site of the one built by the Protector Somerset. After a brief sojourn of a month at The Bear,' they went, in 1708, to the Young Devil' tavern close by, and there they seem to have been housed for above a quarter of a century. In 1739 they moved to more commodious apartments in The Mitre,' Fleet Street, and they talked no more of sixpences. They numbered a hundred members. Each of them paid a guinea entrance-fee, and twelve shillings annual subscription. In 1770 they commenced the Archæologia'; and in the following year George the Third gave them the abiding-place beneath the roof of Somerset House, where they meet weekly, on Thursdays, during six or seven months of the year, and sometimes, like Gratiano, speak an infinite deal of nothing. At other times the meetings are full of interest, and Emperors themselves have been glad to be enrolled among the Antiquaries, who began their career, as a modest club in a Strand tavern of no great repute.

A more ancient society than the Antiquaries has a home within Somerset House. The Royal Society is of much older date, but it began in a little club-gathering, in 1645, at Dr. Goddard's lodgings in Wood Street, and for some time where it could, in Cheapside. After it rose from a club to an incorporated society, it first met in Gresham College; but it has occupied rooms in Somerset House exactly ninety years. Its first avowed object-the establishing of facts by successive experiments-was highly ridiculed, and that most wittily, by Butler, in The Elephant in the Moon.' One of the members is described as one who

"had lately undertook

To prove and publish in a book

That men, whose natural eyes are out,
May, by more pow'rful art, be brought
To see with th' empty holes as plain
As if their eyes were in again."

Another philosopher is said to be renowned

"for his excellence

In height'ning words and shad'wing sense."

A third experimentalist and chatterer is transported with the "twang of his own trills." Collectively they are men who are satisfied;

"As men are wont, o' th' bias'd side."

The society set up a telescope to make discoveries in the moon. They detect armies fighting, and an elephant moving among them. Delighted with what they had discovered, they drew up a narrative, to be published in the Transactions.' By the time this had been done, idle explorers have made out that the armies are gnats and flies on the lens, and that the elephant is a mouse that had got imprisoned in the

tube. The philosophers are disconcerted, and the satirical poet rides over them roughshod, with a moral which is intended to make them as comfortable as a toad under a harrow. Butler flew at them again, in prose, in An Occasional Reflection upon Dr. Charlton's feeling a Dog's Pulse at Gresham College.' This is exquisite fooling. The paper is supposed to be written by Robert Boyle, Esq., and never was imitation so hard to be distinguished from an original. It is far superior in this respect to the prose imitations, in 'Rejected Addresses,' of the styles of Dr. Johnson and of Cobbett. We will not conclude this reference to the Wood-street Club, which has grown to such dignity and usefulness as the present Royal Society, without recording that, a little more than a hundred years ago, a Latin paper, on Volcanoes,' was read before it by a German, one Raspe. Whether it faithfully narrated Raspe's experiences, who can tell ?— for Raspe subsequently wrote that amusingly serious lie called Baron Munchausen.'

In the early part of the last century, a body of ladies constituted themselves as 'The Shakespeare Club.' They met in rooms in Covent Garden, and their object was to raise funds to supply the managers of the two theatres, to enable them to act with appropriate splendour the plays of the national poet strictly according to his text: in other words, the end was to annihilate the adapters of the bard. How even the ladies themselves were divided in opinion and into clubs, is seen in the closing words to Fielding's Historical Register for 1736.' The piece closes with a deprecatory appeal to the fair sex present, to whom an actor says: "And you ladies, whether you be Shakespeare's ladies, or Beaumont and Fletcher's ladies, I hope you will make allowance for a rehearsal."

