The Garrick was originally started at 35 King Street, Covent Garden, in 1831, “for the purpose of bringing together the ‘patrons’ of the drama and its professors, and also for offering literary men a rendezvous.” The club-house had been a family hotel. It was comfortable enough when it was first transformed into the home of the Garrick Club, but in course of time the building was found insufficient for the increased number of members, and in 1864 the club removed to a new house built for them a little farther west than the old one, in the then newly-made Garrick Street—a classic region associated with the old club-house. The new Garrick was built by Mr. Marrable, who cleverly surmounted certain difficulties connected with the back of the building. The bulk of the Garrick Club collection consists of the gallery formed by the elder Mathews, who had a passion for collecting theatrical portraits, and who purchased most of the pictures owned by Mr. Harris, the old lessee of Covent Garden. Mrs. Mathews, the actor’s wife and biographer, describes how the pictures were saved from the swindling tenant who robbed them of their rent in the King’s Road cottage. Mathews’s “giant hobby,” as she calls it, was then (1814) in its infancy; but the Mr. Tonson who succeeded them in the cottage begged to be allowed to retain the pictures, which were at that time hanging in one small room. Mathews, who would as soon have left behind him an eye or a limb as these his treasures, managed to retain them. Later on he built at his house at Hampstead a special gallery for his pictures, which had then considerably increased in number. Many writers came there to see them, all of whom were not equally appreciative. When, however, Mathews found a real judge of art, he called it “receiving a dividend,” and would launch out into all sorts of disquisitions as to his treasures, enlivened by anecdotes and imitations of the persons portrayed. Inquisitive people, who came to see the actor as a celebrity rather than to inspect his pictures, irritated and exasperated him by their behaviour and their mistakes, which were often absurd. Harlowe’s fine picture of Mrs. Siddons as Lady Macbeth was taken for a portrait of Mrs. Mathews; Dewilde’s exquisite portrait of Miss De Camp—Mrs. Charles Kemble—in male attire, in “The Gentle Shepherd,” was praised as being Master Betty. One individual, who had evidently never entered a London theatre, asked why there was no portrait of Milton. Eventually all the pictures were exhibited in Oxford Street, and there still exists a catalogue of this exhibition, to which a characteristic article of Charles Lamb’s, which appeared in the _London Magazine_, is prefixed. During Mathews’s lifetime the collection was removed to the Garrick Club. It then practically passed into the possession of a member, Mr. John Durrant, who eventually gave the pictures to the club.