A FAIR PROPHECY FULFILLED. Two fair girls, and now another ; Did she not produce the Graces The lady said, "Pray, don't be stupid;" IN FOR IT! To your beauty, dear lady, a sonnet Though I'll swear the whole Nine could not fire me THE RELIGION OF LOVE. Love's religion universal Needs no neophyte rehearsal. Of Love's infallibility. The reason is, for either sex Nature is Love's Grand Pontifex.1 When it came to the Doctor's turn, who had not been very well pleased at the manner in which his Persian story had been received, he gave us the following fling at the beau sexe, from a bit of paper which he drew from his cigar-box, condescending to give us at the 1 Si les mystères de l'amour trouvent partout tant des croyants c'est que l'amour est une religion dont le grand pontife est la nature.—ADOLPHE RICARD. same time the authorities from whom he drew his inspiration. One of the company proposed giving it the title of― ES TRIPLEX! Three things women throw away: Health and time and golden treasure.1 What they lose or what may move them, Captain Daly, an Irish dragoon, who had been at Stonyhurst with Roger Tichbourne, and escaped being trotted out by the AttorneyGeneral, said he could cap the Doctor's little bit of caustic with something like a triad, and gave us the following quaint rendering of one of Martial's best epigrams. The original was happily quoted by Lord Palmerston in Parliament on a celebrated occasion. The Captain roundly asserted that if the Romans had been smokers they would have never thought of bathing. At all events, they would not have thought it worth their while to write verses about it. THE GOODFELLOWS' TRIO. Oh! 'tis Venus and Bacchus Is smoking and drinking, And we wind it all up with a wife.3 The old Knight wound up the evening with the following racy anecdote; and he was not, as indeed he never is, long about it. "I perceive," said he, "that a correspondent of the 'Notes and Queries,' declares that Dick Milligan's old song of The Groves of Blarney,' is a plagiarism from the still older one of 'Castle Hyde;' but what I'm going to tell you about them is original-every word of it. "One night, at the wind-up of one of the pleasantest of the pleasant 1 Π y a trois choses que les femmes jettent par la fenêtre : leur temps, leur argent, et leur santé.-MDME. GEOFfrin. 2 Trois choses meuvent puissamment les femmes: l'intérêt, la vanité, et le plaisir.-DIDEROT. 3 Balnea, vina, Venus, corrumpunt corpora nostra; MARTIAL. dinner parties at Gore House, the wittiest member of the House of Commons, a reputation which he maintains, omnium consensu, to this day, asked the Countess of Blessington, on taking leave, if she had any commands for the emerald west. He was bound for Ireland next morning. The finest salmon, dear B., that swims the Blackwater, when you come back again, if you can think of me,' was the request, made with one of her most winning smiles, by the beautiful hostess. Of course B. O. promised as religiously as a knight of romance; but of course he had a good deal to trouble him in Tipperary and he forgot all about it -forgot it, in fact, till coming into the Euston Square Station on his return to town. He then ordered his coachman to drive to the great fishmonger in Bond Street, to whom he explained in confidence the omission he had made, and asked him to make up for it by sending his noblest salmon to Gore House on the instant. And so he did; but -as Polonius says to Hamlet, "Do'st know me?" "Excellent well; thou'rt a fishmonger!" Instead of seeing to the delicate commission himself the fishmonger left it to his chief shopman. This vicarious functionary attached his master's fish-card to the hamper, and sent it moreover in his master's fish van, which had other fish orders to attend to in the Kensington direction. The M.P. had left his card, with his compliments to Lady Blessington written on it, to be attached to the consignment; and this was mislaid in the hurry of business. The consequence was a letter to him from the Countess, acknowledging the receipt of the hamper, with many thanks, and an invitation to dine next day on the great fish, which, although it was the noblest she had ever seen, seemed to flavour more of Groves of Bond Street than the Groves of Blarney." JOHN SHEEHAN. On some Clubs, and their Ends. Or all historical parallels, there are few more curious than the one between the first club ever established and any similar association of modern times. We must go as far back as the reign of Philip of Macedon (B.c. 320) for that original club. It consisted of Greek gentlemen, who, from their number, called themselves The Sixty.' They met once a week, not at a tavern, but in a temple-that of Hercules, at Athens. Their secretary was a sprightly young Achaian, named Callimedes-so sprightly, indeed, that the jolly Sixty nicknamed