CHAPTER VI.

FLEET STREET (NORTHERN TRIBUTARIES SHOE LANE AND BELL YARD).

The Kit-Kat Club-The Toast for the Year Little Lady Mary-Drunken John Sly-Garth's Patients-Club removed to Barn Elms-Steele at the "Trumpet"-Rogues' Lane- Murder-Beggars' Haunts-Thieves' Dens-Coiners-Theodore Hook in Hemp's Sponging-house-Pope in Bell Yard-Minor Celebrities-Apollo Court.

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Godfrey Kneller, the great Court painter of the reigns of William and Anne, was a member; and he painted, for his friend Tonson the portraits of forty-two gentlemen of the Kit Kat, including Dryden, who died a year after it started. The forty-two portraits, painted three-quarter size (hence called Kit-Kat), to suit the walls of Tonson's villa at Barn Elms, still exist, and are treasured by Mr. R. W. Baker, a representative of the Tonson family, at Hertingfordbury, in Hertfordshire. Among the lesser men of this distinguished club we must include Pope's friends, the "knowing Walsh" and "Granville the polite." : I

OPPOSITE Child's Bank, and almost within sound | Congreve, the most courtly of dramatists; Garth, of the jingle of its gold, once stood Shire Lane, the poetical physician-"well-natured Garth," as afterwards known as Lower Serle's Place. It latterly Pope somewhat awkwardly calls him; and Vanbrugh, became a dingy, disreputable defile, where lawyers' the writer of admirable comedies. Dryden could clerks and the hangers-on of the law-courts were hardly have seriously belonged to a Whig club; often allured and sometimes robbed; yet it had Pope was inadmissible as a Catholic, and Prior as been in its day a place of great repute. In this lane a renegade. Latterly objectionable men pushed in, the Kit-Kat, the great club of Queen Anne's reign, worst of all, Lord Mohun, a disreputable debauchee held its sittings, at the "Cat and Fiddle," the shop of and duellist, afterwards run through by the Duke a pastrycook named Christopher Kat. The house, of Hamilton in Hyde Park, the duke himself according to local antiquaries, afterwards became the perishing in the encounter. When Mohun, in a "Trumpet," a tavern mentioned by Steele in the drunken pet, broke a gilded emblem off a club Tatler, and latterly known as the "Duke of York." chair, respectable old Tonson predicted the downThe Kit-Kats were originally Whig patriots, who, at fall of the society, and said with a sigh, “The man the end of King William's reign, met in this out-of-who would do that would cut a man's throat." Sir the-way place to devise measures to secure the Protestant succession and keep out the pestilent Stuarts. Latterly they assembled for simple enjoyment; and there have been grave disputes as to whether the club took its name from the punning sign, the "Cat and Kit," or from the favourite pies which Christopher Kat had christened ; and as this question will probably last the antiquaries another two centuries, we leave it alone. According to some verses by Arbuthnot, the chosen friend of Pope and Swift, the question was mooted even in his time, as if the very founders of the club had forgotten. Some think that the club really began with a weekly dinner given by Jacob Tonson, the great bookseller of Gray's Inn Lane, to his chief authors and patrons. This Tonson, one of the patriarchs of English booksellers, who published Dryden's "Virgil," purchased a share of Milton's works, and first made Shakespeare's works cheap enough to be accessible to the many, was secretary to the club from the commencement. An average of thirty, nine poets, wits, noblemen, and gentlemen formed the staple of the association. The noblemen were perhaps rather too numerous for that republican equality that should prevail in the best intellectual society; yet above all the dukes shine out Steele and Addison, the two great luminaries of the club. Among the Kit-Kat dukes was the great Marlborough; among the earls the poetic Dorset, the patron of Dryden and Prior; among the lords the wise Halifax; among the baronets bluff Sir Robert Walpole. Of the poets and wits there were

As at the "Devil," "the tribe of Ben" must have often discussed the downfall of Lord Bacon, the poisoning of Overbury, the war in the Palatinate, and the murder of Buckingham; so in Shire Lane, opposite, the talk must have run on Marlborough's victories, Jacobite plots, and the South-Sea Bubble; Addison must have discussed Swift, and Steele condemned the littleness of Pope. It was the custom of this aristocratic club every year to elect some reigning beauty as a toast. To the queen of the year the gallant members wrote epigrammatic verses, which were etched with a diamond on the club glasses. The most celebrated of these toasts were the four daughters of the Duke of Marlborough Lady Godolphin, Lady Sunderland (generally known as "the Little Whig"), Lady Bridgewater, and Lady Monthermer. Swift's friend, Mrs. Long, was another; and so was a piece of Sir Isaac Newton. The verses

seem flat and dead now, like flowers found between the leaves of an old book; but in their time no doubt they had their special bloom and fragrance. The most tolerable are those written by Lord Halifax on "the Little Whig" :

"Ail nature's charms in Sunderland appear,
Bright as her eyes and as her reason clear;
Yet still their force, to man not safely known,
Seems undiscovered to herself alone."

Yet how poor after all is this laboured compli-
ment in comparison to a sentence of Steele's on
some lady of rank whose virtues he honoured,
"that even to have known her was in itself a
liberal education.”

