and Alnwick, Percy intrusted to him the notes he had collected for illustrating the Tatler, Spectator, and Guardian. These were afterwards used, with additions by Dr. Calder, in the various editions of those works, especially in the six-volume edition of the Tatler, published by John Nichols in 1786, where Percy's notes have a P. attached to them, and Dr. Calder's are signed 'Annotator.' The Tatler was annotated fully, and the annotated Tatler has supplied some pieces of information given in the present edition of the Spectator. Percy actually edited two volumes for R. Tonson in 1764, but the work was stopped by the death of the bookseller, and the other six were added to them in 1789. They were slightly annotated, both as regards the number and the value of the notes; but Percy and Calder lived when Spectator traditions were yet fresh, and oral information was accessible as to points of personal allusion or as to the authorship of a few papers or letters which but for them might have remained anonymous. Their notes are those of which the substance has run through all subsequent editions. Little, if anything, was added to them by Bisset or Chalmers; the energies of those editors having been chiefly directed to the preserving or multiplying of corruptions of the text. Percy, when telling Tonson that he had completed two volumes of the Spectator, said that he had corrected ' innumerable corruptions' which had then crept in, and could have come only by misprint. Since that time not only have misprints been preserved and multiplied, but punctuation has been deliberately modernized, to the destruction of the freshness of the original style, and editors of another 'understanding age' have taken upon themselves by many a little touch to correct Addison's style or grammar. ་ This volume reprints for the first time in the present century the text of the Spectator as its authors left it. A good recent edition contains in the first 18 papers, which are a fair sample of the whole, 88 petty variations from the proper text (at that rate, in the whole work more than 3000) apart from the recasting of the punctuation, which is counted as a defect only in two instances, where it has changed the sense. Chalmers's text, of 1817, was hardly better, and about two-thirds of the whole number of corruptions had already appeared in Bisset's edition of 1793, from which they were transferred. Thus Bisset as well as Chalmers in the Dedication to Vol. I. turned the 'polite parts of learning' into the polite arts of learning,' and when the silent gentleman tells us that many to whom his person is well known speak of him 'very currently by Mr. What-d'ye-call him,' Bisset before Chalmers rounded the sentence into 'very correctly by the appellation of 'Mr. What-d'ye-call him.' But it seems to have been Chalmers who first undertook to correct, in the next paper, Addison's grammar, by turning 'have laughed to have Iseen' into 'have laughed to see,' and transformed a treaty with London and Wise,' --a firm now of historical repute,-for the supply of flowers to the opera, into a treaty 'between London and Wise,' which most people would take to be a very different matter. If the present edition has its own share of misprints and oversights, at least it inherits none; and it contains no wilful alteration of the text. The papers as they first appeared in the daily issue of a penny (and after the stamp was imposed two-penny) folio half-sheet, have been closely compared with the first issue in guinea octavos, for which they were revised, and with the last edition that appeared before the death of Steele. The original text is here given precisely as it was left after revision by its authors; and there is shown at the same time the amount and character of the revision. Sentences added in the reprint are placed between square brackets [ ], without any appended note. Sentences omitted, or words altered, are shown by bracketing the revised version, and giving the text as it stood in the original daily issue within corresponding brackets as a foot-note. Thus the reader has here both the original texts of the Spectator. The Essays, as revised by their authors for permanent use, form the main text of the present volume. But if the words or passages in brackets be omitted; the words or passages in corresponding foot-notes-where there are such foot-notes,-being substituted for them; the text I The editor has used his own numbers of the original issue as far as No. 460, which is the last he has, and then depended on the copy in the British Museum, which wants a few numbers. The greater part of this volume has been printed from revisions made upon a copy of the Spectator published in Steele's life-time, which was broken up for the printer's use, to avoid chance of the slipping in of misprints by the use of a later edition. Where there is want of conformity in spelling, the same variation is to be found in the original. The spelling represents what was good usage between 1711 and 1729. Several words, spelt then as now, were