him this ignominious
punishment which would, doubtless, have spoiled a limb of which he was
particularly proud. He was pardoned: the real widow married a far more
honourable gentleman, in spite of the unenviable notoriety she had
acquired; the sham one was somehow quieted, and the duchess died some
four years later, the more peacefully for being rid of her tyrannical
mate.

Thus ended a petty scandal of the day, in which all the parties were so
disreputable that no one could feel any sympathy for a single one of
them. How the dupe himself ended is not known. The last days of fops and
beaux are never glorious. Brummell died in slovenly penury; Nash in
contempt. Fielding lapsed into the dimmest obscurity; and as far as
evidence goes, there is as little certainty about his death as of that
of the Wandering Jew. Let us hope that he is not still alive: though his
friends seemed to have cared little whether he were so or not, to judge
from a couple of verses written by one of them:--

'If Fielding is dead,
And rests under this stone,
Then he is not alive
You may bet two to one.

'But if he's alive,
And does not lie there--
Let him live till he's hanged,
For which no man will care.'

OF CERTAIN CLUBS AND CLUB-WITS UNDER ANNE.

The Origin of Clubs.--The Establishment of Coffee-houses.--The
October Club.--The Beef-steak Club.--Of certain other
Clubs.--The Kit-kat Club.--The Romance of the Bowl.--The Toasts
of the Kit-kat.--The Members of the Kit-kat.--A good Wit, and a
bad Architect.--'Well-natured Garth.'--The Poets of the
Kit-kat.--Charles Montagu, Earl of Halifax.--Chancellor
Somers.--Charles Sackville, Lord Dorset.--Less celebrated Wits.

I suppose that, long before the building of Babel, man discovered that
he was an associative animal, with the universal motto, '_L'union c'est
la force_;' and that association, to be of any use, requires talk. A
history of celebrated associations, from the building society just
mentioned down to the thousands which are represented by an office, a
secretary, and a brass-plate, in the present day, would give a curious
scheme of the natural tendencies of man; while the story of their
failures--and how many have not failed, sooner or later!--would be a
pretty moral lesson to your anthropolaters who Babelize now-a-days, and
believe there is nothing which a company with capital cannot achiev