Queen Anne’s time, were, as may readily be imagined, highly prominent members of this murderous fraternity, which might have flourished much longer but for the interference of the Sheriff’s hangman in ordinary, who disposed of the members with such amazing despatch and persistence, that the club could not at last form a quorum, and was so dissolved. The “Irish Fortune-hunters’ Club” I am somewhat chary of recognising, for I am afraid that it existed only in the lively fancy of Mr. Ned Ward or his imitator. There is, indeed, a copy of some resolutions of the club appended to the “Complete Account,” but I am inclined to consider them apocryphal. Leave, by these resolutions, is given to Captain Donahoo to change his name to Talbot Howard Somerset; Captain Macgarret is empowered to change the place of his nativity from Connemara to Cornwall; and Lieutenant Dunshunner is presented with a suit of laced camlet at the club expense, in order to his successfully prosecuting his suit with Miss Bridget Tallboys, “with ten thousand pounds fortune; in the event of which happy consummation, he is to repay the price of the suit with interest, and moreover to release from his captivity at the Gate-house the club secretary, therein confined on suspicion of debt.” Very different is the bran-new modern club whose interior my faithful artist has depicted, and whose appearance at five o’clock in the afternoon I am now called upon to describe. Gentlemen members of clubs, these gorgeous palaces are but the growth of one generation. Your fathers had, it is true, their Wattier’s, the Cocoa-Tree, White’s, and Boodle’s, but those were considerably more like gambling-houses than clubs. To obtain admission was exceedingly difficult, and to remain a member was, save to men of immense fortune, absolutely ruinous. Hundreds of the superior middle-classes, nay, even of the aristocracy, who would consider themselves social Pariahs now-a-days, if they did not belong to one or more clubs, were perfectly content, a score of years since, to frequent the coffee-rooms of hotels and taverns. A modern London club is the very looking-glass of the time; of the gay, glittering, polished, improved utilitarian, material age. Nothing more can be done for a palace than the fitters-up of a modern club have done for it. The march of upholstering intellect is there in its entirety. It must be almost bewildering to the modest half-pay captain or the raw young ensign, to the country gentleman, the book-worm fellow of his college, or the son of the country squire, fresh from dog-breaking and superintending the drains on his father’s estate, to find themselves suddenly transferred from the quiet lodgings in St. Alban’s Place, the whitewashed barrack-room, the ivy-grown parsonage, the tranquil oak-sporting rooms of “Keys” or “Maudlin,” the dull comfort of the country mansion-house, to this great hectoring palace, of which he is the twelve-hundreth part proprietor,