The localities in which the trade of wit was plied were, then, the clubs, and the drawing-rooms of fashionable beauties.  The former were in Selwyn’s youth still limited in the number of their members, thirty constituting a large club; and as the subscribers were all known to one another, presented an admirable field for display of mental powers in conversation.  In fact, the early clubs were nothing more than dining-societies, precisely the same in theory as our breakfasting arrangements at Oxford, which were every whit as exclusive, though not balloted for.  The ballot, however, and the principle of a single black ball suffering to negative an election were not only, under such circumstances, excusable, but even necessary for the actual preservation of peace.  Of course, in a succession of dinner-parties, if any two members were at all opposed to one other, the awkwardness would be intolerable.  In the present day, two men may belong to the same club and scarcely meet even on the stairs, oftener than once or twice in a season.

Gradually, however, in the place of the ’feast of reason and flow of soul’ and wine, instead of the evenings spent in toasting, talking, emptying bottles and filling heads, as in the case of the old Kit-kat, men took to the monstrous amusement of examining fate, and on club-tables the dice rattled far more freely than the glasses, though these latter were not necessarily abandoned.  Then came the thirst for hazard that brought men early in the day to try their fortune, and thus made the club-room a lounge.  Selwyn was an habitual frequenter of Brookes.’

Brookes’ was, perhaps, the principal club of the day, though ’White’s Chocolate House’ was almost on a par with it.  But Selwyn did not confine his attention solely to this club.  It was the fashion to belong to as many of them as possible, and Wilberforce mentions no less than five to which he himself belonged:  Brookes’, Boodle’s, White’s, Miles and Evans’s in New Palace Yard, and Goosetree’s.  As their names imply, these were all, originally, mere coffee-houses, kept by men of the above names.  One or two rooms then sufficed for the requirements of a small party, and it was not till the members were greatly increased that the coffee-house rose majestically to the dignity of a bow-window, and was entirely and exclusively appropriated to the requirements of the club.

This was especially the case with White’s, of which so many of the wits and talkers of Selwyn’s day were members.  Who does not know that bow-window at the top of St. James’s Street, where there are sure, about three or four in the afternoon, to be at least three gentlemen, two old and one young, standing, to the exclusion of light within, talking and contemplating the oft-repeated movement outside.  White’s was established as early as 1698, and was thus one of the original coffee-houses.  It was then kept by a man named Arthur:  here Chesterfield gamed and talked, to be succeeded by Gilly Williams.