rbuthnot, the chosen friend of Pope and Swift, the
question was mooted even in his time, as if the very founders of the
club had forgotten. Some think that the club really began with a weekly
dinner given by Jacob Tonson, the great bookseller of Gray's Inn Lane,
to his chief authors and patrons. This Tonson, one of the patriarchs of
English booksellers, who published Dryden's "Virgil," purchased a share
of Milton's works, and first made Shakespeare's works cheap enough to be
accessible to the many, was secretary to the club from the commencement.
An average of thirty-nine poets, wits, noblemen, and gentlemen formed
the staple of the association. The noblemen were perhaps rather too
numerous for that republican equality that should prevail in the best
intellectual society; yet above all the dukes shine out Steele and
Addison, the two great luminaries of the club. Among the Kit-Kat dukes
was the great Marlborough; among the earls the poetic Dorset, the patron
of Dryden and Prior; among the lords the wise Halifax; among the
baronets bluff Sir Robert Walpole. Of the poets and wits there were
Congreve, the most courtly of dramatists; Garth, the poetical
physician--"well-natured Garth," as Pope somewhat awkwardly calls him;
and Vanbrugh, the writer of admirable comedies. Dryden could hardly have
seriously belonged to a Whig club; Pope was inadmissible as a Catholic,
and Prior as a renegade. Latterly objectionable men pushed in, worst of
all, Lord Mohun, a disreputable debauchee and duellist, afterwards run
through by the Duke of Hamilton in Hyde Park, the duke himself perishing
in the encounter. When Mohun, in a drunken pet, broke a gilded emblem
off a club chair, respectable old Tonson predicted the downfall of the
society, and said with a sigh, "The man who would do that would cut a
man's throat." Sir Godfrey Kneller, the great Court painter of the
reigns of William and Anne, was a member; and he painted for his friend
Tonson the portraits of forty-two gentlemen of the Kit-Kat, including
Dryden, who died a year after it started. The forty-two portraits,
painted three-quarter size (hence called Kit-Kat), to suit the walls of
Tonson's villa at Barn Elms, still exist, and are treasured by Mr. R.W.
Baker, a representative of the Tonson family, at Hertingfordbury, in
Hertfordshire. Among the lesser men of this distinguished club we must
include Pope's friends, the "knowing Walsh" and "Granville the polite."

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