it is sincerely to be hoped that Wilkes was sent after his lordship. This club is now represented by one held behind the Lyceum, with the thoroughly British motto, 'Beef and Liberty:' the name was happily chosen and therefore imitated. In the reign of George II. we meet with a 'Rump-steak, or Liberty Club;' and somehow steaks and liberty seem to be the two ideas most intimately associated in the Britannic mind. Can any one explain it?

Other clubs there were under Anne,-political, critical, and hilarious-but the palm is undoubtedly carried off by the glorious Kit-kat.

It is not every eating-house that is immortalized by a Pope, though Tennyson has sung 'The Cock' with its 'plump headwaiter,' who, by the way, was mightily offended by the Laureate's verses or pretended to be so-and thought it 'a great liberty of Mr. what is his name? to put respectable private characters into his books.' Pope, or some say Arbuthnot, explained the etymology of this club's extraordinary title:

Mr.

'Whence deathless Kit-kat took its name,

Few critics can unriddle :

Some say from pastrycook it came,

And some from Cat and Fiddle.

'From no trim beaux its name it boasts,
Grey statesmen or green wits;

But from the pell-mell pack of toasts
Of old cats and young kits.'

Probably enough the title was hit on a hap-hazard, and retained because it was singular, but as it has given a poet a theme, and a painter a name for pictures of a peculiar size, its etymology has become important. Some say that the pastrycook in Shire Lane, at whose house it was held, was named Christopher Katt. Some one or other was certainly celebrated for the manufacture of that forgotten delicacy, a mutton-pie, which acquired the name of a Kit-kat.

'A Kit-kat is a supper for a lord,'

says a comedy of 1700, and certes it afforded at this club evening nourishment for many a celebrated noble profligate of the day. The supposed sign of the Cat and Fiddle (Kitt), gave

The Romance of the Bowl.

97 another solution, but after all, Pope's may be satisfactorily received.

The Kit-kat was, par excellence, the Whig Club of Queen Anne's time it was established at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and was then composed of thirty-nine members, among whom were the Dukes of Marlborough, Devonshire, Grafton, Richmond, and Somerset. In later days it numbered the greatest wits of the age, of whom anon.

This club was celebrated more than any for its toasts.

Now, if men must drink—and sure the vine was given us for use, I do not say for abuse-they had better make it an occasion of friendly intercourse; nothing can be more degraded than the solitary sanctimonious toping in which certain of our northern brethren are known to indulge. They had better give to the quaffing of that rich gift, sent to be a medicine for the mind, to raise us above the perpetual contemplation of worldly uk Drink ills, as much of romance and elegance as possible. It is the opener of the heart, the awakener of nobler feelings of generosity and love, the banisher of all that is narrow, and sordid, and selfish; the herald of all that is exalted in man. No wonder that the Greeks made a god of Bacchus, that the Hindu worshipped the mellow Soma, and that there has been scarce a poet who has not sung its praise. There was some beauty in the feasts of the Greeks, when the goblet was really wreathed with flowers; and even the German student, dirty and drunken as he may be, removes half the stain from his orgies with the rich harmony of his songs, and the hearty good-fellowship of his toasts. We drink still, perhaps we shall always drink till the end of time, but all the romance of the bowl is gone; the last trace of its beauty went with the frigid abandonment of the

toast.

There was some excuse for wine when it brought out that now forgotten expression of good-will. Many a feud was reconciled in the clinking of glasses; just as many another was begun when the cup was drained too deeply. The first quarter of the last century saw the end of all the social glories of the wassail in this country, and though men drank as much fifty years later, all its poetry and romance had then disappeared.

Toast

98

The Toasts of the Kit-kat.

It was still, however, the custom at that period to call on the name of some fair maiden, and sing her praises over the cup as it passed. It was a point of honour for all the company to join the health. Some beauties became celebrated for the number of their toasts; some even standing toasts among certain sets. In the Kit-kat Club the custom was carried out by rule, and every member was compelled to name a beauty, whose claims to the honour were then discussed, and if her name was approved, a separate bowl was consecrated to her, and verses to her honour engraved on it. Some of the most celebrated toasts had even their portraits hung in the club-room, and it was no slight distinction to be the favourite of the Kit-kat. When only eight years old, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu enjoyed this privilege. Her father, the Lord Dorchester, afterwards Evelyn, Duke of Kingston, in a fit of caprice, proposed 'the pretty little child' as his toast. The other members, who had never seen her, objected; the Peer sent for her, and there could no longer be any question. The forward little girl was handed from knee to knee, petted, probably, by Addison, Congreve, Vanbrugh, Garth, and many another famous wit. Another celebrated toast of the Kit-kat, mentioned by Walpole, was Lady Molyneux, who, he says, died smoking a pipe.

