With the clubs and coffee-houses some of the greatest English names are associated. At Will’s Coffee-house, in Bow Street, Dryden reigned supreme; at Button’s, in Great Russell Street, Addison was the presiding genius. Addison, by the way, moralist as he was, was addicted to something much stronger than coffee; he entered largely into, if he did not lead, the dissipation of his day. Samuel Johnson, as is well known, was quite an enthusiast in the matter of clubs and taverns. His principal haunt was the “Turk’s Head” in Gerard Street, where the Literary Club met, including, amongst others, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Garrick (who also frequented the Bedford in Covent Garden, along with Foote, Quin, and others), Oliver Goldsmith, Burke, and Sheridan. Johnson also went to the Essex Club in Essex Street, and the King’s Head beefsteak house. Our space will not allow us to enumerate the various clubs of the time, but in order to show what extension had been given to the system in later days, we may add that in 1801 there was a club called “The King of Clubs,” which met at the “Crown and Anchor” in the Strand, and reckoned among its members Lord Holland, the Marquis of Lansdowne, Lord Abinger, Lord Erskine, and Samuel Rogers. Then, at the opposite end of the social scale, there were the “Bird Fanciers,” who met at a pothouse in Rosemary Lane; the “Flat Cap,” where market-women assembled, and “young gentlemen and gallants paid their court to those ladies with burnt brandy and formidable mugs of porter;” the “Thieves,” at the Half-Moon in the Old Bailey; the “Lying Club,” where whoever told the truth between six and ten was fined a gallon of wine; the “Bold Bucks,” who drove the neighbourhood of St. Mary-le-Strand crazy with bands of music during the performance of divine service, and then sat down to feast on “Holy Ghost Pie;” and the “Sword Clubs,” whose members took possession of the town after supper, “holding their swords against every man, whilst every man’s sword was held against them.”[272] As this notice of the clubs of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries may possibly find its way to posterity, it is but just to add regarding those of the present day that they are amongst the noblest institutions of our country. This is certainly not the place to expatiate upon their services to the state, and it must suffice to say that they are the centres of political and intellectual activity. All that we have to note concerning them in relation to our subject is, that they are certainly not conducted on teetotal principles. In most of them the wines are selected by a committee of connoisseurs, and one, in which the “feast of reason and the flow of soul” are supposed to predominate, manages to expend £2000 annually in wines and spirits. A well-known French writer has been at the trouble to ascertain what quantity of wine is usually consumed at our metropolitan clubs, and he sets it down at a pint per diem for each member.[273]