FOOTNOTES:
[3] This non sequitur has already appeared in print.
CHAPTER VII.
CLUB LIFE AT THE “CHEESE”
The feast of reason and the flow of soul.—Pope.
One of the most interesting features of the “Cheese” is its club life. It is not the stately and withal solemn life of the modern West-end club, but it is the social and intensely human life of the club as Johnson, Burke, Reynolds, understood it. When the Doctor, Sir Joshua, and some others established “The Club” in 1764, the members were to meet once a month and take supper, passing their evening in witty discourses.
At the “Old Cheshire Cheese” the Johnsonian tradition is naturally strong; it pervades the whole place, and all the clubs which hold their regular or occasional meetings there endeavour, as much as our less heroic days will allow, to emulate the example of the giants of the days gone by.
The following is a complete list of the clubs actually in existence at the present time:—The Johnson Club, founded about 25 years; Sawdust Club, founded 1906; Ye Punchbowlers; the Mitre Club, founded November, 1903; “Ourselves,” founded 1897; St. Dunstan’s, founded 1790; Rump Steak Club; the Dickens Club.
The following further details regarding the Cheshire Cheese Clubs of the past as well as the present may be found not without interest. The place of honour is given to—
THE JOHNSON CLUB.
This club is composed of many men eminent in literature and art, or distinguished in other ways. The club, which is literary and social, and is restricted to thirty-one members, was founded about twenty-five years ago. The members bind themselves to sup together annually on or about December 13, the anniversary of the Doctor’s death, but various other meetings are held throughout the year. The constitution of the club is thus described by Dr. George Birkbeck Hill, the well-known editor of the latest and best edition of “Boswell.” “We are,” he says (in the Atlantic Monthly of January, 1896), “in strict accordance with the great Lexicographer’s definition, ‘an assembly of good fellows meeting under certain conditions’; the conditions being that we shall do honour to the immortal memory of Dr. Samuel Johnson by supping together four times a year, and by swallowing as much beefsteak pudding, punch, and tobacco smoke as the strength of each man’s constitution admits. A few of the weaker brethren—among whom unhappily I am included—whose bodily infirmity cannot respond to the cheerful Johnsonian cry, ‘Who’s for poonsh?’ do their best to play their part by occasionally reading essays on Johnsonian subjects, and by seasoning their talk with anecdotes and sayings of the great Doctor. We are tolerated by the jovial crew, for they see that we mean well, and are as ‘clubbable’ as nature allows. Our favourite haunt is the OLD CHESHIRE CHEESE, the only tavern in Fleet Street left unchanged by what Johnson called that ‘fury of innovation’ which, beginning with Tyburn and its gallows-tree, has gradually transformed London. The Mitre—‘where he loved to sit up late’; where he made Boswell’s head ache, not with the port wine, but with the sense he put into it; where, at their first supper, he called to him with warmth, ‘Give me your hand, I have taken a liking to you’; where, nearly a century later, Hawthorne, in memory of the two men, dined ‘in the low, sombre coffee-room’—the Mitre has been rebuilt.