were for the gallant of the seventeenth century. Old Dekker, in his Gull's Horn-Book, was writing The Book of Snobs of his day. Just as The Snobographer describes old Jawkins in the coffeeroom of "the No-Surrender," waving the Standard, swaggering, and haranguing; or Spitfire, great upon foreign affairs, and oracular on the treasons of Lord Palmerston and the designs of Russia; or Fawney, sidling along in his shiny boots, with his endless greasy simper, and his profound interest in every body's business; or Messrs. Spavin and Cockspur growling together in a corner about sporting matters; or Wiggle and Waggle, the lady-killers; or Captain Shindy, throwing all the club into an uproar about the quality of his mutton-chop;— so the Elizabethan humorist, in his chapter, "How a Gallant should behave himself in an Ordinary," depicts the Paul's captain bragging about the Portugal, Cadiz, or Island voyage, or vaunting his employments in Ireland and the Low Countries, and "publishing his languages" for the benefit of the untravelled listeners; the courtier, with his politic discourse of great lords; and the poet, "after a turn or two in the room, pulling out his gloves, with an epigram, satire, or sonnet fastened in one of them." Thackeray paints not more minutely the affectations and table-habits of our own Club coffee-rooms, than Dekker the humours of the Ordinary, the handling of the tobacco-box, "the whiff," "the ring," and all the other tricks of taking your right Trinidado; the carving, the criticism, and the dicing,- till "the parings of fruit and cheese are in the voider; cards and dice lie stinking in the fire; the guests are all up; the gilt rapiers ready to be hanged; and the French lackey and the Irish footboy shrugging at the doors with their masters' hobby-horses, to ride to the new play."

Have any of our readers ever speculated on the etymology of the word "club," or asked themselves whether it points to the entertainment or the bill? Do we arrive at it by way of the old 'prentice-cry of "Clubs! Clubs!"-in allusion to the good-fellowship of those who "club" together to eat, drink, and. be merry; or, as that respectable authority, Skinner; maintains, through the Anglo-Saxon clifian, cleofian (our "cleave"), from the division of the reckoning among the guests round the table? As clifian and its English equivalent include the correlative meanings "to stick together" and "to separate," we may perhaps be allowed to take either view, pace etymologorum.

We are not aware of any example earlier than the Restoration of the word being used in the sense of a social gathering. The first "club" we read of is an association, not of roystering/ Cavaliers, but of sober Puritans. This was the "Rota," or "Coffee Club," as Pepys calls it, which met in New Palace:

Yard, "where they take water, the next house to the staires, at one Miles's; where was made purposely a large ovall table, with a passage in the middle for Miles to deliver his coffee.' Round this table, "in a room every evening as full as it could be crammed" (says Aubrey), sat Milton and Marvell, Cyriac Skinner, Harrington, Nevill, and their friends, discussing abstract political questions, like members of the Union at Oxford and Cambridge. Hither, in January 1660,-the same month in which Monk marched across the Tweed in defiance of the Rump,-came Pepys, and "heard very good discourse in answer to Mr. Harrington's answer, who said that the state of the Roman government was not a settled government; and so it was no wonder the balance of prosperity was in one hand and the command in another, it being therefore always in a posture of war: but it was carried by ballot that it was a steady government, though, it is true, by the voices it had been carried before that it was an unsteady government. So to-morrow it is to be proved by the opponents that the balance lay in one hand, and the government in another." The Clubs we hear of at that time were all political. Besides the Rota, there was the old Royalist club, "the Sealed Knot," which the year before the Restoration had organised a general insurrection in favour of the king. Unluckily, they had a spy among them-Sir Richard Willis-who had long fingered Cromwell's money as one of his private "intelligencers;" and the leaders, on his information, were arrested, and committed to prison. There was the "King Club," all the members of which were called "King." Then there were doubtless Rump Clubs by dozens; and on the other side the Calf's-Head Clubs, which continued into the next century. The flaming Jacobite who wrote the secret history* of this club in 1703, ascribes its institution to "Milton, and some other creatures of the Commonwealth." But he very likely confounded the Calf's-Head with the Rota. The Calf's-Head Club had no fixed house for meeting, but removed their quarters as they saw convenient. In 1695 their place of assemblage was in a blind alley about Moorfields, where, on the 30th of January in that year, Jerry White, Cromwell's old chaplain, said grace after the anniversary dinner. The cloth removed, a calf's-skull filled with wine was set on the table, and an "anthem" was sung while a brimmer went about to the pious memory of him that killed the tyrant. "Some

*Harleian Miscellany, vol. viii.

