We have just narrated the establishment of this Club—how it was originally a gaming club, and was formed at first by Almack. It was subsequently taken by Brookes, a wine-merchant and money-lender, according to Selwyn; and who is described by Tickell, in a copy of verses addressed to Sheridan, when Charles James Fox was to give a supper at his own lodgings, then near the Club:—
"Derby shall send, if not his plate, his cooks,
And know, I've brought the best champagne from Brookes,
From liberal Brookes, whose speculative skill
Is hasty credit, and a distant bill;
Who, nursed in clubs, disdains a vulgar trade,
Exults to trust, and blushes to be paid."
From Pall Mall Brookes's Club removed to No. 60, on the west side of St. James's-street, where a handsome house was built at Brookes's expense, from the designs of Henry Holland, the architect; it was opened in October, 1778. The concern did not prosper; for James Hare writes to George Selwyn, May 18, 1779, "we are all beggars at Brookes's, and he threatens to leave the house, as it yields him no profit." Mr. Cunningham tells us that Brookes retired from the Club soon after it was built, and died poor about the year 1782.
Lord Crewe, one of the founders of the Club in Pall Mall, died in 1829, after sixty-five years' membership of Brookes's. Among its celebrities were Burke and Sir Joshua Reynolds, Garrick and Hume, Horace Walpole, Gibbon, and Sheridan and Wilberforce. Lord March, afterwards Duke of Queensberry, was one of its notorieties—"the old Q., whom many now living can remember, with his fixed eye and cadaverous face, watching the flow of the human tide past his bow-window in Pall Mall."—National Review, 1857. [This is hardly correct as to locality, since the Club left Pall Mall in 1778, and a reminiscent must be more than 80 years of age.] Among Selwyn's correspondents are Gilly Williams, Hare, Fitzpatrick, the Townshends, Burgoyne, Storer, and Lord Carlisle. R. Tickell, in "Lines from the Hon. Charles Fox to the Hon. John Townshend cruising," thus describes the welcome that awaits Townshend, and the gay life of the Club:—
"Soon as to Brookes's thence thy footsteps bend,