CHAPTER VIII. THE CLUB AND ITS FIRST MEMBERS. 1763. THE association of celebrated men of this period universally known as the Literary Club, did not receive that name till many years after it was formed and founded; but that Reynolds was its Romulus (so Mrs. Thrale said Johnson called him),* and this year of 1763 the year of its foundation, is unquestionable: though the meetings did not begin till winter. Johnson caught at the notion eagerly; suggested as its model a club he had himself founded in Ivy-lane some fourteen years before, and which the deaths or dispersion of its members had now interrupted for nearly seven years; and on this suggestion being adopted, the members, as in the earlier club, were limited to nine, and Mr. Hawkins, as an original member of the Ivy-lane, was invited to join. Topham Beauclerc and Bennet Langton were also asked, and welcomed earnestly; and, of course, Mr. Edmund Burke. He had lately left Dublin and politics for a time, and returned to literature in Queen-Anne-street; where a solid mark of his patron Hamilton's satisfaction had accompanied him, in shape of a pension on the Irish Establishment of £300 a year. * Anecdotes, 122. "Or said somebody else of the company called him so, "which was more likely." 1763. Et. 35. 1763. Perhaps it was ominous of the mischances attending this Et. 35. pension, that it was entered in the name of "William Birt: the name which was soon to be so famous, having little familiarity or fame as yet. The notion of the club delighted Burke; and he asked admission for his father-in-law, Doctor Nugent, an accomplished Roman Catholic physician, who lived with him. Beauclerc in like manner suggested his friend Chamier, then secretary in the war-office.* Oliver Goldsmith completed the number. But another member of the original Ivy-lane society, Samuel Dyer,† making unexpected appearance from abroad in the following year, was joyfully admitted; and though it was resolved to make election difficult, and only for special reasons permit addition to their number, the limitation at first proposed was thus of course done away with. A second limitation, however, to the number of twelve, was definitively made on the occasion of the second balloting, and will be duly described. The place of meeting was the Turk'shead tavern in Gerrard-street Soho, § where, the chair being * Chamier was not appointed under-secretary till 1775. In the account of the club there may still be one or two slight inaccuracies, though I have been at some pains to obtain correct information since my last edition. Obvious errors, indeed, exist in every description of this celebrated society, from the first supplied by Malone to the last furnished by Mr. Hatchett. For an interesting account of this remarkable man, see Malone's Life of Dryden, 181-5 (note.) It was intended, according to Malone (Account of Reynolds, lxxxiii), that the club should consist of such men as that if only two of them chanced to meet they should be able to entertain each other sufficiently, without wishing for more company with whom to pass an evening. "This," writes Percy to Boswell (Nichols's Illustrations, vii. 311), "I have heard Johnson mention as the principal or avowed "" reason for the small number of members to which for many years it was "limited." And so far Johnson was right in holding that the club's adversity did not arrive till the numbers were large, and the members not very select; nor is it easy to imagine that Lord Liverpool, in comparatively recent days, when he found himself on one occasion solus at the dinner, was able to entertain himself sufficiently without wishing for more company. The men are few indeed who can afford to have "nobody with them at sea but" themselves. § Here the club remained as long as Goldsmith lived, and until 1783, when the landlord died, and the hotel became a private house. Meanwhile the predo 1763. taken every Monday night at seven o'clock by a member in rotation, all were expected to attend and sup together. In Et. 35. about the ninth year of their existence, they changed their day of meeting to Friday; and, some years later (Percy and Malone say in 1775),* in place of their weekly supper they resolved to dine together once a fortnight during the meeting of parliament. Each member present was to bear his share of the reckoning; and conversation, from which politics only were excluded, was kept up always to a late hour. So originated and was formed that famous club, which had made itself a name in literary history long before it received, at Garrick's funeral, the name of the Literary Club by which it is now known. Its meetings were noised abroad; the fame of its conversations received eager addition from the difficulty of obtaining admission to it; and it came to be as generally understood that literature had fixed her social head-quarters here, as that politics reigned supreme at Wildman's or the Cocoa-tree. Not without advantage, let me add, to the dignity and worldly consideration of men-of-letters themselves. "I believe Mr. Fox will allow me say," wrote the Bishop of St. Asaph to Mr. William Jones, when the society was not more than fifteen years old, "that the honour of "being elected into the Turk's-head Club is not inferior to minance of whig politics in it, in consequence of the remarkable prominence in its * 1763. Æt. 35. 