There was another club in the last century whose purpose was one which deserves for it everlasting respect and admiration. The excellent object it had in view was the suppression of wearisome preachers, or the putting-down of silly and interminable sermons. Whether the means taken to arrive at the ends aimed at could be equally respected and admired, is a matter on which a certain difference of opinion may be justly allowed. It was the fashion of the time for ladies to carry fans, and for gentlemen to be inseparable from their canes. These weapons were turned to church uses by the ladies and gentlemen who were members of the Rattling Club. They were vagrant Christians, who attended such churches as possessed congregations who sat in need of relief from a great oppression-that of being bored by a preacher who (as Voltaire says of them all) stood five feet above contradiction. The Rattlers were perfectly unobtrusive during service, and indeed they were perfectly decorous during sermon, unless they were provoked by absurdity or tediousness. As soon as any provocation of that sort was felt, a Lady-Rattler began to agitate her fan, or

a Gentleman-Rattler tapped his cane against the floor or the panneling of his pew. The signal was followed by the other members, and the interruption was continued, gradually increasing till there was such a fluttering of fans and a rattling of canes as to produce conviction on the mind of the preacher that the sooner he pronounced the word "finally" the sooner there would be peace in the church. It would not be very unreasonable to call such conduct unseemly - even vulgar. The Rattling Club, however, had very august precedent for their proceedings. In as far as the eccentric young Queen Christina of Sweden set the example, she may be fairly looked upon as the founder of the Rattlers. In her own royal chapel, as well as in any ordinary church where she happened to be present before she passed over to the Church of Rome, Christina used to give decent attention to the sermon till she thought she had taken as much as would do her good. At that point she would slightly rap with her fan on the top of the back of the chair which always stood before her own in the Chapel Royal, or on any hard substance which happened to be near her, when she was being sermon-vexed in other places. If the preacher neglected to attend to this signal, her Majesty declared open warfare against him, and rattled away with her fan with increasing intensity till she had silenced the pulpit, or (if the preacher continued to pour forth his volleys) till she raised the siege and retreated in vexation. Let us mention here, by the way, that in the early intolerant age of the Reformation which followed the intolerable era of Popery in England, people were compelled (under serious penalties) to go to church whether they were Reformers or Romanists. Many of the latter attended the Protestant service rather than pay the fine, and yet preserved their consistency; and you may fancy the mirth in some old country-house, where the solemn knight and his lady, and the laughing daughters with their haughty brothers, as soon as they heard the church-bells ring, proceeded to stuff wool into their ears, and then went to sermon with a joyous conviction of being unable to hear a word of it.

Let us now fancy ourselves standing in Great Queen Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields, in the year 1711. We are in front of the Land Bank, which had lately come to grief, and the street was not of the high estate it had been when lords smoked their pipes at its windows, and could smell the haycocks that were in St. Pancras Fields. Let us describe what took place. There was a going in and out, and a standing on the steps, and a gathering of increased numbers, and an universal cheerful gossiping, save on the part of Mr. Ferrers, who was dumb. Passengers stopped to look at these men, and were not slow to recognise the most eminent among the wellnigh five dozen standing or moving about the door, or going in and out. People from Drury Lane knew their neighbour Mr. Vertue, who was talking apart to a little knot of

listeners-engravers like himself. There was Michael Dahl, talking a good deal about his Swedish patroness Queen Christina, and still more about his claims to be director of an Academy of Painting. At these claims his hearers may be taken to have smiled, especially if their eye happened to fall on a well-dressed, courteous gentleman, who passed into the house bowing to all who greeted him. There was not a child in Queen Street who could not recognise in him the great Sir Godfrey Kneller. Sir Godfrey was probably greeted most warmly by Laguerre, who had glorified the knight's house at Whitton with more simple taste than usually distinguished Laguerre. Thornhill stood near the latter, and looked on him with no more perceptible air of triumph than a modest artist could help, who had been substituted for the other in the task of painting the Life of St. Paul within the dome of the metropolitan church. Richardson too was there, and his colleagues respected him as an artist who, if Kneller and Dahl were but away, would be at the head of portraiture in England. A laughing group stood round Richardson; he was narrating to them his own great story, which has been so often retold with other heroes of the tale: "The gentleman was singularly annoyed that his friend should declare that his Rubens was only a copy. He said to me: 'I will knock any man's brains out who will call it a copy! My dear Mr. Richardson, come down to my house, and give me your candid opinion!" We may fancy that merry and wise Richardson tripping up the steps laughingly, stopping, perhaps, in the hall to talk with two gentlemen, brothers, one of whom exhibits to him, and to smiling Baptist Monnoyer, some paintings on fans which excite his generous unreserved admiration. It is Mr. Godfrey, behind whose marvellously-decorated fans-on which figured landscapes created to make love in-the beauties of the time of Anne and the first two Georges used to feign to blush and hide confusion which they did not feel.

