Let us hope that he is not still alive: though his
friends seemed to have cared little whether he were so or not, to judge
from a couple of verses written by one of them:--
'If Fielding is dead,
And rests under this stone,
Then he is not alive
You may bet two to one.
'But if he's alive,
And does not lie there--
Let him live till he's hanged,
For which no man will care.'
OF CERTAIN CLUBS AND CLUB-WITS UNDER ANNE.
The Origin of Clubs.--The Establishment of Coffee-houses.--The
October Club.--The Beef-steak Club.--Of certain other
Clubs.--The Kit-kat Club.--The Romance of the Bowl.--The Toasts
of the Kit-kat.--The Members of the Kit-kat.--A good Wit, and a
bad Architect.--'Well-natured Garth.'--The Poets of the
Kit-kat.--Charles Montagu, Earl of Halifax.--Chancellor
Somers.--Charles Sackville, Lord Dorset.--Less celebrated Wits.
I suppose that, long before the building of Babel, man discovered that
he was an associative animal, with the universal motto, '_L'union c'est
la force_;' and that association, to be of any use, requires talk. A
history of celebrated associations, from the building society just
mentioned down to the thousands which are represented by an office, a
secretary, and a brass-plate, in the present day, would give a curious
scheme of the natural tendencies of man; while the story of their
failures--and how many have not failed, sooner or later!--would be a
pretty moral lesson to your anthropolaters who Babelize now-a-days, and
believe there is nothing which a company with capital cannot achieve.
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