This club was no less celebrated for its portraits than for the ladies it honoured. They, the portraits, were all painted by Kneller, and all of one size, which thence got the name of Kit-kat; they were hung round the club-room. Jacob Tonson, the publisher, was secretary to the club.

Defoe tells us the Kit-kat held the first rank among the clubs of the early part of the last century, and certainly the names of its members comprise as many wits as we could expect to find collected in one society.

Addison must have been past forty when he became a member of the Kit-kat. His 'Cato' had won him the general applause of the Whig party, who could not allow so fine a writer to slip from among them. He had long, too, played the courtier, and was quite a gentleman.' A place among the exclusives of the Kit-kat was only the just reward of such attainments, and he had it. I shall not be asked to give a notice of

The Members of the Kit-kat.

99

a man so universally known, and one who ranks rather with the humorists than the wits. It will suffice to say, that it was not till after the publication of the 'Spectator,' and some time after, that he joined our society.

Congreve I have chosen out of this set for a separate life, for this man happens to present a very average sample of all their peculiarities. Congreve was a literary man, a poet, a wit, a beau, and-what unhappily is quite as much to the purpose -a profligate. The only point he, therefore, wanted in common with most of the members, was a title; but few of the titled members combined as many good and bad qualities of the Kit-kat kind as did William Congreve.

Another dramatist, whose name seems to be inseparable from Congreve's, was that mixture of bad and good tasteVanbrugh. The author of "The Relapse,' the most licentious play ever acted; the builder of Blenheim, the ugliest house ever erected, was a man of good family, and Walpole counts him among those who wrote genteel comedy, because they lived in the best company.' We doubt the logic of this; but if it hold, how is it that Van wrote plays which the best company, even at that age, condemned, and neither good nor bad company can read in the present day without being shocked? If the conversation of the Kit-kat was anything like that in this member's comedies, it must have been highly edifying. However, I have no doubt Vanbrugh passed for a gentleman, whatever his conversation, and he was certainly a wit, and apparently somewhat less licentious in his morals than the rest. Yet what Pope said of his literature may be said, too, of some acts of his life :

'How Van wants grace, who never wanted wit.'

And his quarrel with Queen Sarah' of Marlborough, though the duchess was by no means the most agreeable woman in the world to deal with, is not much to Van's honour. When the nation voted half a million to build that hideous mass of stone, the irregular and unsightly piling of which caused Walpole to say that the architect 'had emptied quarries, rather than built houses,' and Dr. Evans to write this epitaph for the builder

729030

100

A Good Wit and a Bad Architect.

'Lie heavy on him, Earth, for he
Laid many a heavy load on thee,'

Sarah haggled over seven-pence halfpenny a bushel;' Van retorted by calling her stupid and troublesome,' and 'that wicked woman of Marlborough,' and after the Duke's death, wrote that the Duke had left her 'twelve thousand pounds a-year to keep herself clean and go to law.' Whether she employed any portion of it on the former object we do not pretend to say, but she certainly spent as much as a miser could on litigation, Van himself being one of the unfortunates she attacked in this way.

The events of Vanbrugh's life were varied. He began life in the army, but in 1697 gave the stage 'The Relapse.' It was sufficiently successful to induce him to follow it up with the 'Provoked Wife,' one of the wittiest pieces produced in those days. Charles, Earl of Carlisle, Deputy Earl Marshal, for whom he built Castle Howard, made him Clarencieux King-atarms in 1704, and he was knighted by George I., 9th of September, 1714. In 1705 he joined Congreve in the management of the Haymarket, which he himself built. George I. made him Comptroller-general of the royal works. He had even an experience of the Bastille, where he was confined for sketching fortifications in France. He died in 1726, with the reputation of a good wit, and a bad architect. His conversation was, certainly, as light as his buildings were heavy.

Another member, almost as well known in his day, was Sir Samuel Garth, the physician, 'well-natured Garth,' as Pope called him. He won his fame by his satire on the apothecaries in the shape of a poem called 'The Dispensary.' When delivering the funeral oration over Dryden's body, which had been so long unburied that its odour began to be disagreeable, he mounted a tub, the top of which fell through and left the doctor in rather an awkward position. He gained admission to the Kit-kat in consequence of a vehement eulogy on King William which he had introduced into his Harveian oration in 1697.* It was Garth, too, who extemporized most of the

*The Kit-kat club was not founded till 1703.