spelt differently in the middle of the century. becomes throughout that of the Spectator as it first came wet from the press, to English breakfast-tables. As the few differences between good spelling in Queen Anne's time and good spelling now are never of a kind to obscure the sense of a word, or lessen the enjoyment of the reader, it has been thought better to make the reproduction perfect, and thus show not only what Steele and Addison wrote, but how they spelt, while restoring to their style the proper harmony of their own methods of punctuating, and their way of sometimes getting emphasis by turning to account the use of capitals, which in their hands was not wholly conventional. Here also the capitals have another use. They are a help to the eye in reading columns of small type. It may be added that the two columns in a full page of this volume represent in miniature the two columns of an ordinary full page of the Spectator in its daily issue, with its usual number of lines in a column, and the same average of words in a line. The original folio numbers have been followed also in the use of italics, and other little details of the disposition of the type; for example, in the reproduction of those rows of single inverted commas, which distinguish what a correspondent called the parts laced down the side with little c's.' The translation of the mottos and Latin quotations, which Steele and Addison deliberately abstained from giving, and which, as they were since added, impede and sometimes confound and contradict the text, are here placed in a body at the end, for those who want them. Again and again the essayists indulge in banter on the mystery of the Latin and Greek mottos; and what confusion must enter into the mind of the unwary reader who finds Pope's Homer quoted at the head of a Spectator long before Addison's word of applause to the young poet's Essay on Criticism. The mottos then are placed in an Appendix. There is a short Appendix also of advertisements taken from the original number of the Spectator, and a few others, where they seem to illustrate some point in the text, will be found among the notes. In the large number of notes here added to a revision of those bequeathed to us by Percy and Calder,' the object has been to give information which may contribute to some nearer acquaintance with the writers of the book, and enjoyment of allusions to past manners and events. Finally, from the 'General Index to the Spectators, &c.,' published as a separate volume in 1760, there has been taken what was serviceable, and additions have been made to it with a desire to secure for this edition of the Spectator the advantages of being handy for reference as well as true to the real text. H. M. I The reader is requested to cancel note I upon col. 1 of p. 8, which has been transferred by oversight from a preceding edition. Not only is La signature of Addison's, and attached to papers which are evidently not from materials found in the Letter-box; but Steele's change of R into T became permanent when but a fourth part of his work was done, so that R and T could not have been meant to distinguish between original and transcribed papers. Equally baseless is a suggestion of Dr. Calder's, which has also been copied and re-copied, that when Addison signed C he wrote at Chelsea, when L in London, when I in Ireland, and when O at the office. This notion was invented to dispose of an idea that there was vanity in taking the name of a Muse as a word from which to get the four letters used to abate the reader's over-certainty as to the authorship of papers. If Addison had wanted ten letters instead of four he might have had Bucephalus for a keyword, and then perhaps some editor would have thought it requisite to find a way of proving that he had not actually mistaken himself for a horse. Steele's signature was R till No. 91; then T, and occasionally R, till No. 134; then always T. Addison signed C till No. 85, when he first used L; and was L or C till No. 265, then L, till he first used I in No. 372. Once or twice using L, he was I till No. 405, which he signed O, and by this letter he held, except for a return to C (with a single use of O), from 433 to 477. My LORD, TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE JOHN LORD SOMMERS, BARON OF EVESHAM.1 SHOULD not act the Part of an impartial Spectator, if I Dedicated the following Papers to In 1695, when a student at Oxford, aged 23, Joseph Addison had dedicated to the Right Honourable Sir John Somers, Lord Keeper of 'the Great Seal,' a poem written in honour of King William III. after his capture of Namur in sight of the whole French Army under Villeroi. This was Addison's first bid for success in Literature; and the twenty-seven lines in which he then asked Somers to receive the present of a Muse 'unknown,' were honourably meant to be what Dr. Johnson called 'a kind of rhyming introduction to Lord Somers.' If you, he said to Somers then 'If well pleas'd, shall smile upon my lays, you, 'Secure of fame, my voice I'll