to visitors, but was stolen in 1829. The West Wycombe Caves in which the Friars met are now a tourist site known as the "Hell Fire Caves". In Anstruther, Scotland, a likeminded sex and drinking club called The Beggar's Benison was formed in the 1730s, which survived for a century and spawned additional branches in Glasgow and Edinburgh. Honorary membership was extended to the Prince of Wales in 1783. 39 years later, while the Prince (by now King George IV) was paying a royal visit to Scotland, he bequeathed the club a snuff box filled with his mistresses' pubic hair. Hellfire Clubs in contemporary life Phoenix Society In 1781, Dashwood's nephew Joseph Alderson (an undergraduate at Brasenose College, Oxford) founded the Phoenix Society (later known as the Phoenix Common Room), but it was only in 1786 that the small gathering of friends asserted themselves as a recognised institution. The Phoenix was established in honour of Sir Francis, who died in 1781, as a symbolic rising from the ashes of Dashwood's earlier institution. To this day, the dining society abides by many of its predecessor's tenets. Its motto 'when one is torn away another succeeds' is from the sixth book of Virgil's Aeneid and refers to the practice of establishing the continuity of the society through a process of constant renewal of its graduate and undergraduate members, but also refers to the alchemical kabbalistic process that a life snatched via sacrifice is a life given back via a spirit at the command of its master. The Phoenix Common Room's continuous history was reported in 1954 as a matter of note to the college. In popular culture Literature The Hellfire Club has appeared in numerous literary works: Robert Graves describes it as an "organic fraternity, alias the Society of Monks of Medmenham" in his historical novel Sergeant Lamb of the 9th. Jerome K. Jerome cites the Hellfire Club in his 1889 novel Three Men in a Boat. Ian Fleming in his 1955 novel Moonraker cites the "rare engravings of the Hell-Fire Club in which each figure is shown making a minute gesture of scatological or magical significance." Hunter S. Thompson in the 1988 collection of columns Generation of Swine. Peter Straub's 1996 novel The Hellfire Club centers around a BDSM-friendly sex and social club of the same name. In Diana Gabaldon's 1998 historical novella Lord John and the Hellfire Club. Lawrence Miles