CHAP. viiL] THE CLUB AND ITS FIRST MEMBERS.
taken every Monday night at seven o'clock by a member in
rotation, all were expected to attend and sup together. In
about the ninth year of their existence, they changed their
day of meeting to Friday; and, some years later (Percy and
Malone say in 1775),* in place of their weekly supper they
resolved to dine together once a fortnight during the meeting
of parliament. Each member present was to bear his share of
the reckoning; and conversation, from which politics only were
excluded, was kept up always to a late hour.
So originated and was formed that famous club, which had
made itself a name in literary history long before it received,
at Grarriek's funeral, the name of the Literary Club by which
it is now known. Its meetings were noised abroad; the fame
of its conversations received eager addition from the difficulty
of obtaining admission to it; and it.came to be as generally
understood that literature had fixed her social head-quarters
here, as that politics reigned supreme at Wildman's or the
Cocoa-tree. Not without advantage, let me add, to the
dignity and worldly consideration of men-of-letters them-
selves. " I believe Mr. Fox will allow me say," wrote the
Bishop of St. Asaph to Mr. William Jones, when the society
was not more than fifteen years old, " that the honour of
" being elected into the Turk's-head Club is not inferior to
minance of whig polities in it, in consequence of the remarkable prominence in its
conversations of Burke, Fox, Lord Spencer, Sheridan, Dunning, and others (as
Johnson phrased it, "the Fox star and the Irish constellation," when he com-
plained of Reynolds being "too much under" those planets, Bos. vii. 96), had so
thoroughly disgusted Johnson, that he almost wholly withdrew himself in the
latter years of his life. "He then," says Mrs. Piozzi, "loudly proclaimed his
" carelessness who might be admitted, when it was become a mere dinner-club."
(Anecdotes, 122.) After 1783 it removed to Prince's, in Sackville-street; and on
his house being soon afterwards shut up, it removed to Baxter's, which subsequently
became Thomas's, in Dover-street. In January 1792 it removed to Parsloe's, in
St. James's-street; and on February 26, 1799, to the Thatched-house in the
same street. Such as it now is, "a mere miscellaneous collection of conspicuous
" men, without any determinate character," it meets still at the Thatched-house.
* Percy Memoir, 73, and Malone's Account of Reynolds, Ixxxiv.