Estcourt was one of the best mimics of the day, and a keen satirist to boot; in fact he seems to have owed much of his success on the stage to his power of imitation, for while his own manner was inferior, he could at pleasure copy exactly that of any celebrated actor.  He would be a player.  At fifteen he ran away from home, and joining a strolling company, acted Roxana in woman’s clothes:  his friends pursued him, and, changing his dress for that of a girl of the time, he tried to escape them, but in vain.  The histrionic youth was captured, and bound apprentice in London town; the ‘seven long years’ of which did not cure him of the itch for acting.  But he was too good a wit for the stage, and amused himself, though not always his audience, by interspersing his part with his own remarks.  The great took him by the hand, and old Marlborough especially patronized him:  he wrote a burlesque of the Italian operas then beginning to be in vogue; and died in 1712-13.  Estcourt was not the only actor belonging to the Beef-steak, nor even the only one who had concealed his sex under emergency; Peg Woffington, who had made as good a boy as he had done a girl, was afterwards a member of this club.

In later years the beef-steak was cooked in a room at the top of Covent Garden Theatre, and counted many a celebrated wit among those who sat around its cheery dish.  Wilkes the blasphemer, Churchill, and Lord Sandwich, were all members of it at the same time.  Of the last, Walpole gives us information in 1763 at the time of Wilkes’s duel with Martin in Hyde Park.  He tells us that at the Beef-steak Club Lord Sandwich talked so profusely, ‘that he drove harlequins out of the company.’  To the honour of the club be it added, that his lordship was driven out after the harlequins, and finally expelled:  it is sincerely to be hoped that Wilkes was sent after his lordship.  This club is now represented by one held behind the Lyceum, with the thoroughly British motto, ’Beef and Liberty:’  the name was happily chosen and therefore imitated.  In the reign of George II. we meet with a ‘Rump-steak, or Liberty Club;’ and somehow steaks and liberty seem to be the two ideas most intimately associated in the Britannic mind.  Can any one explain it?

Other clubs there were under Anne,—­political, critical, and hilarious—­but the palm is undoubtedly carried off by the glorious Kit-kat.

It is not every eating-house that is immortalized by a Pope, though Tennyson has sung ‘The Cock’ with its ‘plump head-waiter,’ who, by the way, was mightily offended by the Laureate’s verses—­or pretended to be so—­and thought it ’a great liberty of Mr. ——­, Mr. ——­, what is his name? to put respectable private characters into his books.’  Pope, or some say Arbuthnot, explained the etymology of this club’s extraordinary title:—­

    ’Whence deathless Kit-kat took its name,
       Few critics can unriddle: 
     Some say from pastrycook it came,
       And some from Cat and Fiddle.