The origin of the club, for which, it will be remembered, Horace Walpole once designed a coat of arms, was White’s Chocolate House, which was established in 1698, just ten years after Stewart’s Bakery, as we have seen, opened its doors at the corner of Bond Street. White’s was then on the west side of St. James’s Street, five doors from the bottom, and occupied the one-time residence of that Countess of Northumberland, who was such a “grande dame,” that her grand-daughter-in-law, the Duchess of Somerset, is reported to have never sat down in her presence without previously asking her leave. It soon became a hot-bed of aristocratic gamesters. Robert Harley never passed by without cursing it, as the bane of half the nobility; Whitehead, in one of his poems, does not hesitate to call it a den of thieves; and although Chesterfield once wrote to his son that “a member of a gaming club should be a cheat or he will soon be a beggar,” that teacher of manners and morals practically lived at White’s, not putting in practice, it is to be hoped, what he taught by precept. The Club was burnt down in 1733; but, phœnix-like, sprang up again soon after, at Gaunt’s Coffee House, which was next door to the St. James’s Coffee House near the south-west corner of the street. Arthur, Mackreth, Martindale, and Raggett, all names familiar to students of the social life of the eighteenth century, were the successive proprietors of White’s, after 1736, when the Chocolate House was formed into a regular club. Nineteen years after that date it was removed to the premises it now occupies and its present outward appearance is due to alterations made nearly a century later. [Sidenote: BOODLE’S CLUB.] Boodle’s, another famous club, is almost opposite, at No. 28, and was known formerly, from its gastronomic reputation, as the “_Savoir Vivre_.” The Club House was designed by Adam for John Crunden, in 1765, and additions were made to it in 1821. It was largely frequented by country gentlemen, who knew probably how hard it was “to rival Boodle’s dinners,” and it used to be said, in consequence, that if a waiter came into the reading-room and called out, “Sir John, your servant has come,” every other head was mechanically turned in answer to the summons! Both Gibbon and Wilberforce were members, as was that Sir Frank Standish, caricatured by Gillray as “A Standing Dish at Boodle’s.” Gillray, by the bye, lived next door, at No. 29, where, in 1815, he committed suicide by throwing himself from an upper window. [Sidenote: CROCKFORD’S CLUB.]