reprint 'Lord Roscommon's Essay on Translated Verse,' and to print a thousand copies. Dryden was now at work upon the 'Miscellany Poems;' that collection which is sometimes called 'Tonson's' and sometimes 'Dryden's.' According to the fashion of title-pages at that time, it was to be written "by the most eminent hands." The poet writes, "since we are to have nothing but new, I am resolved we will have nothing but good, whomever we disoblige." The first volume was published in 1684; a second volume appeared in 1685. Malone says, "This was the first collection of that kind which had appeared for many years in England." The third Miscellany ' was published in 1693. Tonson has now become a sharp tradesman. A letter from him to Dryden exhibits him haggling about the number of lines he ought to receive of the translation of parts of Ovid. He had only 1,446 for fifty guineas, whereas he expected 1,518 lines for forty guineas. He is, nevertheless, humbly submissive. "I own, if you don't think fit to add something more, I must submit: 'tis wholly at your choice." Still, holding to his maxim to have a pennyworth for his penny, he adds, "You were pleased to use me much kindlier in Juvenal, which is not reckoned so easy to translate as Ovid." Although the bookseller seems mercenary enough to justify Malone's remark that "by him who is to live by the sale of books, a book is considered merely as an article of trade," Dryden soon after writes to Tonson, "I am much ashamed of myself that I am so much behind-hand with you in kindness. Above all things, I am sensible of your good nature in bearing me company to this place." (somewhere in Northamptonshire.)

Dryden could now ill afford to be curtailed in the bookseller's payment for his verses. The Revolution had deprived him of his office of poet-laureate; but he might do better than writing Miscellany Poems' at the rate of ninepence a line. He will publish a specimen of his translation of Virgil in the 'Miscellany,' but he will produce the complete work by subscription. Tonson shall be his agent for printing the volumes, with engravings. The plan succeeds. There are large-paper copies for the rich and great; there are small-paper copies for a second class of subscribers. "Be ready with the price of paper and of the books," writes Dryden. They were to meet at a tavern. "No matter for any dinner; for that is a charge to you, and I care not for it. Mr. Congreve may be with us, as a common friend." Few were the literary bargains that were settled without a dinner. Fewer, indeed, were the coffee-house meetings between author and bookseller that were not accompanied with that solace which was called "a whet." Their business is completed. Mr. Dryden goes again into the country for his poetical labors and his fishing. Mr. Tonson is "My good friend;" and "I assure you I lay up your last kindness to me in my heart." But a terrible subject of dispute is coming up which much perplexes the bookseller. In October, 1695, the poet writes, I expect fifty pounds in good silver: not

such as I had formerly. I am not obliged to take gold, neither will I; nor stay for it beyond four and twenty hours after it is due." The sellers and the buyers in all trades are sorely disturbed in their calculations; whilst Charles Montague and Locke and Newton are thinking over the best means for a reform of the coinage. Mr. Tonson's customers give him bad silver for his books, and Mr. Dryden's subscribers for his five-guinea edition would take care not to pay the bookseller at the rate of twenty-one shillings for each golden piece, whose exchangeable value is increased forty per cent. When the author writes, "I expect fifty pounds in good silver," he demands an impossibility. All the "good silver" was hoarded. When he says, "I ain not obliged to take gold," he means that he was not obliged to take guineas at their market value as compared with the clipped and debased silver. Cunningham says, "Guineas on a sudden rose to thirty shillings a piece: all currency of other money was stopped." Dryden was, in the end, compelled to submit to the common fate of all who had to receive money in exchange for labor or goods. So the poet squabbles with his publisher into the next year, and the publisher of whose arguments in his self-defence we hear nothing-gets hard measure from the historian one hundred and fifty years afterwards. "The ignorant and helpless peasant," say Macaulay, was cruelly ground between one class which would give money only by tale, and another which would take it only by weight; yet his sufferings hardly exceeded those of the unfortunate race of authors. Of the way in which obscure writers were treated we may easily form a judgment from the letters, still extant, of Dryden to his bookseller, Tonson." The poet's complaints, presented without any attendant circumstances, and with some suppression, would seem to imply that Tonson attempted to cheat Dryden, as he would have attempted to cheat obscure writers. But Macaulay justly says, "These complaints and demands, which have been preserved from destruction only by the eininence of the writer, are doubtless merely a fair example of the correspondence which filled all the mail-bags of England for several months."