But few stories connected with the Kit-Kat meetings are to be dug out of books, though no doubt many snatches of the best conversation are embalmed in the Spectator and the Tatler. Yet Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, whom Pope first admired and then reviled, tells one pleasant incident of her childhood that connects her with the great club.

even when in liquor, kept whispering to the rather shocked prelate, "Do laugh; it is humanity to laugh." The bishop soon put on his hat and withdrew, and Steele by and by subsided under the table. Picked up and crammed into a sedan-chair, he insisted, late as it was, in going to the Bishop of Bangor's to apologise. Eventually he was coaxed home and got upstairs, but then, in a gush of politeness, he insisted on seeing the chairmen out; after which he retired with self-complacency to bed. The next morning, in spite of headache the most racking, Steele sent the tolerant bishop the following exquisite couplet, which covered a multitude of such sins :

"Virtue with so much ease on Bangor sits,

All faults he pardons, though he none commits." One night when amiable Garth lingered over the Kit-Kat wine, though patients were pining for him, Steele reproved the epicurean doctor. “ Nay, nay, Dick," said Garth, pulling out a list of fifteen, "it's no great matter after all, for nine of them have such bad constitutions that not all the physicians in the world could save them; and the other six have such good constitutions that all the physicians in the world could not kill them."

Three o'clock in the morning seems to have been no uncommon hour for the Kit-Kat to break up, and a Tory lampooner says that at this club

One evening when toasts were being chosen, her father, Evelyn Pierpoint, Duke of Kingston, took it into his head to nominate Lady Mary, then a child only eight years of age. She was prettier, he vowed, than any beauty on the list. "You shall see her," cried the duke, and instantly sent a chaise for her. Presently she came ushered in, the youth of Anne's reign learned dressed in her best, and was elected by acclamation. The Whig gentlemen drank the little lady's health up-standing and, feasting her with sweetmeats and passing her round with kisses, at once inscribed her name with a diamond on a drinkingglass. "Pleasure," she says, "was too poor a word to express my sensations. They amounted to ecstasy. Never again throughout my whole life did I pass so happy an evening."

"To sleep away the days and drink away the nights."

It used to be said that it took so much wine to raise Addison to his best mood, that Steele generally got drunk before that golden hour arrived. Steele, that warm-hearted careless fellow in whom Thackeray so delighted, certainly shone at the KitKat; and an anecdote still extant shows him to us with all his amiable weaknesses. On the night of that great Whig festival-the celebration of King William's anniversary-Steele and Addison brought Dr. Hoadley, the Bishop of Bangor, with them, and solemnly drank "the immortal memory." Presently John Sly, an eccentric hatter and enthusiastic politician, crawled into the room on his knees, in the old Cavalier fashion, and drank the Orange toast in a tankard of foaming October. No one laughed at the tipsy hatter; but Steele, kindly

The club latterly held its meetings at Tonson's villa at Barn Elms (previously the residence of Cowley), or at the "Upper Flask" tavern, on Hampstead Heath. The club died out before 1727 (George II.); for Vanbrugh, writing to Tonson, says,—“ Both Lord Carlisle and Cobham expressed a great desire of having one meeting. next winter, not as a club, but as old friends that have been of a club-and the best club that ever met." In 1709 we find the Kit-Kat subscribing 400 guineas for the encouragement of good comedies. Altogether such a body of men must have had great influence on the literature of the age, for, in spite of the bitterness of party, there was some generous esprit de corps then, and the Whig wits and poets were a power, and were backed by rank and wealth.

Whether the "Trumpet" (formerly half-way up on the left-hand side ascending from Temple Bar) was the citadel of the Kit-Kats or not, Steele introduces it as the scene of two of the best of his Tatler papers. It was there, in October, 1709, that he received his deputation of Staffordshire county

LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU AND THE KIT-KATS (see page 71).

gentlemen, delightful old fogies, standing much on humour Steele sketches Sir Geoffrey Notch, the form and precedence. There he prepares tea for president, who had spent all his money on horses, Sir Harry Quickset, Bart.; Sir Giles Wheelbarrow; dogs, and gamecocks, and who looked on all Thomas Rentfree, Esq., J.P.; Andrew Windmill, thriving persons as pitiful upstarts. Then comes Esq., the steward, with boots and whip; and Mr. Major Matchlock, who thought nothing of any Nicholas Doubt, of the Inner Temple, Sir Harry's battle since Marston Moor, and who usually began mischievous young nephew. After much dispute his story of Naseby at three-quarters past six. about precedence, the sturdy old fellows are taken Dick Reptile was a silent man, with a nephew

by Steele to "Dick's" Coffee-house for a morning whom he often reproved. The wit of the club, draught; and safely, after some danger, effect the passage of Fleet Street, Steele rallying them at the Temple Gate. In Sir Harry we fancy we see a faint sketch of the more dignified Sir Roger de Coverley, which Addison afterwards so exquisitely elaborated.

At the "Trumpet" Steele also introduces us to a delightful club of old citizens that met every evening precisely at six. The humours of the fifteen Trumpeters are painted with the breadth and vigour of Hogarth's best manner. With a delightful

an old Temple bencher, never left the room till he had quoted ten distiches from "Hudibras" and told long stories of a certain extinct man about town named Jack Ogle. Old Reptile was extremely attentive to all that was said, though he had heard the same stories every night for twenty years, and upon all occasions winked oracularly to his nephew to particularly mind what passed. About ten the innocent twaddle closed by a man coming in with a lantern to light home old Bickerstaff. They were simple and happy times that Steele

Mr. R. Wells, of Colne Park, Halstead, kindly informs us that as late as the year 1765 there was a club that still kept up the name of Kit-Kat. The members in 1765 included, among others, Lord Sandwich (Jemmy Twitcher, as he was gene-"tiger," invented and made fashionable by the rally called), Mr. Beard, Lord Weymouth, Lord Bolingbroke, the Duke of Queensbury, Lord Caresford, Mr. Cadogan, the Marquis of Caracciollo, Mr. Seymour, and Sir George Armytage. One of the most active managers of the club was Richard Phelps (who, we believe, afterwards was secretary to Pitt). Among letters and receipts preserved by Mr. Wells, is one from Thomas Pingo, jeweller, of the "Golden Head," on the "Paved Stones," Gray's Inn Lane, for gold medals, probably to be worn by the members.