’From no trim beaux its name it boasts,
       Grey statesmen or green wits;
     But from the pell-mell pack of toasts
       Of old cats and young kits.’

Probably enough the title was hit on a hap-hazard, and retained because it was singular, but as it has given a poet a theme, and a painter a name for pictures of a peculiar size, its etymology has become important.  Some say that the pastry cook in Shire Lane, at whose house it was held, was named Christopher Katt.  Some one or other was certainly celebrated for the manufacture of that forgotten delicacy, a mutton-pie, which acquired the name of a Kit-kat.

    ‘A Kit-kat is a supper for a lord,’

says a comedy of 1700, and certes it afforded at this club evening nourishment for many a celebrated noble profligate of the day.  The supposed sign of the Cat and Fiddle (Kitt), gave another solution, but after all, Pope’s may be satisfactorily received.

The Kit-kat was, par excellence, the Whig Club of Queen Anne’s time:  it was established at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and was then composed of thirty-nine members, among whom were the Dukes of Marlborough, Devonshire, Grafton, Richmond, and Somerset.  In later days it numbered the greatest wits of the age, of whom anon.

This club was celebrated more than any for its toasts.

Now, if men must drink—­and sure the vine was given us for use, I do not say for abuse—­they had better make it an occasion of friendly intercourse; nothing can be more degraded than the solitary sanctimonious toping in which certain of our northern brethren are known to indulge.  They had better give to the quaffing of that rich gift, sent to be a medicine for the mind, to raise us above the perpetual contemplation of worldly ills, as much of romance and elegance as possible.  It is the opener of the heart, the awakener of nobler feelings of generosity and love, the banisher of all that is narrow, and sordid, and selfish; the herald of all that is exalted in man.  No wonder that the Greeks made a god of Bacchus, that the Hindu worshipped the mellow Soma, and that there has been scarce a poet who has not sung its praise.  There was some beauty in the feasts of the Greeks, when the goblet was really wreathed with flowers; and even the German student, dirty and drunken as he may be, removes half the stain from his orgies with the rich harmony of his songs, and the hearty good-fellowship of his toasts.  We drink still, perhaps we shall always drink till the end of time, but all the romance of the bowl is gone; the last trace of its beauty went with the frigid abandonment of the toast.

There was some excuse for wine when it brought out that now forgotten expression of good-will.  Many a feud was reconciled in the clinking of glasses; just as many another was begun when the cup was drained too deeply.  The first quarter of the last century saw the end of all the social glories of the wassail in this country, and though men drank as much fifty years later, all its poetry and romance had then disappeared.