Reconciliaton soon comes. The business intercourse of Dryden and Tonson continues uninterrupted. Jacob, we may believe, sometimes meditates upon the loss of his great friend. Will any poetical genius arise worthy to take his place? He thinks not. He must look around him and see which of the old writers can be successfully reproduced, like the Milton, which he has now made his own, as the world may observe in the portrait which Sir Godfrey Kneller has painted for him, with 'Paradise Lost' in his hand.*

We see the shadow of a younger Jacob Tonson than he who is thus represented in the engraving. We see him bargaining, in 1683, with Brabazon

* Engraved in mezzotint by Faber. A beautiful and now very rare print.

Aylmer for one-half of bis interest in Milton's poem. Aylmer produces the document, which transfers to him the entire copyright, signed by Samuel Simmons; and he exhibits also the original covenant of indenture, by which Milton sold to Simmons his copy for an immediate payment of five pounds, with a stipulation for other payments, according to the future sales-twenty pounds in the whole. Mr. Tonson thinks that the value of other literary wares than "prologues and plays" has risen in the market. He could scarcely have dreamed, however, that the time would come when a hundred guineas would be given for this very indenture. and that it would be preserved in a national museum as a sacred treasure. He buys a half of Aylmer's interest, and has many cogitations about the best mode of making profit out of his bargain. The temper of the times, and the fashionable taste, are not propitious to blank-verse upon a sacred subject; and the name of Milton, the secretary of the late Protector, is held in hatred. It is true that Mr. Dryden had said that this was one of the greatest, most noble, and most sublime poems which either the age or the nation had produced; but the prudent Jacob would pause a little. The time might come when he who sang of "man's first disobedience" would not be hated by the clergy, and when Rochester would not be the fashion at court. He waited four years, and then issued proposals for publishing 'Paradise Lost' by subscription. He was encouraged in this undertaking by two persons of some influence - John Somers, who had written verses and other things for hin, a barrister; and Francis Atterbury, a student of Christ Church. There is sufficient encouragement to proceed; and so, in 1688, Milton comes forth in folio, with a portrait, under which are engraven certain lines which Dryden had furnished to his publisher. Times were changed since Samuel Simmons paid his five pounds down for the copy, and agreed to pay five pounds more when thirteen - hundred were sold. And so Mr. Dryden was not altogether opposed to the critical opinions of the existing generation when he wrote that "the force of Nature could no farther go" when she united Homer and Virgil in Milton. Dryden not only gave his famous six lines to Tonson, but paid his crowns as a subscriber. It is St. Cecilia's Day, the 22d of November, 1697. Mr. Tonson has seen the manuscript of Mr. Dryden's ode, or song, to be performed at the Music Feast kept in Stationers' Hall - "the Anniversary Feast of the Society of Gentlemen, Lovers of Musick." Mr. Tonson has attended many of these performances in his own hall, and was particularly interested in one a few years before, for which his distinguished friend wrote the ode. But on this latter occasion, as earnest Jacob tells to every one who will listen to him, Mr. Dryden has surpassed himself. Never, he thinks, and thinks truly, has there been so glorious an ode as 'Alexander's Feast.' His notions differed somewhat from the majority of the audience assembled on that occasion, who were accustomed to attach more im

portance to the music than to the words of the annual song of praise. Purcell died two years before, and Dryden wrote his elegy. One of less renown, Jeremiah Clarke, of the Chapel Royal, is now the composer. A great musician was to arise, in another generation, whose music should be married to this immortal verse. But the noble ode can well stand alone.

The ode to St. Cecilia formed a part of the volume of 'Fables' which Tonson published just before the poet's death. In December, 1699, Dryden had finished the work, with a preface written in his usual pure and vigorous prose. He was paid by Tonson two hundred and fifty guineas, with an engagement to make up that amount to three hundred pounds when a second impression should be demanded. It was thirteen years before such second edition was published.

