objects--literary, political, or
convivial--the one leading peculiarity was the powerful influence they
exercised on the condition of their times. A certain club there was with
a simple unassuming name,--differing, by the way, only in three letters
from that which would have commemorated the virtues of Bishop Jolly. The
club in question, though nothing in the eye of the country but an easy
knot of gentlemen who assembled for their amusement, cast defiance at a
sovereign prince, and shook the throne and institutions of the greatest
of modern states. But if we want to see the club culminating to its
highest pitch of power, we must go across the water and saturate
ourselves with the horrors of the Jacobin clubs, the Breton, and the
Feuillans. The scenes we will there find stand forth in eternal protest
against Johnson's genial definition in his Dictionary, where he calls a
club "an assembly of good fellows, meeting under certain conditions."

The Structure of the Book Clubs.

There has been an addition, by no means contemptible, to the influence
exercised by these institutions on the course of events, in the Book
Clubs, or Printing Clubs as they are otherwise termed, of the present
day. They have within a few years added a department to literature. The
collector who has been a member of several may count their fruit by the
thousand, all ranging in symmetrical and portly volumes. Without
interfering either with the author who seeks in his copyrights the
reward of his genius and labour, or with the publisher who calculates on
a return for his capital, skill, and industry, the book clubs have
ministered to literary wants, which these legitimate sources of supply
have been unable to meet.

I hope no one is capable of reading so far through this book who is so
grossly ignorant as not to know that the Book Clubs are a set of
associations for the purpose of printing and distributing among their
members certain books, calculated to gratify the peculiar taste which
has brought them together and united them into a club. An opportunity
may perhaps be presently taken for indulging in some characteristic
notices of the several clubs, their members, and their acts and
monuments: in the mean time let me say a word on the utilitarian
efficiency of this arrangement--on the blank in the order of terrestrial
things which the Book Club was required to fill, and the manner in which
it has accomplished its function.

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