entertaining."[1]

[Footnote 1: "Memoirs of Dr. Burney," &c., by his daughter, Madame
D'Arblay. In three volumes, 1832. Vol. ii. p. 173-178.]

It was mainly owing to his domestication with the Thrales that he
began to frequent drawing-rooms at an age when the arm-chair at home
or at the club has an irresistible charm for most men of sedentary
pursuits. It must be admitted that the evening parties in which he
was seen, afforded a chance of something better than the "unidead
chatter of girls," with an undue fondness for which he reproached
Langton; for the _Blue Stocking_ clubs had just come into
fashion,--so called from a casual allusion to the blue stockings of
an _habitué_, Mr. Stillingfleet.[1] Their founders were Mrs. Vesey
and Mrs. Montagu; but according to Madame D'Arblay, "more bland and
more gleeful than that of either of them, was the personal celebrity
of Mrs. Thrale. Mrs. Vesey, indeed, gentle and diffident, dreamed not
of any competition, but Mrs. Montagu and Mrs. Thrale had long been
set up as rival candidates for colloquial eminence, and each of them
thought the other alone worthy to be her peer. Openly therefore when
they met, they combated for precedence of admiration, with placid
though high-strained intellectual exertion on the one side, and an
exuberant pleasantry or classical allusion or quotation on the other;
without the smallest malice in either."

[Footnote 1: The first of these was then (about 1768) in the meridian
of its lustre, but had been instituted many years previously at Bath,
It owed its name to an apology made by Mr. Stillingfleet in declining
to accept an invitation to a literary meeting at Mrs. Vesey's, from
not being, he said, in the habit of displaying a proper equipment for