imitated. In the
reign of George II. we meet with a 'Rump-steak, or Liberty Club;' and
somehow steaks and liberty seem to be the two ideas most intimately
associated in the Britannic mind. Can any one explain it?

Other clubs there were under Anne,--political, critical, and
hilarious--but the palm is undoubtedly carried off by the glorious
Kit-kat.

It is not every eating-house that is immortalized by a Pope, though
Tennyson has sung 'The Cock' with its 'plump head-waiter,' who, by the
way, was mightily offended by the Laureate's verses--or pretended to be
so--and thought it 'a great liberty of Mr. ----, Mr. ----, what is his
name? to put respectable private characters into his books.' Pope, or
some say Arbuthnot, explained the etymology of this club's extraordinary
title:--

'Whence deathless Kit-kat took its name,
Few critics can unriddle:
Some say from pastrycook it came,
And some from Cat and Fiddle.

'From no trim beaux its name it boasts,
Grey statesmen or green wits;
But from the pell-mell pack of toasts
Of old cats and young kits.'

Probably enough the title was hit on a hap-hazard, and retained because
it was singular, but as it has given a poet a theme, and a painter a
name for pictures of a peculiar size, its etymology has become
important. Some say that the pastry cook in Shire Lane, at whose house
it was held, was named Christopher Katt. Some one or other was certainly
celebrated for the manufacture of that forgotten delicacy, a mutton-pie,
which acquired the name of a Kit-kat.

'A Kit-kat is a supper for a lord,'

says a comedy of 1700, and certes it afforded at this club evening
nourishment for many a celebrated noble profligate of the day. The
supposed sign of the Cat and Fiddle (Kitt), gave another solution, but
after all, Pope's may be satisfactorily received.

The Kit-kat was, _par excellence_, the Whig Club of Queen Anne's time:
it was established at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and was
then composed of thirty-nine members, among whom were the Dukes of
Marlborough, Devonshire, Grafton, Richmond, and Somerset. In later days
it numbered the greatest wits of the age, of whom anon.

This club was celebrated more than any for its _toasts_.

Now, if men must drink--and sure the vine was given us for use, I do not
say for abuse--they had better make it an occasion of friendly
intercourse; nothing can be more degraded than the soli