24 LITERARY ASSOCIATION. 
In one respect it presents a marked contrast to the club, 
for while the club is essentially masculine, the Salon is 
wholly under female influence and guidance. 
One of the earliest was held about the middle of the 
seventeenth century by Mme. da Rambouillet, a Floren- 
tine by birth, who brought with her to Paris a love 
of poetry, and there gathered around her all the lovers of 
literature. During Napoleon’s reign the Salon flourished 
and Mmes. Le Brun, de Stael, Recamier, de Scudery, 
are names famous in the development of this institu- 
tion and influential in deciding the fortunes of the na- 
tion. The Salons of Paris were Napoleon’s chief oppo- 
nents. 
As we turn to England, we are impressed more than 
before with the antiquity of the habit of organization. 
Addison, in one of the Spectators, referring to man as a 
social animal, says, ‘‘ we take all occasions and pretences 
of forming ourselves into those little nocturnal assemblies 
which are commonly known by the name of clubs. When 
a set of men find themselves agree in any particular, 
though never so trivial, they establish themselves into a 
kind of fraternity.” 
A club is said to have existed in the time of Henry [V 
and that to it Chaucer probably belonged and there are 
also reports that Sir Walter Raleigh established, about 
1603, at the Mermaid tavern, the Mermaid Club, of which 
Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher were members, but 
these stories are now doubted. 
Karly in the seventeenth century, Ben Jonson was a lead- 
ing spirit in the Apollo Club which met at the Devils’ 
tavern, and Pepys speaks of going to the Coffee House 
_ where had been founded a club called ‘‘ Rota,’’ in 1659, 
as a debating society for the dissemination of republican 
opinions. 
Nearly all the early clubs and most of them until quite 
recent times met at the taverns. This, partly because 
