Doctor Samuel Johnson, the lexicographer,  and Joshua Reynolds, the portraitist, are the accredited founders of the famous Literary Club, or just "The Club", that met to discuss, debate, perform, and converse upon all matters intellectual and aesthetic. It was a very exclusive club indeed, and if you didn't attend a regular meeting a member had to pay a forfeit fee to the secretary and bursar. The details of the club's formation are obscure , but preeminence is given to Johnson & Reynolds . This however is a fiction created by the prejudices, literary, cultural, and sectarian,  of the past two hundred and fifty years. A cursory view of the clubs formation names its original members 9 nine members as being Johnson, Reynolds, Edmund Burke, Christopher Nugent, Oliver Goldsmith,Topham Beauclerk, Bennet Langton, John Hawkins,& Anthony Charmier. Whilst the concept of intellectual soirees, and assemblies of the intelligentsia are part and parcel of the history of civilization since well before Plato's "academy" , the original inspiration for such a similar gathering of aesthetes and scholars was devised by Christopher Nugent the famous doctor from Bath, and his son-in-law Edmund Burke ( and his son Richard Burke). These three were all influenced by their regular invitations to attend the castle home of the 'gentleman-piper' and patron of the bardic arts, Garrett Nagle. Who unsurprisingly, along with Edmund Burke, are the co-ward/co-stepfathers of Admiral Sir Edmund Nagle, Groom of the Bedchamber for George IV. It is no coincidence then that apart from his own lexicographic masterpiece "The English Dictionary" Johnson , as he is portrayed in Curtis & Elton's satire, lists Edmund's (under his nom de plume) intellectual and social discourse , the memoirs of a butler, as his second choice in the stratosphere of literature. Harvard University's library has letters with Johnson's signature addressed to the aforementioned Garrett Nagle, so there is evidence the two men corresponded. And , in lieu of Garrett esq. leaving his castle in Cork to attend The Club, he has as his lieutenants his three very close kinsmen Nugent and the two Burkes.