In May, 1700, the bookseller's first great patron died. The time, we think, has arrived when a different interpretation of "patronage," as between author and publisher, must be adopted, in preference to the conventional use of the term which long prevailed. "During the better half of the the past century," writes the worthy John Nicholls, "Jacob Tonson and Andrew Millar were the best patrons of literature;" a fact rendered unquestionable by the valuable works produced under their fostering and genial hands. Again: "That eminent bookseller, Andrew Millar, the steady patron of Thomson and Fielding, and many other eminent authors." In 1773, Johnson said, "Now learning itself is a trade. A man goes to a bookseller, and gets what he can. We have done with patronage." It was a pleasant delusion of Paternoster Row that patronage of authors had only changed from the Mæcenas of the cabinet to the Mæcenas of the countinghouse.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century Tonson purchased a small house and grounds at Barn Elms, a village between Putney and Mortlake. Its majestic elms are said to have been the subject of many a pastoral poet. There was a mansion here in which Count Heidegger, the founder of Italian operas, resided. George II. was here entertained with displays of fireworks and illuminated lamps; but the "boets and bainters" who were not in good Iodor with the Hanoverian dynasty, conferred a lustre upon Barn Elms which did not go out quite so quickly as Heidegger's fireworks. Jacob's villa, originally little more than a cottage, was a pleasanter summer place of meeting for the Kit-Cat Club than Shire Lane or the Fountain. Like other clubable men, its members were fond of country excursions. They had occasional meetings at the "Upper Flask" on Hampstead Heath, but to Barn Elms they could come in the painted vessel or the swift wherry, not quite so free from care, perhaps, as the swan hopping citizens, who, in their August voyages, were accustomed to land at Barn Elms, and, with collations and dances on the green, while away a summer afternoon.

The origin and early history of the Kit-Cat Club are shrouded in the "darkness visible" of the past. Fable and tradition assert their claims to be interpreters, as in the greater subject of the beginning of nations. Elkanah Settle, whose name has been preserved, like a fly in amber, by Dryden's bitter description of him under the name of Doeg, addressed, in 1699, a manuscript poem 'To the most renowned the President and the rest of the Knights of the most noble Order of the Toast.' In these verses the city poet asserted the dignity of this illustrious society. Malone supposes the president to have been Lord Dorset or Mr. Montague, and the Order of the Toast to have been identical with the Kit-Cat Club. The toasting glasses of this association had verses engraven upon them, which might have perished with their fragile vehicle had they not been preserved in Tonson's fifth Miscellany, as verses by Halifax, Congreve, Granville, Addison, Garth, and others of the rhyming and witty companionship, whose toasts, as was irreverently written, were in honor of old cats and young kits. This ingenious derivation is ascribed to Arbuthnot. There was a writer of a far lower grade-the scurrilous Ned Ward-who, in his 'Secret History of Clubs,' gives a circumstantial account of the origin of the Kit-Cat in connection with Jacob Tonson. It was founded, he said, “by an amphibious morta!, chief merchant to the muses." According to Ward's narrative, we see the shadow of Jacob Tonson, as drawn by a party caricaturist, waiting hopefully in his shop for the arrival of some one or more of "his new profitable chaps, who, having more wit than experience, put but a slender value as yet upon their maiden performances." The exact locality, made illustrious by Christopher Katt and his mutton pies, is held by Ned Ward to have been Gray's Inn Lane; by other and better authorities Shire Lane, and subsequently the Fountain Tavern in the Strand. Mr. Tonson, then, in accordance with the custom of the times, was always ready to propose "a whet" to his authors; but he now added a pastry entertainment. At length, according to the satirist, Jacob proposed a weekly meeting, where he would continue the like feast, provided his friends would give him the refusal of all their juvenile productions. This "generous proposal" was very readily agreed to by the whole poetic class, and the cook's name being Christopher, for brevity called Kit, and his sign being the "Cat and Fiddle," they very merrily derived a quaint denomination from puss and her master, and from thence called themselves the Kit-Cat Club." Ward goes on to say that the club, having usurped the bays from all the town, *many of the quality grew fond of showing the everlasting honor that was likely to crown the poetical society."

