Will’s Coffee-house, known as the Wits’, which was very celebrated in its day, was at No. 23, Russell Street, Bow Street. Dryden first made it a resort of wits. The poet used to sit in a room on the first-floor, and his customary seat was by the fireside in the winter, and at the corner of the balcony, looking over the street, in fine weather; he called the two places his winter and his summer seat. In the eighteenth century this room became the dining-room. In Dryden’s day people did not sit in boxes, as subsequently, but at various tables which were dispersed through the room. Smoking was permitted in the public room, and was then much in vogue; indeed, it does not seem to have been considered a nuisance, as it was some years later. Here, as in other similar places of meeting, the visitors divided themselves into parties; the young beaux and wits, who seldom approached the principal table, thought it a great honour to have a pinch out of Dryden’s snuff-box. In later years Will’s Coffee-house became an open market for libels and lampoons. Swift thought little of the frequenters of Will’s; he used to say the worst conversation he ever heard in his life was to be heard there. The wits (as they were called), said he disparagingly, used formerly to assemble at this house; that is to say, five or six men who had written plays or at least prologues, or had a share in a miscellany, came thither, and entertained one another with their trifling compositions, assuming as grand an air as if they had been the noblest efforts of human nature, or as if the fate of kingdoms depended on them. It was Swift who framed the rules of the Brothers’ Club, which met every Thursday. “The end of our club,” said he, “is to advance conversation and friendship, and to reward learning without interest or recommendation. We take in none but men of wit or men of interest; and if we go on as we began, no other club in this town will be worth talking of.” The Brothers’, which was really a political club, broke up in 1713, and the next year Swift formed the celebrated Scriblerus Club, an association rather of a literary than a political character. Oxford and St. John, Swift, Arbuthnot, Pope, and Gay were members. Satire upon the abuse of human learning was their leading object. The name originated as follows: Oxford used playfully to call Swift _Martin_, and from this sprang Martinus Scriblerus. Swift, as is well known, is the name of one species of swallow (the largest and most powerful flier of the tribe), and martin is the name of another species, the wall-swallow, which constructs its nest in buildings.