See Toland's Invitation to Dismal to dine with the Calf's-Head Club," published among Swift's poems:

"While an alluding hymn some artist sings,

We toast Confusion to the race of kings.""

persons that frequent the Black Boy in Newgate Street," says our historian ominously, "know this account to be true." Parties ran high when this was written: Defoe stood in the pillory that year for his pamphlet, The Shortest Way with Dissenters. The authorship of "A Calf's-Head Anthem" might have procured the same distinction for Mr. Benjamin Bridgewater, the laureate of the club. The specimens of these lyrics given in the secret history are sorry doggrel enough. In the best of them, alluding to the observance of the day by zealous Royalists as a solemn fast, Benjamin Bridgewater sings:

"They and we this day observing,
Differ only in one thing:

They are canting, whining, starving;
We, rejoicing, drink and sing.
Advance the emblem of the action,
Set the calf's-head full of wine;
Drinking ne'er was counted faction,
Men and gods adore the vine."

While the old party-hates lasted, and bloody retaliation was to be feared, according as Whig or Tory came uppermost, political clubs continued to flourish. Free speech was dangerous in mixed assemblies. Cromwell had introduced the detestable practice of employing paid spies. Spies continued to be employed-though probably they went unpaid-under Charles II. The history of the Popish plots, and the execution of Russell and Sidney, show how little protection was in law. Things were no better under James. Judges were disbenched, bishops sent to the Tower, fellows of colleges expelled, colonels and captains broke, and writers pilloried, for the utterance of opinions adverse to absolute power. The atrocities of Jeffreys, the horrors of the Bloody Assize, can never be forgotten. William was, happily, averse to blood-shedding; and no lives, except those of the men who participated in the assassinationplot, were forfeited for political offences in his reign. For most of the years during which Queen Anne sat on the throne men in high places were traitors at heart, and not likely to punish treason severely in others.

The non-renewal of the Licensing Act in 1694 had released the press from the last restraint of censorship; indeed, the writers under Anne carried freedom to license. We should hardly have regretted the suppression, even by a licenser, of the detestable filth and profanity of such ribalds as Tom D'Urfey, Tom Brown, and Ned Ward. It is true, we have to thank them for some knowledge of the town ; but he that walks under their guidance must pick his way through ordure. They have an unsavoury instinct for dirt; they will go a mile about to roll in it.

The comic writers of the Restoration are immoral enough; but there is some grace in their most offensive productions. In the works of Brown and Ward all is unredeemed scurrility, obscenity, and blackguardism. There is no good without its accompanying evil. With increasing freedom of opinion and expression, came freer social intercourse. Politics, under Anne, had grown a smaller and less dangerous game than in the preceding century. The original political clubs, of the Commonwealth, the Protectorate, and the Restoration, plotted revolutions of government. The Parliamentary clubs, after the Revolution of 1688, manoeuvred for changes of administration. The high-flying Tory, country gentleman and county member, drank the health of the king,-sometimes over the water-decanter,and flustered himself with bumpers in honour of Dr. Sacheverell and the Church of England, with true-blue spirits of his own kidney, at the October Club. The two hundred squires who, under this name, met at the Bell Tavern, in King Street, Westminster, gave infinite trouble to the Tory administration which came into office under the leadership of Harley, St. John, and Harcourt, in 1710. The administration were for proceeding moderately with their rivals, and for gradually replacing opponents by partisans. The October Club were for immediately impeaching every leader of the Whig party, and for turning out, without a day's grace, every placeman who did not wear their colours and shout their cries. Swift was employed to talk over those of the Club who were amenable to reason; but there were many red-hot "tantivies," for whose tipsy loyalty and hiccupping Anglicanism the October Club was not thorough-going enough. They seceded from the original body, and formed the "March Club, more Jacobite, more Anglican, more rampant in its hatred of the Whigs, than the society from which it branched.

