en face of the government, to watch it, to take advantage of its blunders, is the part of an old general who will not be guided like a fish by the tail. Precipitate nothing, yield nothing. Aim not alone to destroy the government, but to render a class government impossible. No hesitation, no rash impulse, no egotism; but an earnest, serious, unyielding progress. Nothing for self, nothing even for fame, present or posthumous. All for the cause. Upon the elevation of your course for the moment will depend the estimation in which you will henceforth be held; and the position you may attain and retain will be second to none of the reformers who have gone before you.’ This was advice beyond the capacity of the receiver. It was to Allsop a sort of duty to the dead who had done something for mankind to testify at their burial the obligation due to them from the living. Not merely at the burial of greatness which he knew before the world discerned it, but at the grave of unregarded but honest heroism, his tall form was to be seen on the outskirts of the throng. He united in an unusual degree personal tenderness to intellectual thoroughness. Yet in these seemingly revolutionary fervours he was all the while a conservative, and only sought the establishment of right and justice. His merit—which is not common—was that he adopted no opinion which he had not himself well thought over, and he expressed none of the truth and relevance of which he was not well assured in his own mind. He died at Exmouth in 1880, and his body was removed to Woking, that his friend George Jacob Holyoake, to whom he left autobiographical papers, might speak at his grave, which could only be done on un-consecrated ground.
[Allsop's Letters, Conversations, and Recollections of S. T. Coleridge; Objections presented to Commissioners at the Old Bailey, 27 Nov. 1836; Budget of Two Taxes only, 1848; California and its Gold Mines, 1852–3; Letters and Writings of Charles Lamb, edited by Percy Fitzgerald, M.A., F.S.A., vol. iii. (1876); Talfourd's Memorials of Charles Lamb; Holyoake's Life of Joseph Rayner Stephens, 1880.]
ALMACK, WILLIAM (d. 1781), was the founder of the famous assembly-rooms that for nearly a century bore his name, and of many well-known London clubs. His origin is somewhat uncertain. According to one account, which is accepted by his living representatives, he was descended from a Yorkshire family of quakers (Lower, Patronymica Britannica); according to another, which was accepted by many of his contemporaries, he ‘was a sturdy Celt from Galloway or Atholl, called MacCaul,’ who ‘by a slight transposition of his name, gave birth to Almack's’ (Kerr, Memoirs of Smellie, 1811, i. 436–7). He apparently came to London at an early age as the valet of the Duke of Hamilton, and towards the middle of the eighteenth century became proprietor of the Thatched House Tavern in St. James's Street. Before 1763 he opened a gaming-club in Pall Mall, which was known as Almack's Club, and from that date till his death he was the leading caterer for the amusement of the fashionable world of London. Among the twenty-seven original members of Almack's Club were the Duke of Portland and Charles James Fox, and it was subsequently joined by Gibbon, William Pitt, and very many noblemen. It was noted for its high play, and Horace Walpole wrote of it in 1770: ‘The gaming of Almack's, which has taken the pas of White's, is worthy of the decline of our empire.’ The club passed subsequently into other hands, and still survives as ‘Brooks's.’ In 1764 Almack erected, from the designs of Milne, out of the profits acquired in his previous speculations, the large assembly-rooms in King Street, St. James's, by which he is chiefly known. They were opened on 20 Feb. 1765, before they were quite completed; and at Almack's inaugural reception, among the visitors, who were not very numerous, were the Duke of Cumberland and Horace Walpole. The weather was bitterly cold, and Horace Walpole writes that, to induce his patrons to attend on the opening day, ‘Almack advertised that the new assembly-room was built with hot bricks and boiling water.’ Gilly Williams, in a letter descriptive of the ceremony addressed to George Selwyn, says: ‘Almack's Scotch face in a bagwig waiting at supper would divert you, as would his lady in a sack, making tea and curtseying to the duchesses.’ The success of the new rooms was rapidly assured. Under the direction of the leaders of London society, weekly subscription-balls were held there for more than seventy-five years during twelve weeks of each London season. The distribution of tickets, which were sold at ten guineas each, was in the hands of a committee of lady-patronesses—‘a feminine oligarchy less in number but equal in power to the Venetian Council of Ten’ (Grantley Berkeley's Life and Recollections, i. 256–7). At the beginning of this century admission to Almack's was described as ‘the seventh heaven of the fashionable world,’ and its high reputation did not decline before 1840. Many other clubs—including the Dilettanti Society and a club of both sexes on the model of that of
z 2
