Amongst the company to the Upper Flask came Dr. Garth,[122] Addison, Swift, Steele, Parnell, Sir Richard Blackmore, Sir Godfrey Kneller, Dr. Arbuthnot, and others whose names are not connected with my subject. But the friendship of the associates did not end with good-fellowship. Few things redound more to the credit of this famous club than the firmness of its members’ regard for one another, which often showed itself very practically, as in Addison’s frequent assistance of Steele, till wearied by his recklessness and folly, and in Swift’s help to him at a critical moment, which we have already glanced at. For the sake of these celebrities the Upper Flask had been famous long before Richardson made the persecuted Clarissa alight there from the Hampstead coach. The mulberry-tree, now held together by iron bands,[123] in what was once the garden of the tavern, may have shaded in those far-off summers the brows of Isaac Bickerstaffe, Obadiah Greenhat, and others of the witty confederates banded against the vices and frivolities of the times. Their charming essays remain with us in the too-little-looked-at pages of the _Spectator_, _Guardian_, and _Tatler_. A few years later we should have found Colley Cibber, playwright and actor, seated beneath it, discussing stage business with his theatrical allies, Wilkes and Booth, over tankards of brown ale or a bowl of punch; or it may be the great Dr. Johnson himself, in his ‘bushy, grayish wig, brown clothes, black worsted stockings, and plain shirt’ (a solecism in the days of lace ruffles and embroidery). Goldsmith, too, may have sat there, having strolled through the pleasant fields from his cottage lodging ‘near a place called Kilburn Priory,’ with the MS. of his ‘Animated Nature.’ And Richardson must have been familiar with the place of his heroine’s attempted seclusion.