Dr. Johnson was probably the most staunch defender of clubs who ever lived; his reply to someone who was rather inclined to decry such institutions is historic. A gentleman venturing one day to say to the learned Doctor that he sometimes wondered at his condescending to attend a club, the latter replied: “Sir, the great chair of a full and pleasant town club is, perhaps, the throne of human felicity.” His, of course, was the day of literary clubs, more suited to the spirit of the eighteenth century than to that of to-day. In modern times most of the literary clubs founded for conversation have been complete failures. So much talking, and nothing said! Everyone failing, because everyone is attempting; in a word, nothing of the club feeling, which demands the postponement of our petty selfloves to the general gratification, and strikes only in unison with the feelings and sentiments of all! A good deal of wine was generally consumed during the symposiums which the great talkers of the past loved. At one meeting-place where a literary club was wont to meet, the landlord was said to keep a special kind of port expressly for such parties, which those who frequented the house christened “the philosopher’s port.” A cynic declared that in one respect it certainly merited its name, for a good deal of philosophy was necessary to swallow it. Thackeray, unlike Dr. Johnson, was rather inclined to disparage clubs. Speaking of the town life of a past age, he said: “All that fuddling and boozing shortened the lives and enlarged the waistcoats of the men of that age. They spent many hours of the four-and-twenty, nearly a fourth part of each day, in clubs and coffee-houses, where they dined, drank, and smoked. Wit and news went by word of mouth; a journal of 1710 contained the very smallest portion of either the one or the other. The chiefs spoke; the faithful habitués sat around; strangers came to wonder and to listen.... The male society passed over their punch-bowls and tobacco-pipes almost as much time as ladies of that age spent over spadille and manille.” Tom Hood expressed an equally unfavourable view in 1838: “One selfish course the Wretches keep; They come at morning chimes; To snatch a few short hours of sleep— Rise—breakfast—read the _Times_— Then take their hats, and post away, Like Clerks or City scrubs, And no one sees them all the day— They live, eat, drink, at Clubs!” Many women regarded such places as dens of iniquity. “I believe that mine will be the fate of Abel,” said a devoted wife to her husband one day. “How so?” inquired the husband. “Because Abel was killed by a club, and your club will kill me if you continue to go to it every night.”