The clubs of London! I recollect once reading a book so called; but as for any _bonâ fide_ information touching the _soi disant_ social assemblies, I might as well have been perusing the Shaster, or reading the Florentine copy of the Pandects! _The_ clubs of London afford, as I have reason to know, ample material for the most abundant fun; but they who expect to find it at Crockford's, the Athenæum, and other _maisons de jeu_, where yawning dandies, expert _chevaliers_, old men of the town, _roués_ of all sorts, Mingle, mingle, mingle, As they mingle may, will be wofully disappointed. The clubs, _par excellence_, take them one and all,--from the Oriental, stuck, with a due disposition and attention to habits of Eastern indolence, in the dullest corner of the dullest square in London, down to, or up to, I care not which, the staring bow-windowed Omnibus Union in Cockspur-street,--are all alike destitute of the requisite material. I perhaps may have a touch at them in the middle of the session and season, when the _élite_ of the club-men are in town, and when their sayings and doings may by possibility be worth recording, even if it were only to have a laugh over them. But, as Copp says, "let that pass for the present." The clubs that I intend to introduce to the readers of the Miscellany are certain of those convivial associations composed of the middlemen of society in the metropolis, who assemble on certain stated nights in the week to sing songs, smoke pipes, and imbibe moisture in the shape of divers goes of spirit and pints of ale. My reminiscences of these assemblies, I think, would fill a goodly tome. To begin with the last, Hebrew fashion. In was my lot one evening, a short time since, to be introduced by Mr. Timmins, my landlord, who, seeing I was rather low-spirited, volunteered the invitation, on a social community called the "WIDE AWAKE CLUB." "Sir," said Mr. Timmins,--a very worthy knight of the needle, who called me "the genelman wot lodges in my first floor," (whether up or down the chimney, deponent sayeth not,)--"you looks werry oncomfutable this here nasty evening. Prowisin it ain't takin' of too great a liberty, and you feel noways disinclined, I think an hour or two at our club--(I have the privilege of introducing a wisitor wot I can answer for in regard to respectability)--might do you good." "And pray, Mr. Timmins, what is the character of your club?"--"Oh! sir, the character of our club is _on_-doubted, sir; we are all men of experence, sir: no one is admitted a member _on_less he shows he is a _wide awake_ cove." "What do you mean by a wide awake cove," said I, "Mr. Timmins?"--"Vy," said Timmins, "there's no von hellgibble to be a member on our society but what gets a woucher from a member that he has a summut to say, and prove wot has made him _wide awake_,--that is to say, more up and down to the ways of the world than the generality of people, by experence."