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 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's satisfaction had accompanied him, in a pension on the Irish Establishment of £300 a year. Perhaps it was ominous of the mischances of this 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 undersecretary at war. Oliver Goldsmith completed the number. But another member of the original Ivy Lane, 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. Twenty was the highest number reached during Goldsmith's life; and this in the course of ten years. The place of meeting was the Turk's Head tavern in Gerrard Street

Soho, where, the chair being taking every Monday night at seven o'clock by a member in rotation, all were expected to attend and sup together. In the ninth year of their existence, they changed their day of meeting to Friday; and in place of their weekly supper, 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. With advantage, let me add, to the dignity and worldly consideration of men of letters themselves. 'I believe

Mr. Fox will allow me to say,' remarked the Bishop of Asaph, 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 that of being the repre'sentative of Westminster or Surrey.' The bishop had just been elected; but into such lusty independance had the Club sprung up thus early, that bishops, even Lords Chancellors, were known to have knocked for admission

unsuccessfully; and on the night of St. Asaph's election, 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?

I need not anticipate

His claim to enter it would seem to have been somewhat canvassed, at first, by 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' 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; 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

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elected Chairman of the Sessions; in 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.' One 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 foundation 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. Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne, he looked upon as 'stuff;' and for the three last, as men whose necessities and abilities were nearly commensurate,' he had a special contempt. As Chairman of Quarter Sessions, what other judgment could he be expected to have of them? Being men of loose principles, he would say, bad economists, and living without foresight, it is their endeavour to commute for their 'failings by professions of greater love to mankind, more ' tender affections, and finer feelings, than they will allow

men of more regular lives, whom they deem formalists, to possess.' With a man of such regular life, denouncing woe to loose characters that should endeavour to commute

their failings, poor Goldsmith had naturally little chance; and it fared as ill with the rest of the Club when questions of 'economy' or 'foresight' came up. Mr. Hawkins, after the first four meetings, begged to be excused his share of the reckoning, on the ground that he did not partake of the supper. And was he excused?' asked Doctor Burney, when Johnson told him of the incident many years after. 'Oh yes,' was the reply; 'for no man is angry at another 'for being inferior to himself. We all scorned him, and 'admitted his plea. Yet I really believe him,' pursued Johnson, characteristically, 'to be an honest man at the 'bottom; though to be sure he is penurious, and he is 'mean, and it must be owned he has a tendency to savage'ness.' It was this latter tendency which caused his early secession from the Club. He was not a member for more His own account is that he

than two or three years. withdrew because its late hours were inconsistent with his domestic arrangements: but the fact was, says Boswell, that he one evening attacked Mr. Burke in so rude a manner, that all the company testified their displeasure; and at their next meeting his reception was such that he never came again.

Letitia Matilda Hawkins herself, proposing to defend her father, corroborates this statement. The Burkes,' she says, describing the impressions of her childhood, 'as 'the men of that family were called, were not then what 'they were afterwards considered; they were, as my 'father termed them, Irish Adventurers; and came into