There probably never existed a club whose members have had such a happy chance of their memories being preserved for the admiration or indifference of posterity as those of the Kit-Cat. Many of them are important figures in the state history of

แ

their country, and in the history of its literature. Others have passed on to the obscurity of mere lord chamberlains and grooms of the stole; whilst some of the versifiers and wits of their day have written their names upon the sands of the ebbing tide, which the next flood obliterates. But they each of them were painted by Kueller. The pictures are still in the possesion of the representative of the Tonson family, in Hertfordshire, having been, some of them, from time to time publicly exhibited. All the portraits, engraved by Faber, were published a year before the death of Jacob Tonson. They were re-engraved in 1821, accompanied by Memoirs of the celebrated persons composing the Kit-Cat Club.' These memoirs are, with some justice, described by the Quarterly Review of 1825 as one of the most blundering pieces of patchwork that the scissors of a hackney editor ever produced." It certainly is one of the dullest books, manufactured out of the commonest materials. This volume, by which we may trace our course as by a catalogue in calling up some of the Shadows associated in this club with Jacob Tonson, brings them before us, nearly all in the full-bottomed peruke of the court; the men of letters, however, affected this not ungraceful head decoration. Farquhar, in 1698, makes "the full wig as infallible a token of wit as the laurel." Some of the grandees show with ribbons and stars and white staffs; many of them are in the négligé costume, which the painter often adopted; more artistic, perhaps, than the lace cravat and the embroidered coat. Only a few are in the cap in which Tonson himself is depicted, but some of these are lords.

First, let us call up the great Sir Godfrey himself, state painter to five sovereigns. He was equally favored by Charles II., James II., William III., Anne, and George I. The German artist must have been exceedingly discreet in his politics and his religion, to have begun life with Toryism and Popery; to have gone on happily with those who accomplished the Revolution; and to have ended his days amongst soine of the stanchest adherents of the Protestant cause, the boon companions of his KitCat family at Barn Elms. He must have been an amusing associate when his inordinate vanity was unlocked by good cheer. He would then scarcely venture to relate that famous vision of his which he described to Pope. He dreamed that he was dead; when, encountering St. Peter, the apostle very civilly asked his name. "I said it was Kneller. I had no sooner said so, than St. Luke, who was standing close by, turned to me, and said, with a great deal of sweetness, 'What! the famous Sir Godfrey Kneller, from England?' 'The very same, sir,' said I; at your service."'" It is related, upon the authority of Pope, that Tonson got a good many fine portraits, and two of himself, by flattering Kneller's vanity. We may picture the bookseller whispering into his ear at the Kit-Cat dinners that he was the greatest master that ever was. That might be sufficient when the flattery was accom

panied by the feast; but there were sometimes dull intervals when the Kit-Cat room no longer echoed the toasts of lords and the jokes of wits. The bookseller must then propitiate the painter in some other way. "Oh!" said Kneller, with his usual oath, to Vander Gutcht, "this old Jacob loves me; he is a very good man; you see he loves me, he sends me good things; the venison was fat."

We pass on to another personage, who is characterized by an essentially different ruling passion from that of Sir Godfrey. The "proud" Duke of Somerset was the first of the members of the Kit-Cat who sat for his portrait, for the purpose of presenting it to Mr. Tonson, the secretary of the club. We hesitate in giving implicit credence to the stories that are related of this Whig partisan by the Tory writers, such as, that he would never suffer his children to sit in his presence, and that, not deigning to speak to servants, he gave his orders by signs. It seems scarcely consistent that this inordinately haughty peer should write to a tradesman who kept an open book shop in a public thoroughfare, "Our club is dissolved till you revive it again, which we are impatient of." This was in June, 1703, when Tonson had made a trip to Holland to purchase paper for his noble edition of Cæsar. At that exact period, Vanbrugh, who seems to have been his constant friend and correspondent, writes to him at Amsterdam, "In short, the Kit-Cat wants you much more than you ever can them. Those who remain in town are in great desire of waiting on you at Barn Elms; not that they have finished their pictures, neither; though to excuse them as well as myself, Sir Godfrey has been most in fault. The fool has got a country-house near Hampton Court, and is so busy in fitting it up (to receive nobody) that there is no getting him to work." Vanbrugh had recollections of Tonson's villa which were not associated with its ceremonial banquets. Writing to Tonson in 1725, he says, "From Woodstock we went to Lord Cobham's, seeing Middleton-Stony by the way, and eating a cheerful cold loaf at a very humble ale-house; I think, the best meal I ever ate, except the first supper in the kitchen at Barnes."

