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After passing some months in the United Provinces, he returned about the close of the year 1703 to England. He was there cordially received by his friends, and introduced by them into the Kitcat Club, a society in which were collected all the various talents and accomplishments which then gave lustre to the Whig party.
The meetings of the Kitcat Club were held here in a room specially built for the purpose by Jacob Tonson, the bookseller, who lived in a house formerly known as Queen Elizabeth's Dairy, and died there November 25, 1735. At present Ranelagh rivals Hurlingham as a social outdoor club, and the merits of the respective grounds are a matter of opinion.
And my aunt would like to see the new staircase, and to see a kitcat view of a robin redbreast sitting on her nest in a sawpit, discovered by Lovell, and you would both like to pick Emmeline's fine strawberries round the crowded oval table after dinner, and to see my mother look so much better in the midst of us. If these delights thy soul can move, Come live with us and be our love.
He told her, loftily, he must take a studio, and his sitters must come to him, and must no longer expect to be immortalized for one pound. It must be two pounds for a bust, and three pounds for a kitcat. "Nay, but, my dear," said Phoebe, "they will pay no more because you have a diamond." "Then they will have to go unpainted," said Mr. Falcon. This was intended for a threat.
The Countess, a Whig and a toast, was probably as gracious as her lord; for Addison long retained an agreeable recollection of the impression which she at this time made on him, and, in some lively lines written on the glasses of the Kitcat Club, described the envy which her cheeks, glowing with the genuine bloom of England, had excited among the painted beauties of Versailles.
Martin's church, to sleep on a bulk in June and amidst the ashes of a glass-house in December, to die in an hospital, and to be buried in a parish vault, was the fate of more than one writer who, if he had lived thirty years earlier, would have been admitted to the sittings of the Kitcat or the Scriblerus Club, would have sat in Parliament, and would have been intrusted with embassies to the High Allies; who, if he had lived in our time, would have found encouragement scarcely less munificent in Albemarle Street or in Paternoster Row.
Though attached to a party that lost power at the accession of Queen Anne, and waiting for new employment, Addison who had declined the Duke of Somerset's over-condescending offer of a hundred a year and all expenses as travelling tutor to his son, the Marquis of Hertford was able, while lodging poorly in the Haymarket, to associate in London with the men by whose friendship he hoped to rise, and was, with Steele, admitted into the select society of wits, and men of fashion who affected wit and took wits for their comrades, in the Kitcat Club.
Accordingly, every shout that was raised by the members of the Kitcat was echoed by the High Churchmen of the October; and the curtain at length fell amidst thunders of unanimous applause. The delight and admiration of the town were described by the Guardian in terms which we might attribute to partiality, were it not that the Examiner, the organ of the Ministry, held similar language.
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