When these and others were assembled in the old bank, they numbered sixty-two. Every man came with his guinea ready for the treasurer. It was to be the annual subscription. Each member had also with him a list of twelve names, whom he voted for as directors for one year. Michael Dahl insinuated his right to be governor, but, saving Dahl's vote, Kneller was unanimously elected; and with his quietly moving into the chair of that club, was the first Academy of Painting established in England.

The jealousy of Dahl, and a few individual affectations, marred some of the good that the Academy might have accomplished. In the second year, the Swedish favourite of Queen Anne and her husband, Prince George of Denmark, withdrew, because Kneller was still preferred to him as governor or president. The Academy Club elected new members, with or without their consent. At that time there was

a French painter in London, named Berchet. He had painted panels and ceilings in England from the time of the latter years of Charles the Second; and when De la Fosse was over here, he must have been proud, if he was not jealous, of his pupil. If there be an old painted panel yet in the house that was the Duke of Schomberg's, in Pall Mall, it is possibly a portion of the decoration of the house, and is, in such case, Berchet's work. The belles and gallants of the day flocked. to Ranelagh, to gaze at the summerhouse so daintily tricked out by Berchet's delicate pencil. Now, he was painting small mythological pieces, in oils; and the " Academicians," deeming him worthy of being a member, elected him. Berchet (by letter) "excused himself, being not well and tysicky, and could not bear the smoke of the lamp." His infirmity did not leave him, neither did his industry. He had just put his name at the foot of A Bacchanalian,' his last work, when the pencil dropped for ever from his hand, and Berchet's occupation was gone.

We pass from Art to Fashionable Eccentricity. When squires were squires in England, and came up to London to see a little life, a club was founded for them in St. James's Street, which was (and is) called Boodle's, but which was long familiarly known as 'The Topboot and Worsted Stocking Club.' To rival Boodle's dinners, or Almack's, was not a difficult matter, since they seem to have consisted of uncouth legs of mutton, roasted geese, and buttered apple-pies. Something better than mere squirearchy must have been among the members, for Gibbon was one, and a hundred years ago the great historian wrote his letters there. It was the poor cookery of Boodle's that probably gave rise to the Sçavoir Vivre Club,' the palates of whose members could not bear, nor their stomachs digest, the mutton, geese, and apple-pies of the club, which still exists. The 'Sçavoir Vivre' showed that they knew how to live, by composing or importing new dishes, and they showed that they knew how to dress, by creating the most eccentric of costumes. Among their imported dishes was maccaroni. It became such a favourite dish at the club, and was so invariably brought to table, that the clubbists themselves became celebrated as Maccaronies.' In dress they wore a toy cocked hat, gold-laced, buttoned and tasseled over hair fashioned into a foretop above the head, side-curls, and a clubbed tail. Tight striped silk breeches, and an equally tight coat and waistcoat, kept them together. Their tasseled canes were as long as those still carried by state footmen when they ride behind a carriage going to court on a drawingroom day. Like Tiddy Bob, they had a watch in each fob, with cablechains, and a pound of seals at the end of them. Their white neckcloths displayed a front bow as large as a cauliflower; and they daintily walked about in white silk stockings and diamond-buckled shoes, in all weathers. In any sense, for a Maccaronie to wear a greatcoat