timbs, met late in the last century at a tavern in Chandos-street, Covent-garden, and then removed to May's-buildings, St. Martin'slane. The Eccentrics from first to last numbered 40,000 members, including among many eminent names those of Fox, Sheridan, Lord Melbourne, and Lord Brougham. On one and the same night Sheridan, Lord Petersham, and Theodore Hook were enrolled as members.

The happy days of George IV. were glorified by the FOUR-INHAND Club, an ambitious attempt of the Regent's friends to raise themselves to the enviable dignity of stage-coachmen. In that age of vice and folly this club met three times a week, at midday, in the neighbourhood of Piccadilly; from twelve to twenty smart four-in-hands starting at once for the Windsor-road, somewhere along which they dined. Many of the noblemen drove themselves. The gay company rode outside in fine weather, and "the rigour of the game" imperatively required two real footmen in rich liveries on the back seat.

But we must go back to 1783, about which time the wild and heartless prince used to frequent a convivial club of a low roistering kind at the Salutation Tavern, in Tavistock-court, Covent-garden. From this den, with Sheridan, Hare, Fox, the Duke of Norfolk (then Earl of Surrey), and the infamous Duc d'Orléans (afterwards Egalité), the royal scapegrace, vicious as Prince Hal, without, however, his courage or generosity, used to sally forth to thieves' kitchens and beggars' ginshops, or to box the watch, and carry off knockers. There is a tradition that the whole gang was on one occasion seized, and brought before the St. Giles Dogberries.

The ALFRED Club, instituted in Albemarle-street in 1808-so dull at last that it was unable to endure itself alone-was incorporated with the lively Oriental in 1855. Its nickname was the "Half-read." Lord Byron, who belonged to it, as he did to the Cocoa Tree, says of it, "It was pleasant; a little too sober and literary, and bored with Sotheby