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 head-waiter,' 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. ----, 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:--
'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.
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