Volume I Part 14 (2/2)
Among the members was Bligh, a notorious madman, of whom Mr. Raikes relates:--”One evening at the Macao table, when the play was very deep, Brummell having lost a considerable stake, affected, in his farcical way, a very tragic air, and cried out, 'Waiter, bring me a flat candlestick and a pistol.' Upon which Bligh, who was sitting opposite to him, calmly produced two loaded pistols from his coat pocket, which he placed on the table, and said, 'Mr. Brummell, if you are really desirous to put a period to your existence, I am extremely happy to offer you the means without troubling the waiter.' The effect upon those present may easily be imagined, at finding themselves in the company of a known madman who had loaded weapons about him.”
MR. CANNING AT THE CLIFFORD-STREET CLUB.
There was in the last century, a debating Club, which boasted for a short time, a brighter a.s.semblage of talent than is usually found to flourish in societies of this description. Its meetings, which took place once a month, were held at the Clifford-street Coffee-house, at the corner of Bond-street. The debaters were chiefly Mackintosh, Richard Sharp, a Mr. Ollyett Woodhouse; Charles Moore, son of the celebrated traveller; and Lord Charles Townshend, fourth son of the facetious and eccentric Marquis. The great primitive principles of civil government were then much discussed. It was before the French Revolution had ”brought death into the world and all its woe.”
At the Clifford-street Society, Canning generally took ”the liberal side” of the above questions. His earliest prepossessions are well known to have inclined to this side; but he evidently considered the Society rather as a school of rhetorical exercise, where he might acquire the use of his weapons, than a forum, where the serious profession of opinions, and a consistent adherence to them, could be fairly expected of him. One evening, the question for debate was ”the justice and expediency of resuming the ecclesiastical property of France.” Before the debate began, Canning had taken some pains to ascertain on which side the majority of the members seemed inclined to speak; and finding that they were generally in favour of the resumption, he expressed his fears that the unanimity of sentiment would spoil the discussion; so, he volunteered to speak against it. He did so, and it was a speech of considerable power, chiefly in reply to the opener, who, in a set discourse of some length, had a.s.serted the revocable conditions of the property of the church, which, being created, he said, by the state, remained ever after at its disposition. Canning denied the proposition that ecclesiastical property was the creature of the state. He contended that though it might be so in a new government, yet, speaking historically, the great as well as lesser ecclesiastical fiefs were coeval with the crown of France, frequently strong enough to maintain fierce and not unequal conflicts with it, and certainly not in their origin emanations from its bounty. The church, he said, came well dowered to the state, who was now suing for a divorce, in order to plunder her pin-money. He contended that the church property stood upon the same basis, and ought to be protected by the same sanctions, as private property. It was originally, he said, acc.u.mulated from the successive donations with which a pious benevolence ought to enrich the fountains, from which spiritual comfort ought to flow to the wretched, the poor, the forsaken. He drew an energetic sketch of Mirabeau, the proposer of the measure, by whose side, he remarked, the worst characters in history, the Cleons, the Catilines, the Cetheguses, of antiquity, would brighten into virtue. He said that the character of the lawgiver tainted the law. It was proffered to the National a.s.sembly by hands hot and reeking from the cells of sensuality and vice; it came from a brain inflamed and distended into frenzy by habitual debauchery. These are, of course, but faint sketches of this very early specimen of Canning as a speaker. The humour and irony with which he delighted his auditors are indescribable. He displayed the same powers of pleasantry which, in maturer years, enlivened the dulness of debate, and softened the asperities of party. He was, indeed, less rapid, and more measured in his elevation; sometimes impeded in flow, probably, from too fastidious a selection of words; but it was impossible not to predict that at no very distant period he would rise into high distinction as a parliamentary speaker.
Canning was then the most handsome man about town; and his fine countenance glowed, as he spoke, with every sentiment which he uttered. It was customary during the debates at the Clifford-street Senate, for pots of porter to be introduced by way of refreshment.
Canning, in his eloquent tirade against Mirabeau, handled the peculiar style of the Count's oratory with great severity. The president had, during this part of Canning's speech, given a signal for a pot of porter, which had been brought in and placed before him. It served Canning for an ill.u.s.tration. ”Sir,” said he, ”much has been said about the gigantic powers of Mirabeau; let us not be carried away by the false jargon of his philosophy, or imagine that deep political wisdom resides in tumid and decorated diction. To the steady eye of a sagacious criticism, the eloquence of Mirabeau will appear to be as empty and vapid as his patriotism. It is like the beverage that stands so invitingly before you,--foam and froth at the top, heavy and muddy within.”
ECCENTRIC CLUBS.
In Ward's _Secret History_, we read of the Golden Fleece Club, a rattle-brained society, originally held at a house in Cornhill, so ent.i.tled. They were a merry company of tippling citizens and jocular change-brokers, who every night washed away their consciences with claret, that the mental alienations and fallacious a.s.surances the one had used in their shops, and the deceitful wheedling and stock-jobbing honesty by which the other had outwitted their merchants, might be no impediment to their night's rest; but that they might sleep without repentance, and rise next day with a strong propensity to the same practices. Each member on his admission had a characteristic name a.s.signed to him; as, Sir Timothy Addlepate, Sir Nimmy Sneer, Sir Talkative Do-little, Sir Skinny Fretwell, Sir Rumbus Rattle, Sir Boozy Prate-all, Sir Nicholas Ninny Sipall, Sir Gregory Growler, Sir Pay-little, etc. The Club flourished until the decease of the leading member; when the dull fraternity, for want of a merry leader, and neglecting to be shaved and blooded, fell into the dumps, gave up their nocturnal revels, forsook frenzied claret for sober water-gruel, and a cessation of b.u.mpers was proclaimed, till those who were sick recovered their health, and others their senses; and then, the better to prevent their debas.e.m.e.nt being known, they adjourned their Society from the Fleece in Cornhill to the Three Tuns in Southwark, that they might be more retired from the bows and compliments of the London apprentices, who used to salute the n.o.ble knights by their t.i.tles, as they pa.s.sed to and fro.
