One evening when toasts were being chosen, her father, Evelyn Pierpoint, Duke of Kingston, took it into his head to nominate Lady Mary, then a child only eight years of age. She was prettier, he vowed, than any beauty on the list. "You shall see her," cried the duke, and instantly sent a chaise for her. Presently she came ushered in, dressed in her best, and was elected by acclamation. The Whig gentlemen drank the little lady's health up-standing and, feasting her with sweetmeats and passing her round with kisses, at once inscribed her name with a diamond on a drinking-glass. "Pleasure," she says, "was too poor a word to express my sensations. They amounted to ecstasy. Never again throughout my whole life did I pass so happy an evening." It used to be said that it took so much wine to raise Addison to his best mood, that Steele generally got drunk before that golden hour arrived. Steele, that warm-hearted careless fellow in whom Thackeray so delighted, certainly shone at the Kit-Kat; and an anecdote still extant shows him to us with all his amiable weaknesses. On the night of that great Whig festival--the celebration of King William's anniversary--Steele and Addison brought Dr. Hoadley, the Bishop of Bangor, with them, and solemnly drank "the immortal memory." Presently John Sly, an eccentric hatter and enthusiastic politician, crawled into the room on his knees, in the old Cavalier fashion, and drank the Orange toast in a tankard of foaming October. No one laughed at the tipsy hatter; but Steele, kindly even when in liquor, kept whispering to the rather shocked prelate, "Do laugh; it is humanity to laugh." The bishop soon put on his hat and withdrew, and Steele by and by subsided under the table. Picked up and crammed into a sedan-chair, he insisted, late as it was, in going to the Bishop of Bangor's to apologise. Eventually he was coaxed home and got upstairs, but then, in a gush of politeness, he insisted on seeing the chairmen out; after which he retired with self-complacency to bed. The next morning, in spite of headache the most racking, Steele sent the tolerant bishop the following exquisite couplet, which covered a multitude of such sins:-- "Virtue with so much ease on Bangor sits, All faults he pardons, though he none commits." One night when amiable Garth lingered over the Kit-Kat wine, though patients were pining for him, Steele reproved the epicurean doctor. "Nay, nay, Dick," said Garth, pulling out a list of fifteen, "it's no great matter after all, for nine of them have such bad constitutions that not all the physicians in the world could save them; and the other six have such good constitutions that all the physicians in the world could not kill them." Three o'clock in the morning seems to have been no uncommon hour for the Kit-Kat to break up, and a Tory lampooner says that at this club the youth of Anne's reign learned "To sleep away the days and drink away the nights."