evening, the 4th, till five in the afternoon of
"Wednesday, the 5th. An hour before, he had
recovered twelve thousand pounds that he had
lost, and by dinner, which was at five o'clock,
he had ended, losing eleven thousand pounds.
On the Thursday he spoke in the above debate;
went to dinner at past eleven at night; from
thence to White's, where he drank till seven
the next morning; thence to Almack's, where
he won six thousand pounds; and, between
three and four in the afternoon, he set out for
Newmarket. His brother Stephen lost eleven
thousand pounds two nights after, and Charles
ten thousand pounds more on the 13th; so that,
in three nights, the three brothers, the eldest not
twenty-five, lost thirty-two thousand pounds."
Captain Gronow relates that, many years ago,
Lord Robert Spencer and General Fitzpatrick
were allowed to keep a faro-bank at Brookes's,
and that the former bagged, as his share of the
proceeds, one hundred thousand pounds; after
which he never again gambled. George Harley
Drummond, the banker, only played once in his
life, when he lost twenty thousand pounds to
Brummel, and was obliged to retire from the
banking-house. In the first half of the eighteenth
century, ladies of title kept gambling-houses. An
entry in the journals of the House of Lords,
dated the 29th of April, 1745, shows that Ladies
Mordington and Cassillis claimed privilege of
peerage in resisting certain peace-officers while
doing their duty "in suppressing the public
gaming-houses kept by the said ladies;" but the
claim was not allowed.

Betting was formerly indulged in at the clubs
with as much frantic zest as gambling: anything
served as an excuse, and sometimes the
occasions of the bets were so shocking that men of
the least decency would have shrunk from
associating them with any form of pleasure. A man
dropped down at the door of White's, and was
carried into the house: immediately the betting
harpies were staking large sums on the question
whether he was dead or not; and when it was
proposed to bleed him, those who had taken
odds that life was extinct, protested against such
a course, on the ground that it would affect the
fairness of the bet. Bad as this was, there was
a worse case, for which Walpole is again the
authority. If true—though one would fain
believe it an invention—it is sufficient to leave a
stain of murder on the very name of White's.
A youth betted fifteen hundred pounds that a
man could live twelve hours under water. He
accordingly hired some poor wretch, probably in
as desperate a plight as the assassins in
Macbeth, and sank him in a ship. Both ship and man
disappeared, and were never heard of more.
Walpole adds that these miscreants actually
proposed to make the attempt a second time. It is
a singular fact, that the Lord Mountford whose
suicide we have just related, betted Sir John
Bland that Beau Nash would outlive Colley
Cibber, and that both the persons betted on
survived the bettors. Bland, as well as Mountford,
died by his own act. White's used sometimes
to be honoured by the company of highwaymen
—Hogarth shows us one in the gambling-scene
of the Rake's Progress; but the worst of them
could not have been greater scoundrels than
some of these betting and gambling gentlemen.

One of the most famous convivial associations
of the last century and of this, is the Beef Steak
Society. We read of a Steak Club in the
Spectator. Steele, in No. 338 (April 21st, 1712), speaks
in terms of the greatest affection of Dick
Eastcourt, the providore of the club; and in No. 468,
bearing date August 27th, 1712, records his
death in a very touching manner. This club,
however, was not the same as the famous society
established a few years afterwards, and still
surviving, though the latter may, perhaps, have been
in some measure suggested by the former. The
"Society" (for the members disdain to be
considered a club) originated, as is well known, in
Rich, the manager of Covent Garden Theatre,
cooking and eating his beefsteak in the presence
of a distinguished visitor. The peer (Lord
Peterborough) was so charmed with the odour
of the simple and masculine fare that he begged
to be allowed to join; a further supply of steak
was sent for, and a few bottles of wine from
a neighbouring tavern gave a zest to the feast.
On going away at rather a late hour, the old earl
proposed to renew the meeting. On the
following Saturday, Peterborough arrived with
three or four friends, " men of wit and pleasure
about town;" and so jovial was the meeting that
it was proposed to form a Saturday club, to
assemble in Rich's room, and the fare to be
restricted to beef-steaks, port wine, and punch.
The " Steaks " soon became fashionable, and the
greatest lords, as well as the most intellectual
men, were ambitious of belonging to such an
illustrious association. The meetings were at
first held in a room over Covent Garden Theatre;
but when the house was burnt down in
1808, the members assembled for a time at the
Bedford, and then in apartments over the
English Opera House, now the Lyceum Theatre.
Here, again, they were burnt out; but, strange
to say, the original gridiron of the society
(according to some, Rich's own gridiron) was saved
from both fires, and now occupies the centre of
the ceiling in the dining-room of the Lyceum—
a dining-room, according to Mr. Peter Cunningham,
beautifully fitted up with old English oak,
"ornamented with gridirons as thick as Henry
the Seventh's Chapel with the portcullis of the
founder." Churchill and Wilkes, in the last
century, were members of the Steak Society;
but the former made himself so disagreeable,
that, becoming unpopular, he resigned to avoid
expulsion, and the latter also fell into disgrace
in re the Essay on Woman. George the Fourth
was one of the Steaks when Prince of Wales,
having been elected in 1785; and various dukes,
royal and not royal, have felt proud of presiding
in the chair. Very naturally, considering its
origin, " the Sublime Society," as it is sometimes