The first step to this political position was to become a member of a certain club, where its leaders gambled away their money, and drank away their minds—­to wit, Brookes’.  Pretty boys, indeed, were these great Whig patriots when turned loose in these precincts.  The tables were for stakes of twenty or fifty guineas, but soon ran up to hundreds.  What did it matter to Charles James Fox, to the Man of the People, whether he lost five, seven, or ten thousand of a night, when the one-half came out of his father’s, the other out of Hebrew, pockets—­the sleek, thick-lipped owners of which thronged his Jerusalem chamber, as he called his back sitting-room, only too glad to ‘oblige’ him to any amount?  The rage for gaming at this pandemonium may be understood from a rule of the club, which it was found necessary to make to interdict it in the eating-room, but to which was added the truly British exception, which allowed two members of Parliament in those days, or two ‘gentlemen’ of any kind, to toss up for what they had ordered.

This charming resort of the dissipated was originally established in Pall Mall in 1764, and the manager was that same Almack who afterwards opened a lady’s club in the rooms now called Willis’s, in King Street, St. James’s; who also owned the famous Thatched House, and whom Gilly Williams described as having a ‘Scotch face, in a bag-wig,’ waiting on the ladies at supper.  In 1778 Brookes—­a wine-merchant and money-lender, whom Tickell, in his famous ’Epistle from the Hon. Charles Fox, partridge-shooting, to the Hon. John Townsend, cruising,’ describes in these lines;—­

  ’And know I’ve bought the best champagne from Brookes,
  From liberal Brookes, whose speculative skill
  Is hasty credit, and a distant bill: 
  Who, nurs’d in clubs, disdains a vulgar trade: 
  Exults to trust, and blushes to be paid—­’

built and opened the present club-house in St. James’s Street, and thither the members of Almack’s migrated.  Brookes’ speculative skill, however, did not make him a rich man, and the ‘gentlemen’ he dealt with were perhaps too gentlemanly to pay him.  He died poor in 1782.  Almack’s at first consisted of twenty-seven members, one of whom was C.J.  Fox.  Gibbon, the historian, was actually a member of it, and says that in spite of the rage for play, he found the society there rational and entertaining.  Sir Joshua Reynolds wanted to be a member of it too.  ’You see,’ says Topham Beauclerk thereupon, ’what noble ambition will make a man attempt.  That den is not yet opened,’ &c.

Brookes’, however, was far more celebrated, and besides Fox, Reynolds, and Gibbon, there were here to be found Horace Walpole, David Hume, Burke, Selwyn, and Garrick.  It would be curious to discover how much religion, how much morality, and how much vanity there were among the set.  The first two would require a microscope to examine, the last an ocean to contain it.  But let Tickell describe its inmates:—­