Dr. Hoadley, Bishop of Bangor, accompanied Steele and Addison to one of the Whig celebrations by the Club of King William's anniversary; when Steele had the double duty of celebrating the day and drinking his friend Addison up to conversation pitch, he being hardly warmed by that time. Steele was not fit for it. So, John Sly, the hatter of facetious memory, being in the house, took it into his head to come into the company on his knees, with a tankard of ale in his hand, to drink off to the immortal memory, and to return in the same manner. Steele, sitting next Bishop Hoadley, whispered him, "Do laugh: it is humanity to laugh." By-and-by, Steele being too much in the same condition as the hatter, was put into a chair, and sent home. Nothing would satisfy him but being carried to the Bishop of Bangor's, late as it was. However, the chairmen carried him home, and got him upstairs, when his great complaisance would wait on them downstairs, which he did, and then was got quietly to bed. Next morning Steele sent the indulgent bishop this couplet:
"Virtue with so much ease on Bangor sits,
All faults he pardons, though he none commits."
Mr. Knight successfully defends Tonson from Ward's satire, and nobly stands forth for the bookseller who identified himself with Milton, by first making Paradise Lost popular, and being the first bookseller who threw open Shakespeare to a reading public. "The statesmen of the Kit-Kat Club," he adds, "lived in social union with the Whig writers who were devoted to the charge of the poetry that opened their road to preferment; the band of orators and wits were 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 Touchstone of all modern wit;" and he is made to vilify the great ones of Barn Elms:
"'I am the founder of your loved Kit-Kat,
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.'"