Richard Tonson, the descendant of the old bookseller, who resided at Water-Oakley on the banks of the Thames, added a room to the villa which he inherited, on whose spacious walls the portraits were hung; not so completely in the style of a master of the ceremonies as in the memoir-writer series of engravings. This latter Tonson, one of the representatives for Windsor, was a partner with his brother, the third Jacob, in the old bookselling business in the Strand; and may therefore be excused for having, with his trade notion of great names, placed together in close companionship, Dryden, Vanbrugh, Congreve, Addison, Garth, and Steele. In our discursive fashion, we shall venture to depart from both the arrangements. Peers, without any intermixture of plebian blood, are not considered to be the liveliest of companions. We think we may also take the liberty of saying, that a knot of six authors

of our own time-though not exactly possessing the qualities attributed to the tribe

"So very clever, anxious, fine and jealous," would not come up to the ordinary expectation that nothing but pearls would drop from their mouths.

In the Water-Oakley arrangement, the door of the room cuts off Tonson from Dryden, who is not given in the engraved series. It may be doubted whether Dryden takes his place here as a member of the Kit-Cat Club, or was introduced by Jacob's descendant, out of respect to the great name by whom the son of the barber-surgeon of Fleet street was first brought into notice. If so it was a very just tribute. As we have intimated, there was no cause of discord between the poet and the bookseller, when the translator of Virgil might expect, like Dante, to be conducted through the unknown regions by his great original. Dryden had, no doubt, forgiven the offense which Jacob had committed a few years before. Although the poet had refused his request to dedicate his translation to King William, the publisher, nevertheless, "prepared the book for it: for, in every figure of Eneas, he has caused him to be drawn, like King William, with a hooked nose. The device of the bookseller is recorded in au epigram of the period:

'Old Jacob, by deep judgment swayed,
To please the wise beholders,
Has placed old Nassau's hook-nosed head
On young Eueas' shoulders.
To make the parallel hold tack,
Methinks there's little lacking:
One took his father pick-a-back,

And t'other sent him packing.'”

The history of the Kit-Cat Club would be far more intelligible could we trace the dates of the admission of members. Club records are perishable commodities, and there are none remaining of the KitCat Club. Ned Ward tells us that the banter upon Dryden's "Hind and Panther," called "The City Mouse and Country Mouse," stole into the world out of the witty society of the Kit-Cat. This joint production of Prior and Charles Montague was published in 1687, much to the annoyance of Dryden, who thought it hard that two young fellows, to whom he had been civil, should set the town laughing at him. Charles Montague, Earl of Halifax, was painted by Kneller amongst the Kit-Cat portraits. Prior does not appear in this collection. Between 1687 and 1703, when the club had a settled locality at Barn Elms, Montague had well pushed his fortunes, -to adopt Johnson's words,-"as an artful and active statesman, employed in balancing parties, contriving expedients, and combating opposition." His qualities as a writer have ceased to interest; but, as a patron of letters, at the period before reliance was placed upon that greater patron the public, who is not to be flattered into complacency by dedications and odes, his memory has survived. "From the moment," says Macaulay," at which he began to distinguish himself in public life, he ceased to be a

versifier... He wisely determined to derive from the poetry of others a glory which he never could have derived from his own. As a patron of genius and learning, he ranks with his two illustrious friends, Dorset and Somers." Both the eminent men thus referred to were members of the Kit-Cat, and are amongst the foremost of those who justify the eulogy of Horace Walpole: "The Kit-Cat Club, though generally mentioned as a set of wits, were, in fact, the patriots that saved Britain."

