In the same year Swift framed the rules of the Brothers Club, which met every Thursday. "The end of our Club," he says, "is to advance conversation and friendship, and to reward learning without interest or recommendation. We take in none but men of wit, or men of interest; and if we go on as we began, no other Club in this town will be worth talking of."
The Journal about this time is very full of _Brothers_ Arran and Dupplin, Masham and Ormond, Bathurst and Harcourt, Orrery and Jack Hill, and other Tory magnates of the Club, or Society as Swift preferred to call it. We find him entertaining his "Brothers" at the Thatched House Tavern, in St. James's Street, at the cost of seven good guineas. He must have been an influential member; he writes: "We are now, in all, nine lords and ten commoners. The Duke of Beaufort had the confidence to propose his brother-in-law, the Earl of Danby, to be a member; but I opposed it so warmly, that it was waived. Danby is not above twenty, and we will have no more boys; and we want but two to make up our number. I staid till eight, and then we all went away soberly. The Duke of Ormond's treat last week cost £20, though it was only four dishes and four without a dessert; and I bespoke it in order to be cheap. Yet I could not prevail to change the house. Lord Treasurer is in a rage with us for being so extravagant; and the wine was not reckoned neither, for that is always brought in by him that is president."
Not long after this, Swift writes: "Our Society does not meet now as usual; for which I am blamed; but till Treasurer will agree to give us money and employments to bestow, I am averse to it, and he gives us nothing but promises. We now resolve to meet but once a fortnight, and have a committee every other week of six or seven, to consult about doing _some good_. I proposed another message to Lord Treasurer by three principal members, to give a hundred guineas to a certain person, and they are to urge it as well as they can."
One day, President Arbuthnot gives the Society a dinner, dressed in the Queen's kitchen: "we eat it in Ozinda's Coffee-house just by St. James's. We were never merrier or better company, and did not part till after eleven." In May, we hear how "fifteen of our Society dined together under a canopy in an arbour at Parson's Green last Thursday. I never saw anything so fine and romantic."