him the Grasshopper. They must have had the highest opinion of their own wit, for every good thing that was uttered was entered in a book, and any member who had a repartee on the tip of his tongue was obliged to keep it there till what had provoked it had been written down! This book of wit, wisdom, and joking was in such repute, that it was lent out to princes and other potentialities, on depositing a security for its return. Thus Athens furnished not only the first club, but the first idea of a circulating library. One of the most singular features of some of the social gatherings of Roman gentlemen consists in the fact, that if a member did not consider himself "clubbable," or was not considered leagues, he might bring with him some one who was. so by his colIf he possessed the meeting, in an extremely witty slave, and chose to bring him to such case Libanus was as welcome as Demenatus. There are clubs of the present day where dullness so prevails among the associates, where Sir Rayleigh D'Istressin is such a nonentity, and Mr. Hugh Doane Nohoo is so overflowing with nonsense, that it is a pity they cannot be represented by capable substitutes. The latter might be found among the public-office clerks. How well many of these persons have discovered what they are especially fitted for is to be seen in the little companies that club together and exhibit themselves with alacrity as Nigger Serenaders! In England here, although the name of Club for a society was not known till the seventeenth century, the thing itself was in active practice three hundred years before. The first English club of which we know anything has a French name-La Cour de Bonne Compagnie. It was founded in the reign of Henry the Fourth, and we may take it that bonne compagnie was understood to signify, in English, good fellows. They met, like 'The Sixty' in Athens, once a week. The club was what would now be called a dining-club--that is, meeting periodically in order to dine together, and to enjoy the "feast of reason and the flow of soul" which come of good cheer, safe digestion, happy humour and undying wit. We may be very sure that at the meetings which took place at The Mermaid,' and at those where Ben Jonson's sons sat around him in The Apollo,' the English language ripened into mellowness, beauty, and strength. Shakespeare, Raleigh, and the men whose sympathies were attuned to those of the soldier and the poet, must have done especially good work to that end during their joyous discussions at The Mermaid.' Politics do not seem to have been touched upon. The first club founded in London, with a political purpose among its other objects, was the Rota Club. More than two centuries have elapsed since the Rota saw its table and coffee-cups surrounded by such men as Milton, Cyriac Skinner (to whom Milton addressed the sonnet which urges play as well as work), Marvel, Harrington, Nevill, and very many others. They advocated a going-out of Members of Parliament by rotation, and used a ballot-box for the settlement of club questions-that is to say, they affirmed or negatived by that means the conclusions arrived at by the lecturer for the evening. They also supported the ballot, as the simplest and truest method of voting, generally. To this end we are only on the point of now coming, partially. There were some clubs that, meeting only for recreation, fell into a fixed purpose by accident. Small clubs they were, but they were the beginnings of great consequences. From the meeting together of a few" city gentlemen," members of the Wednesday Club, in the reign of William the Third, arose certain discussions on financial matters which led to the "Conferences" of 1695, in which William Paterson took a leading part. From this club, its discussions and conferences, sprang a gigantic result-" The Old Lady in Threadneedle Street;" in other words, the Bank of England. 6 A dozen years later, the first germs of the Royal Society of Antiquaries, now enthroned in Somerset House, were planted in the modest room of The Bear Tavern,' in the Strand. Three individuals, to whom the past was dearer than the present or the future, there metto talk over the condition of the ancient monuments of the kingdom, while they smoked their pipes and sipped their ale. One of them was Humphrey Wanley, the well-known archæologist, and librarian to Harley, Earl of Oxford. They agreed to add to their numbers, meet every Friday night, and confine themselves to the consideration of matters and monuments which illustrated English history not later than the reign of James the First. The weekly business was to begin at six, and every absentee was to be fined sixpence. The club or society migrated from the parlour of one publichouse to another before it found royal patronage, and a home in the palace which occupies the |