Amongst the nobles and statesmen of the period that have been made so familiar to us by the eloquent narrative of Macaulay, and who are represented in Kneller's Kit-Cat portraits, we find that of one who has been "damned to everlasting fame," not only by the great historian, but by the great novelist. If we would study the character of one of the most wicked nobles of that day, we may turn to Macaulay's History, and Thackeray's Esmond.' How Charles Lord Mohun could have become a member of any decent society, after his participation in the murder of Mountford, the actor, in 1692, it would be difficult to conjecture. There were few peers, we may believe, of the Kit-Cat Club, who, whatever might have been their motive for the verdict of "not guilty" upon Mohun's trial before the Lord High Steward, would have applauded the saying of one great nobleman,-" After all, the fellow was but a player; and players are rogues." Spence has preserved a satisfactory anecdote of our friend the bookseller, as told him by Pope, which evidently refers to the early days of the club. "The master of the house where the club met was Christopher Katt; Tonson was secretary. The day Lord Mohun and the Earl' of Berkeley entered it, Jacob said he saw they were just going to be ruined. When Lord Mohun broke down the gilded emblem on the top of his chair, Jacob complained to his friends, and said 'that a man who would do that would cut a man's throat.' So that he had the good and the forms of the society much at heart."

Thirty year after the Kit-Cat Club had taken its station at Barn Elms, Pope, in his first satire, published in 1733, celebrated a distinguished epicure of that period:

"Each mortal has his pleasure; none deny; Scarsdale his bottle, Darty his ham-pie," Darty was Charles Dartiquenave, or Dartineuf. The famous lover of "ham-pie" might have been one of the early members of the Kit Cat who rejoiced in Christopher Katt's "mutton pies." Swift describes him to Stella as "the man who knows everything that everybody knows, and where a knot of rabble are going on a holiday, and where they were last." He wrote a paper in the Tatler on the use of wine, in which Addison is supposed to be pointed at. "I have the good fortune to be intimate with a gentleman who has an inexhaustible source of wit, to entertain the curious, the grave, the humorous, and the frolic. He can transform himself into different shapes, and adapt himself to every company; yet, in a coffee-house, or in the ordinary

course of affairs, appears rather dull than sprightly. You can seldom get him to the tavern; but, when once he is arrived to his pint, and begins to look about, and like his company, you admire a thousand things in him which before lay buried. Then you discover the brightness of his mind, and the strength of his judgment, accompanied with the most graceful mirth."

It is scarcely necessary that we should notice Addison or Steele as members of the Kit-Cat Club, except as they hover round the shadow of Jacob Tonson. The bookseller, it would appear from Pope's representations, had no affection for the famous essayist; "Old Jacob Tonson did not like Mr. Addison. He had a quarrel with him; and, after his quitting the secretaryship, used frequently to say of him; 'One day or other you'll see that man a bishop! I'm sure he looks that way; and indeed, I ever thought him a priest in his heart." In Spence's Anecdotes, Tonson is made to say, "Addison was so eager to be the first name, that he and his friend Sir Richard Steele used to run down even Dryden's character as far as they could. Pope and Congreve used to support it." Tonson, indeed, appears to have been chivalrously faithful to his first great friend. There is a curious letter addressed to him by Dennis the critic, in 1715, which thus begins: "When I had the good fortune to meet you in the city, it was with concern that I heard from you of the attempt to lessen the reputation of Mr. Dryden; and 'tis with indignation that I have since learned that that attempt has chiefly been carried on by small poets." Pope is here the jealous rival who is pointed at. One more anecdote which Spence gives, on the authority of Dr. Leigh: "Mr. Addison was not a good-natured man, and very jealous of rivals. Being one evening in company with Philips, and the poems of Blenheim and the Campaign being talked of, he made it his whole business to run down blank verse. Philips never spoke till between eleven and twelve o'clock; nor even then could he do it in his own defence. It was at Jacob Tonson's; and a gentleman in company ended the dispute by asking Jacob what poem he ever got the most by. Jacob immediately named Milton's 'Paradise Lost.'"

The statesmen of the Kit-Cat Club-"the patriots that saved Britain "—thus lived in social union with the Whig writers who were devoted to the charge of the poetry that opened their road to preferment. This band of orators and wits was naturally hateful to the Tory authors that Harley and Bolingbroke were nursing into the bitter satirists of the weekly sheets. Jacob Tonson naturally came in for a due share of invective. In a poem entitled Factions Displayed,' he is ironically introduced as "the touch-stone of all modern wit;" and he is made to vilify the great ones of Barn Elms:

"I am the founder of your loved Kit-Cat, A club that gave direction to the State; "Twas there we first instructed all our youth To talk profane and laugh at sacred truth; We taught them how to boast and rhyme and bite, To sleep away the day and drink away the night."