66 "that of being the representative of Westminster or Surrey. The electors are certainly more disinterested; and I should say they were much better judges of merit, if they had not rejected Lord Camden and chosen me."* The Bishop of St. Asaph had just been elected, and on the very night when Lord Camden and the Bishop of Chester were blackballed. Shall we wonder if distinction in a society such as this, should open a new life to Goldsmith? His claim to enter it would seem to have been somewhat canvassed, at first, by at least one of the members. "As he "wrote for the booksellers," says Hawkins, "we at the club "looked on him as a mere literary drudge, equal to the task "of compiling and translating, but little capable of original, "and still less of poetical composition: he had, nevertheless, "unknown to us"‡ I need not anticipate what it was that so startled Hawkins with its unknown progress: the reader has already intimation of it. It is however more than probable, whatever may have been thought of Goldsmith's drudgery, that this extremely low estimate of his capacity was limited to Mr. Hawkins, whose opinions were seldom popular with the other members of the club. Early associations clung hard to Johnson, and, for the sake of these, Hawkins was borne with to the last; but, in the newly-formed society, even Johnson admitted him to be out of place. Neither in habits nor opinions did he harmonise with the rest. He had been an attorney for many years, affecting literary tastes, and dabbling in music at the Madrigal-club; * Teignmouth's Life and Correspondence of Sir William Jones, i. 347. "When bishops and chancellors," says Jones, commenting on this fact, "honour us with offering to dine at a tavern, it seems very extraordinary that we "should ever reject such an offer; but there is no reasoning on the caprice of "men. Of our club I will only say that there is no branch of human knowledge on which some of our members are not capable of giving information." Teignmouth's Life, i. 345. Life of Johnson, 420, but, four years before the present, so large a fortune had fallen to him in right of his wife, that he withdrew from the law, and lived and judged with severe propriety as a Middlesex magistrate. Within two years he will be elected chairman of the sessions; after seven years more, will be made a knight; and, in four years after that, will deliver himself of five quarto volumes of a history of music, in the slow and laborious conception of which he is already painfully engaged.* Altogether, his existence was a kind of pompous, parsimonious, insignificant drawl, cleverly ridiculed by one of the wits in an absurd epitaph: "Here lies Sir John Hawkins, "Without his shoes and stauckins." To him belonged the original merit, in that age of penal barbarity and perpetual executions, of lamenting that in no less than fourteen cases it was still possible to cheat the gallows. Another of his favourite themes was the improvidence of what he called sentimental writers, at the head of whom he placed the author of Tom Jones; a book which he charged with having "corrupted the rising generation," and sapped "the founda"tion of that morality which it is the duty of parents and "all public instructors to inculcate in the minds of young "people." This was his common style of talk. He would speak contemptuously of Hogarth as a man who knew nothing out of Covent Garden. Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne, he looked upon as "stuff;" and for the three last, as * Gent. Mag. lix. 473. A lucky pun condemned Sir John Hawkins's sixteen years' labour to long obscurity and oblivion. Some wag in the interest of Dr. Burney's rival publication wrote the following catch, which Dr. Callcott set to music: "Have you read Sir John Hawkins's History? "Some folks think it quite a mystery; "Both I have, and I aver "That Burney's History I prefer." Burn his History was straightway in every one's mouth; and the bookseller practically took the advice by "wasting" the greater part of the edition. + Life of Johnson, 214, 215. 1763. Æt. 35. Ꮓ |