III.

THE KING OF CLUBS.

THIS was a fanciful title given to a Club set on foot about the year 1801. Its founder was Bobus Smith (himself a Club), who gave it that whimsical designation. I am speaking of Robert Smith, the late Advocate-General of Calcutta, the friend and contemporary of Canning, at Eton, and his coadjutor in that promising specimen of school-boy talent-the Microcosm. The Club, at its first institution, consisted of a small knot of lawyers, whose clients were too few, or too civil to molest their after-dinner recreations; a few literary characters, and a small number of visitors, generally introduced by those who took the chief part in conversation, and seemingly selected for the faculty of being good listeners.

The King of Clubs sat on the Saturday of each month at the Crown and Anchor Tavern, in the Strand, which, at that time, was a nest of boxes, each containing its Club, and affording excellent cheer, though lately desecrated by indifferent dinners and very questionable wine. The Club was a grand talk. Every one seemed anxious to bring his contribution of good sense, or good humour, and diffused himself over books and authors, and the prevalent topics of the day.

Politics were, by a salutary proviso, quite excluded. Sometimes the conversation rose to the higher moods of philosophical discussion; and there were one or two who "found no end in wandering mazes lost," and made us yawn and betake ourselves to our rappee, whilst they discoursed highly of mind and matter, of first and secondary causation, of the systems of Empedocles, Lucretius, Cicero, and Galen.

I esteemed myself singularly fortunate in being one of its earliest members ;-for it was amongst the most restless aspirations of my youth, to enjoy the converse of older and wiser men. Of

those who frequented the Club, Bobus* in every respect, but that of wine, (for he was but a frigid worshipper of Bacchus) was the most convivial. He has left in my mind the most vivid recollections of his infinite pleasantry; he had great humour, and a species of wit, that revelled amidst the strangest and most grotesque combinations. His manner was at that time somewhat of the bow-wow kind; and when he pounced upon a disputatious and dull blockhead, he made sad work of him. But he was the merriest man there, (for upon the whole it was somewhat of a grave concern) and that will sufficiently account for his having lived so long in my recollection.

Then there was Richard Sharpe, a partner of Boddington's West India House, and subsequently a Member of Parliament during Addington's and Percival's administrations. By constitutional temperament, and the peculiar quality of his understanding, he was a thinker, and a He was occasionally controversial; but he had an overflowing fund both of useful

reasoner.

* This was a nick-name given him at Eton, and it will adhere to him even after death.

and agreeable knowledge, and an unfailing stream of delightful illustration. Sharpe, when he first went into Parliament, excited the warmest expectations of those, who, by an absurdity that is very common, predict, from any unusual vigour of social talent, the highest degrees of senatorial success, all the triumphs of the House of Commons from a neat and felicitous style of discussion at table. When there, he was quite transplanted, adding another to the long list which daily experience registers of the temerity of that vulgar inference. He spoke; he was listened to; but neither extensive information, nor solid erudition, nor sparkling vivacity, nor the condensed weight of all the ratiocination, with which the mind of man can be overcharged, so as to bear down all before him in the private circle, and triumph at will in all its petty warfare, can gain an audience amidst the storm and whirlwind of those great controversies, upon which the hopes and fears of a nation are suspended.

The House of Commons !-it is a sea strewed with the mightiest wrecks. It is an arena in which the proudest strength has faltered, and the

firmest confidence grown pale. Bobus himself spoke once, and once only in that assembly, and failed. He retired a maimed and crippled gladiator from a conflict, in which minds immeasurably inferior have been victorious. Such are the laws by which genius itself is rebuked; such the despotism beneath which the highest and palmiest faculties are compelled to veil their head, however honoured, however flattered, or wreathed and garlanded by academic renown. How is this? A volume might be written, and the problem still remain unsolved.

Is it that there is sometimes a certain amount of reputation already secured by the general suffrage, and backed and sustained by an inward conscience, that it has been justly earned; which, running before a man, and telling his story before he enters that house, and telling it too with the fervid exaggeration of private friendship -becomes a pressure upon sensitive minds, a drag-chain that impedes and deadens them in their career? Pre-existing fame operates as a vehement incentive not to sink beneath it, and, as in our corporeal economy, all our powerful