Addison's hope was to increase their number. Swift found the tone of the paper too feminine for his taste; 'I will not meddle with the Spectator,' he wrote to Esther Johnson, 'let him fair sex it to the world's end;' but Swift was not a representative reader, and the popularity of the paper was certainly not confined to the ladies. 'I am glad to find,' said Hughes in No. 525, 'that my discourses on marriage have been well received. A friend of mine gives me to understand, from Doctors' Commons, that more licences have been taken out there of late than usual. I am likewise informed of several pretty fellows who have resolved to commence heads of families by the first favourable opportunity. One of them writes me word that he is ready to enter into the bonds of matrimony, provided I will give it him under my hand (as I now do) that a man may show his face in good company after he is married, and that he need not be ashamed to treat a woman with kindness who puts herself into his power for life.' Women prefer reason and sense, says one of Steele's imaginary correspondents, but they will not give up the conversation of a woman's man' until men of sense think fit to give them their company. We are made for the cements of society, and come into the world to create relations amongst mankind, and solitude is an unnatural being to us.'

A fine gentleman,' as commonly understood, had often nothing to be proud of except his clothes: "When a gentleman speaks coarsely, he has dressed 1 No. 158.

1

2

3

himself clean to no purpose; the clothing of our minds certainly ought to be regarded before that of our bodies.' The true art of female education is, 'to make the mind and body improve together; and, if possible, to make gesture follow thought, and not let thought be employed upon gesture.' Steele did not forget to denounce flogging in schools: 'A great or good mind must necessarily be the worse for such indignities; and it is a sad change to lose of its virtue for the improvement of its knowledge.' 3 'I shall be ambitious to have it said of me,' wrote Addison, that I have brought philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at the tea-tables and in coffee-houses.' That philosophy is best shown in the humorous papers in which he ridiculed the foibles of the time. If I have any other merit in me,' he says, 'besides endeavouring to advance truth and virtue, it is that I have new-pointed all the batteries of ridicule. They have been generally planted against persons who have appeared serious rather than absurd; or at best, have aimed rather at what is unfashionable than what is vicious. For my own part I have endeavoured to make nothing ridiculous that is not in some measure criminal. have set up the immoral man as the object of derision. In short, if I have not formed a new weapon against vice and irreligion, I have at least shown how that weapon may be put to a right use, which has so often fought the battles of impiety and pro

1 No. 75. 4 No. 10.

2 No. 66. No. 445.

3 No. 157.

I

faneness.' Pains were taken that nothing could be interpreted as aimed at private persons; and it was to the credit of the readers of the Spectator that the demand for the paper increased month by month in spite of the absence of scandal or party strokes.1 The Saturday papers were usually of a serious cast, suitable as a preparation for Sunday; it was this series of Saturday essays, some of which contained excellent hymns by Addison, that led to his being called 'a parson in a tye-wig.' Addison divided his readers into the mercurial and the saturnine, and his aim was to find entertainment for both classes, and also to cause the sprightly reader to find himself sometimes engaged unawares in serious thought; and the thoughtful man to be insensibly betrayed into mirth. I must confess, were I left to myself, I should rather aim at instructing than diverting; but if we will be useful to the world, we must take it as we find it.' Yet Addison's disposition was essentially cheerful, and he often wrote against the Puritan view that mirth and pleasantry are the marks of a carnal mind. Those who represent religion as an unsociable state, without joy and gladness, are its greatest enemies.3

In any comparison of the contributions of Addison and Steele to the periodicals which they brought out, it must be remembered that, especially in the case of the Tatler, it was Steele who was responsible for the regular issue of the paper. It was he who had to find matter if other writers failed; and the inevitable result was that much of his work was 2 No. 179. 3 No. 494.

1 No. 262.

hastily written, the result of the passing impression of the moment. Addison, on the other hand, prepared his contributions at his leisure, with opportunities to study the style and to make use of the results of his reading and travel, or, in some cases, of manuscripts that he had probably prepared long before for other purposes. Sometimes, however, this elaboration and perfection of workmanship is less attractive than the spontaneity of Steele's contributions, which came straight from his heart.

The great work of Addison and Steele was to form public opinion on matters respecting which it can hardly be said to have existed before, and to cause their readers, at a critical time in our history, to consider moral and social questions from a higher standpoint than had been their wont. The press,

so far as it can be said to have existed before the appearance of the Review, the Tatler, and the Spectator, had merely echoed the views of the uninformed crowd, or of the members of a clique, without attempting to instruct. The success of the Spectator was decided and immediate. Swift acknowledged that the papers were 'very pretty'; Defoe said: There is not a man in this nation that pays a greater veneration to the writings of the inimitable Spectator than the author of the Review; and that not only for his learning and wit, but especially for his applying that learning and wit to the true ends for which they are given, viz. the establishing virtue in, and the shaming vice out of the world.'1 Gay, in the tract already referred to, has given the follow1 The Review, vol. viii. No. 82.

ing admirable sketch of the effect produced by the new periodical.

'You may remember I told you before, that one cause assigned for the laying down of the Tatler was want of matter; and, indeed, this was the prevailing opinion in town, when we were surprised all at once by a paper called the Spectator, which was promised to be continued every day, and was written in so excellent a style, with so nice a judgment, and such a noble profusion of wit and humour that it was not difficult to determine it could come from no other hands but those which had penned the Lucubrations. This immediately alarmed those gentlemen who (as it is said Mr. Steele phrases it) had the censorship in commission. They found the new Spectator come on like a torrent, and swept away all before him; they despaired ever to equal him in wit, humour, or learning (which had been their true and certain way of opposing him), and, therefore, rather chose to fall on the author, and to call out for help to all good Christians, by assuring them again and again that they were the first, original, true, and undisputed Isaac Bickerstaff.

'Meanwhile the Spectator, whom we regard as our shelter from that flood of false wit and impertinence which was breaking in upon us, is in every one's hand, and a constant topic for our morning conversation at tea-tables and coffee-houses. We had at first, indeed, no manner of notion how a diurnal paper could be continued in the spirit and style of our present Spectators; but, to our no small surprise, we find them still rising upon us, and can