The

The Whig leaders, on their part, had their Club in Shire Lane, at the house of a famous mutton-pieman, one Christopher Katt; from whom the club, and the pies that formed a standing dish at the club-suppers, both took their name of "Kit-Kat." portraits of the members were all painted for old Jacob Tonson, the bookseller, and secretary of the club, by Sir Godfrey Kneller, on canvases of a uniform size, 36 inches by 28, since known among portrait-painters as "kit-kat" size. It is hard to believe, as we pick our way along the narrow and filthy pathThere are allusions to such negotiations in more than one passage of the Journal for 1711.

†These pictures, forty-two in number, were left by Tonson, at his death, in 1736, to his great-nephew, who died in 1767; from whom they passed to his brother's house at Water-Oakley, near Windsor, and subsequently to the house of Mr. Baker, in Hertingfordbury, where, we believe, they still remain.

way of Shire Lane, that in this blind alley, some hundred-and-
fifty years ago, used to meet many of the finest gentlemen and
choicest wits of the days of Queen Anne and the first George.
Inside one of those frowsy and low-ceiled rooms,—now tenanted
by abandoned women, or devoted to the sale of greengroceries
and small coal,-Halifax has conversed and Somers unbent,
Addison mellowed over a bottle, Congreve flashed his wit,
Vanbrugh let loose his easy humour, Garth talked and rhymed.
The Dukes of Somerset, Richmond, Grafton, Devonshire, Marl-
borough, and Newcastle; the Earls of Dorset, Sunderland,
Manchester, Wharton, and Kingston; Sir Robert Walpole,
Granville, Maynwaring, Stepney, and Walsh,*-all belonged
to the Kit-Kat. The Club was literary and gallant, as well as
political. The members subscribed four hundred_guineas for
the encouragement of good comedies, in 1709. Its toasting-
glasses, each inscribed with a verse to some "toast" or reign-
ing beauty of the time, were long famous. The beauties have
returned to dust, the glasses are long since shivered; but the
verses remain. Among those they celebrate are the four shin-
ing daughters of the Duke of Marlborough, - Lady Godolphin,
Lady Sunderland, Lady Bridgewater, and Lady Monthermer;
Swift's friends, Mrs. Long and Mrs. Barton, the lovely and
witty niece of Sir Isaac Newton; the Duchess of Bolton, Mrs.
Brudenell, Lady Carlisle, Mrs. Di Kirk, and Lady Wharton.‡
Dr. B. (whoever he may be) celebrates the majestic Bolton:
"Flat contradictions wage in Bolton war,

Yet her the toasters as a goddess prize;
Her Whiggish tongue does zealously declare
For freedom, but for slavery her eyes."

Lord Halifax, as of right, devotes his diamond more than once to Mrs. Barton :

Beauty and wit strove, each in vain,

To vanquish Bacchus and his train;
But Barton, with successful charms,
From both their quivers drew her arms.
The roving god his sway resigns,
And awfully submits his vines."

Mr. Maynwaring neatly insinuates his compliment to Marlborough under cover of this quatrain to his eldest daughter:

*We take this list from the article "Kit-Kat Club," in Mr. Cunningham's Handbook to London, the name of which we have prefixed to this article. To this most accurate and amusing work we have throughout this article resorted so freely, that special acknowledgment of our obligations would be tedious. There is no book extant giving so compendious a history of the capital and its manners. †The expression dates from the time of the Kit-Kat.

Poems.

Nichol's Select Collection of Poems, vol. v., 1782. See, too, Lord Halifax's