This ambitious title was given to a Club set on foot about the year 1801. Its founder was Bobus Smith, the brother of the great Sydney Smith. The Club at first consisted of a small knot of lawyers, a few literary characters, and visitors generally introduced by those who took the chief part in the conversation, and seemingly selected for the faculty of being good listeners.
The King of Clubs sat on Saturday of each month, at the Crown and Anchor Tavern, in the Strand, which, at that time, was a nest of boxes, each containing its Club, and affording excellent cheer, though latterly desecrated by indifferent dinners and very questionable wine. The Club was a grand talk, the prevalent topics being books and authors; politics quite excluded. Bobus Smith was a convivial member in every respect but that of wine; he was but a frigid worshipper of Bacchus, but he had great humour and a species of wit, that revelled amidst the strangest and most grotesque combinations. His manner was somewhat of the bow-wow kind; and when he pounced upon a disputatious and dull blockhead, he made sad work of him.
Then there was Richard Sharp, a partner of Boddington's West India house, who subsequently sat in Parliament for Port Arlington, in Ireland. He was a thinker and a reasoner, and occasionally controversial, but overflowed with useful and agreeable knowledge, and an unfailing stream of delightful information. He was celebrated for his conversational talents, and hence called "Conversation Sharp;" and he often had for his guest Sir James Mackintosh, with whom he lived in habits of intimacy. Mr. Sharp published a volume of _Letters and Essays in Prose and Verse_, of which a third edition appeared in 1834. Sharp was confessedly the first of the King of Clubs. He indulged but rarely in pleasantry; but when anything of the kind escaped him, it was sure to tell. One evening, at the Club, there was a talk about Tweddel, then a student in the Temple, who had greatly distinguished himself at Cambridge, and was the Senior Wrangler and medallist of his year. Tweddel was not a little intoxicated with his University triumphs; which led Sharp to remark, "Poor fellow! he will soon find that his Cambridge medal will not pass as current coin in London." Other frequent attendants were Scarlett (afterwards Lord Abinger); Rogers, the poet; honest John Allen, brother of the bluest of the blues, Lady Mackintosh; M. Dumont, the French emigrant, who would sometimes recite his friend the Abbé de Lisle's verses, with interminable perseverance, in spite of yawns and other symptoms of dislike, which his own politeness (for he was a highly-bred man) forbade him to interpret into the absence of it in others.