The famous Irish ballad, which my Uncle
Toby was always humming, 'Lillibullero bullen-a-lah,' but which Percy
attributes to the Marquis of Wharton, another member of the Kit-kat, was
said to have been written by Buckhurst. He retained his wit to the last;
and Congreve, who visited him when he was dying, said, 'Faith, he
stutters more wit than other people have in their best health.' He died
at Bath in 1706.

Buckhurst does not complete the list of conspicuous members of this
club, but the remainder were less celebrated for their wit. There was
the Duke of Kingston, the father of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu;
Granville, who imitated Waller, and attempted to make his 'Myra' as
celebrated as the court-poet's Saccharissa, who, by the way, was the
mother of the Earl of Sunderland; the Duke of Devonshire, whom Walpole
calls 'a patriot among the men, a gallant among the ladies,' and who
founded Chatsworth; and other noblemen, chiefly belonging to the latter
part of the seventeenth century, and all devoted to William III., though
they had been bred at the courts of Charles and James.

With such an array of wits, poets, statesmen, and gallants, it can
easily be believed that to be the toast of the Kit-kat was no slight
honour; to be a member of it a still greater one; and to be one of its
most distinguished, as Congreve was, the greatest. Let us now see what
title this conceited beau and poet had to that position.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 13: The Kit-kat club was not founded till 1703.]

[Footnote 14: For some notice of Lord Dorset, see p. 61.]

WILLIAM CONGREVE.

When and where was he born?--The Middle Temple.--Congreve finds his
Vocation.--Verses to Queen Mary.--The Tennis-court
Theatre.--Congreve abandons the Drama.--Jeremy Collier.--The
Immorality of the Stage.--Very improper Things.--Congreve's
Writings.--Jeremy's 'Short Views.'--Rival Theatres.--Dryden's
Funeral.--A Tub-Preacher.--Horoscopic Predictions.--Dryden's
Solicitude for his Son.--Congreve's Ambition.--Anecdote of
Voltaire and Congreve.--The Profession of Maecenas.--Congreve's
Private Life.--'Malbrook's' Daughter.--Congreve's Death and
Burial.

When 'Queen Sarah' of Marlborough read the silly epitaph which
Henrietta, Duchess of Marlborough, had written and had engraved on the
monument she set up to Congreve, she said, with one of the true Blenheim
sneers, 'I know not what _happiness_ she might