d to
express my sensations. They amounted to ecstasy. Never again throughout
my whole life did I pass so happy an evening."

It used to be said that it took so much wine to raise Addison to his
best mood, that Steele generally got drunk before that golden hour
arrived. Steele, that warm-hearted careless fellow in whom Thackeray so
delighted, certainly shone at the Kit-Kat; and an anecdote still extant
shows him to us with all his amiable weaknesses. On the night of that
great Whig festival--the celebration of King William's anniversary--Steele
and Addison brought Dr. Hoadley, the Bishop of Bangor, with them, and
solemnly drank "the immortal memory." Presently John Sly, an eccentric
hatter and enthusiastic politician, crawled into the room on his knees,
in the old Cavalier fashion, and drank the Orange toast in a tankard of
foaming October. No one laughed at the tipsy hatter; but Steele, kindly
even when in liquor, kept whispering to the rather shocked prelate,
"Do laugh; it is humanity to laugh." The bishop soon put on his hat and
withdrew, and Steele by and by subsided under the table. Picked up and
crammed into a sedan-chair, he insisted, late as it was, in going to
the Bishop of Bangor's to apologise. Eventually he was coaxed home
and got upstairs, but then, in a gush of politeness, he insisted on
seeing the chairmen out; after which he retired with self-complacency
to bed. The next morning, in spite of headache the most racking,
Steele sent the tolerant bishop the following exquisite couplet,
which covered a multitude of such sins:--

"Virtue with so much ease on Bangor sits,
All faults he pardons, though he none commits."

One night when amiable Garth lingered over the Kit-Kat wine, though
patients were pining for him, Steele reproved the epicurean doctor.
"Nay, nay, Dick," said Garth, pulling out a list of fifteen, "it's no
great matter after all, for nine of them have such bad constitutions
that not all the physicians in the world could save them; and the other
six have such good constitutions that all the physicians in the world
could not kill them."

Three o'clock in the morning seems to have been no uncommon hour for the
Kit-Kat to break up, and a Tory lampooner says that at this club the
youth of Anne's reign learned

"To sleep away the days and drink away the nights."

The club latterly held its meetings at Tonson's villa at Barn Elms
(previously the residence of Cowley), or at the "Upper