Another of Ward's humorous Sketches is that of the Lying Club, at the Bell Tavern, in Westminster, with Sir Harry Blunt for its chairman.
The Clubs were fruitful sources of satire to the _Spectator_. He is merry on the Mummers, the Twopenny, the Ugly, the Fighting, the Fringe-Glove, the Humdrum, the Doldrum, and the Lovers; on Clubs of Fat Men, Tall Men, and One-Eyed Men, and of Men who lived in the same Street.
The pretentious character of the Clubs of Queen Anne's time, and the historical importance attached to their annals, are humorously satirized in the following sketch of the Everlasting Club, to which, in those days, if a man were an idle, worthless fellow, who neglected his family, and spent most of his time over a bottle, he was, in derision, said to belong.
”The Everlasting Club consists of an hundred members, who divide the whole twenty-four hours among them in such a manner, that the Club sits day and night from one end of the year to another: no party presuming to rise till they are relieved by those who are in course to succeed them. By this means, a member of the Everlasting Club never wants company; for though he is not upon duty himself, he is sure to find some who are; so that if he be disposed to take a whet, a nooning, an evening's draught, or a bottle after midnight, he goes to the Club, and finds a knot of friends to his mind.
”It is a maxim in this Club that the Steward never dies; for as they succeed one another by way of rotation, no man is to quit the great elbow-chair, which stands at the upper end of the table, till his successor is ready to fill it; insomuch that there has not been a _sede vacante_ in their memory.
”This Club was inst.i.tuted towards the end, or, as some of them say, about the middle of the Civil Wars, and continued with interruption till the time of the Great Fire, which burnt them out and dispersed them for several weeks. The Steward all that time maintained his post till he had like to have been blown up with a neighbouring house, which was demolished in order to stop the fire: and would not leave the chair at last, till he had emptied the bottles upon the table, and received repeated directions from the Club to withdraw himself. This Steward is frequently talked of in the Club, and looked upon by every member of it as a greater man than the famous captain mentioned in my Lord Clarendon, who was burnt in his s.h.i.+p, because he would not quit it without orders. It is said that towards the close of 1700, being the great year of jubilee, the Club had it under consideration whether they should break up or continue their session; but after many speeches and debates, it was at length agreed to sit out the other century. This resolution pa.s.sed in a general club _nemine contradicente_.
”It appears, by their books in general, that, since their first inst.i.tution, they have smoked fifty tons of tobacco, drank thirty thousand b.u.t.ts of ale, one thousand hogsheads of red port, two hundred barrels of brandy, and _one_ kilderkin of small beer. There had been likewise a great consumption of cards. It is also said that they observe the law in Ben Jonson's Club, which orders the fire to be always kept in (_focus perennis esto_), as well for the convenience of lighting their pipes as to cure the dampness of the club-room. They have an old woman, in the nature of a vestal, whose business is to cherish and perpetuate the fire, which burns from generation to generation, and has seen the gla.s.s-house fires in and out above an hundred times.
”The Everlasting Club treats all other clubs with an eye of contempt, and talks even of the Kit-Kat and October as a couple of upstarts.
Their ordinary discourse, as much I have been able to learn of it, turns altogether upon such adventures as have pa.s.sed in their own a.s.sembly; of members who have taken the gla.s.s in their turns for a week together, without stirring out of the Club; of others who have not missed their morning's draught for twenty years together; sometimes they speak in rapture of a run of ale in King Charles's reign; and sometimes reflect with astonishment upon games at whist, which have been miraculously recovered by members of the Society, when in all human probability the case was desperate.
”They delight in several old catches, which they sing at all hours, to encourage one another to moisten their clay, and grow immortal by drinking, with many other edifying exhortations of the like nature.
”There are four general Clubs held in a year, at which time they fill up vacancies, appoint waiters, confirm the old fire-maker or elect a new one, settle contributions for coals, pipes, tobacco, and other necessaries.
”The senior member has outlived the whole Club twice over, and has been drunk with the grandfathers of some of the sitting members.”
_The Lawyer's Club_ is thus described in the _Spectator_, No.
372:--”This Club consists only of attorneys, and at this meeting every one proposes to the board the cause he has then in hand, upon which each member gives his judgment, according to the experience he has met with. If it happens that any one puts a case of which they have had no precedent, it is noted down by their chief clerk, Will Goosequill (who registers all their proceedings), that one of them may go with it next day to a counsel. This is, indeed, commendable, and ought to be the princ.i.p.al end of their meeting; but had you been there to have heard them relate their methods of managing a cause, their manner of drawing out their bills, and, in short, their arguments upon the several ways of abusing their clients, with the applause that is given to him who has done it most artfully, you would before now have given your remarks.
”They are so conscious that their discourses ought to be kept a secret, that they are very cautious of admitting any person who is not in the profession. When any who are not of the law are let in, the person who introduces him says, he is a very honest gentleman, and he is taken, as their cant is, to pay costs.” The writer adds, ”that he is admitted upon the recommendation of one of their princ.i.p.als, as a very honest, good-natured fellow, that will never be in a plot, and only desires to drink his bottle and smoke his pipe.”
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