CHAP. L] REVIEWING FOE ME. AND MES, GEIFFITHS,
the same hand (wherein Ms quick suspicious glance detected 1757.
no Lady Randolphs), would have nothing to do with the Jit. 29.
character of Douglas. "What would come with danger from
the full strength of Mrs. Gibber, he knew might be safely
left to the enfeebled powers of Mrs. Woffington; whose
Lady Randolph would leave him no one to fear but Barry
at the rival house. But despairing also of Covent Garden
when refused by Drury Lane, and crying plague on
both their houses, to the north had good parson Home
returned, and not till eight months were gone, sent back
his play endorsed by the Scottish capital. There it had
been acted; and from the beginning of the world, from the
beginning of Edinburgh, the like of that play had not been
known. The Poker Club* made their ecstacies felt from
Hunter Square to Grub Street and St. James's, for no rise
in the price of claret had yet imperilled the life of that
excellent society. Without stint or measure to their warmth
the cooling beverage flowed; and bottle after bottle (at
eighteenpence a piece f) disappeared in honour of the
Scottish Shakspeare, whom the most illustrious of the
Pokers at once pronounced better than the English, because
free from " unhappy barbarism;"—yes, because refined from
the unhappy barbarism of our southern Shakspeare, and
purged of the licentiousness of our poor London-starved
Otway. It was veritably David Hume's opinion, and still
* The Poker Chib was not so named till 1762, But the men spoken of in the
text -were precisely that select section of Edinburgh society, already existing as a
club, •which, on Scotland being refused a militia, called itself the Poker, " to
" stir up the fire of the nation." See an account of it in Scott's notice of Home
in his Prose Works (ed, 1835), six. 283, and in Burton's Life of Hume, ii. 456.
•f Let me borrow here that exquisite burst of humour with which Johnson met
Boswell's grave assurances that Scotch claret could really make a man drunk.
" I assure you, sir, there was a great deal of drunkenness." "No, sir; there
'' were people who died of dropsies, which they contracted in ti-ying to get
" drunk." Life, iv. 273.