The origin and early history of the Kit-Kat Club is obscure. Elkanah Settle addressed, in 1699, a manuscript poem "To the most renowned the President and the rest of the Knights of the most noble Order of the Toast," in which verses is asserted the dignity of the Society; and Malone supposes the Order of the Toast to have been identical with the Kit-Kat Club: this was in 1699. The toasting-glasses, which we shall presently mention, may have something to do with this presumed identity. Ned Ward, in his _Secret History of Clubs_, at once connects the Kit-Kat Club with Jacob Tonson, "an amphibious mortal, chief merchant to the Muses." Yet this is evidently a caricature. The maker of the mutton-pies, Ward maintains to be a person named Christopher, who lived at the sign of the Cat and Fiddle, in Gray's Inn-lane, whence he removed to keep a pudding-pye shop, near the Fountain Tavern, in the Strand. Ward commends his mutton-pies, cheese-cakes, and custards, and the pieman's interest in the sons of Parnassus; and his inviting "a new set of Authors to a collation of oven trumpery at his friend's house, where they were nobly entertained with as curious a batch of pastry delicacies as ever were seen at the winding-up of a Lord Mayor's feast;" adding that "there was not a mathematical figure in all Euclid's Elements but what was presented to the table in baked wares, whose cavities were filled with fine eatable varieties fit for the gods or poets." Mr. Charles Knight, in the _Shilling Magazine_, No. 2, maintains that by the above is meant, that Jacob Tonson, the bookseller, was the pieman's "friend," and that to the customary "whet" to his authors he added the pastry entertainment. Ward adds, that this grew into a weekly meeting, provided his, the bookseller's friends would give him the refusal of their juvenile productions. This "generous proposal was very readily agreed to by the whole poetic class, and the cook's name being Christopher, for brevity called Kit, and his sign being the Cat and Fiddle, they very merrily derived a quaint denomination from puss and her master, and from thence called themselves of the Kit-Cat Club." A writer in the _Book of Days_, however, states, that Christopher Cat, the pastry-cook, of King-street, Westminster, was the keeper of the tavern, where the Club met; but Shire-lane was, upon more direct authority, the pieman's abode.