This club is composed of many men eminent in literature and art, or distinguished in other ways. The club, which is literary and social, and is restricted to thirty-one members, was founded about twenty-five years ago. The members bind themselves to sup together annually on or about December 13, the anniversary of the Doctor’s death, but various other meetings are held throughout the year. The constitution of the club is thus described by Dr. George Birkbeck Hill, the well-known editor of the latest and best edition of “Boswell.” “We are,” he says (in the _Atlantic Monthly_ of January, 1896), “in strict accordance with the great Lexicographer’s definition, ‘an assembly of good fellows meeting under certain conditions’; the conditions being that we shall do honour to the immortal memory of Dr. Samuel Johnson by supping together four times a year, and by swallowing as much beefsteak pudding, punch, and tobacco smoke as the strength of each man’s constitution admits. A few of the weaker brethren—among whom unhappily I am included—whose bodily infirmity cannot respond to the cheerful Johnsonian cry, ‘Who’s for poonsh?’ do their best to play their part by occasionally reading essays on Johnsonian subjects, and by seasoning their talk with anecdotes and sayings of the great Doctor. We are tolerated by the jovial crew, for they see that we mean well, and are as ‘clubbable’ as nature allows. OUR FAVOURITE HAUNT IS THE OLD CHESHIRE CHEESE, THE ONLY TAVERN IN FLEET STREET LEFT UNCHANGED by what Johnson called that ‘fury of innovation’ which, beginning with Tyburn and its gallows-tree, has gradually transformed London. The Mitre—‘where he loved to sit up late’; where he made Boswell’s head ache, not with the port wine, but with the sense he put into it; where, at their first supper, he called to him with warmth, ‘Give me your hand, I have taken a liking to you’; where, nearly a century later, Hawthorne, in memory of the two men, dined ‘in the low, sombre coffee-room’—the Mitre has been rebuilt. “The Cock, most ancient of taverns, has followed its ‘plump head-waiter’ along the road of mortality, although, fortunately, its fittings and furniture are still preserved with the house which, under the same name, has risen on the other side of the street. THE OLD CHESHIRE CHEESE STANDS AS IT STOOD IN THE DAYS WHEN GOLDSMITH USED TO PASS ITS SIDE DOOR on his way up the dark entry to his lodgings in Wine Office Court. The jolly host who owns the freehold can show title-deeds going back almost to the time of the Great Fire of London. “There, on the ground floor, we meet our ‘Prior’ sitting on a bench, above which is set in the wall a brass tablet bearing the following inscription:— “‘THE FAVOURITE SEAT OF DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON. _Born September 18, 1709; Died December 13, 1784._