boldly raise, For next to what you write, is what you praise.' Somers did smile, and at once held out to Addison his helping hand. Mindful of this, and of substantial friendship during the last seventeen years, Addison joined Steele in dedicating to his carliest patron the first volume of the Essays which include his best security of fame. At that time, John Somers, aged 61, and retired from political life, was weak in health and high in honours earned by desert only. He was the son of an attorney at Worcester, rich enough to give him a liberal education at his City Grammar School and at Trinity College, Oxford, where he was entered as a Gentleman Commoner. He left the University, without taking a degree, to practise law. Having a strong bent towards Literature as well as a keen, manly interest in the vital questions which concerned the liberties of England under Charles the Second, he distinguished himself by political tracts which maintained constitutional rights. He rose at the bar to honour and popularity, especially after his pleading as junior counsel for Sancroft, Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Six Bishops, Lloyd, Turner, Lake, Ken, White, and Trelawney, who signed the petition against the King's order for reading in all churches a Declaration for Liberty of Conscience, which they said 'was founded upon such a dis'pensing power as hath been often declared illegal in Parliament.' Somers earned the gratitude of a people openly and loudly triumphing in the acquittal of the Seven Bishops. He was active also in co-operation with those who were planning the expulsion of the Stuarts and the bringing over of the Prince of Orange. During the Interregnum he, and at the same time also Charles Montague, afterwards Lord Halifax, first entered Parliament. He was at the conference with the one who is not of the most consummate and most acknowledged Merit. None but a person of a finished Character can be Lords upon the question of declaring the Throne vacant. As Chairman of the Committee appointed for the purpose, it was Somers who drew up the Declaration of Right, which, in placing the Prince and Princess of Orange on the throne, set forth the grounds of the Revolution and asserted against royal encroachment the ancient rights and liberties of England. For these services and for his rare ability as a constitutional lawyer, King William, in the first year of his reign, made Somers Solicitor-General. In 1692 he became Attorney-General as Sir John Somers, Seal, which had been four years in Commission, and soon afterwards, in March 1692-3, the Great titling him to a pension of £2000 a year from the was delivered to his keeping, with a patent enday he quitted office. He was then also sworn in as Privy Councillor. In April 1697 Somers as Lord Keeper delivered up the Great Seal, and received it back with the higher title of Lord Chancellor. He was at the same time created Baron Somers of Evesham; Crown property was also given to him to support his dignity. One use that he made of his influence was to procure young Addison a pension, that he might be forwarded in service of the State. Party spirit among his political opponents ran high against Somers. At the close of 1699 they had a majority in the Commons, and deprived him of office, but they failed before the Lords in an impeachment against him. In Queen Anne's reign, between 1708 and 1710, the constitutional statesman, long infirm of health, who had been in retirement serving Science as President of the Royal Society, was serving the State as President of the Council. But in 1712, when Addison addressed to him this Dedication of the first Volume of the first reprint of the Spectator, he had withdrawn from public life, and four years afterwards he died of a stroke of apoplexy. Of Somers as a patron Lord Macaulay wrote: 'He had traversed the whole vast range of polite 'literature, ancient and modern. He was at once 'a munificent and a severely judicious patron of 'genius and learning. Locke owed opulence to Somers. By Somers Addison was drawn forth 'from a cell in a college. In distant countries the 'name of Somers was mentioned with respect and ' gratitude by great scholars and poets who had never seen his face. He was the benefactor ' of Leclerc. He was the friend of Filicaja. Neither political nor religious differences pre'vented him from extending his powerful protec the proper Patron of a Work, which endeavours to Cultivate and Polish Human Life, by promoting Virtue and Knowledge, and by recommending whatsoever may be either Useful or Ornamental to Society. I know that the Homage I now pay You, is offering a kind of Violence to one who is as solicitous to shun Applause, as he is assiduous to deserve it. But, my Lord, this is perhaps the only Particular in which your Prudence will be always disappointed. While Justice, Candour, Equanimity, a Zeal for the Good of your Country, and the most persuasive Eloquence in bringing over others to it, are valuable Distinctions, You are not to expect that the Publick will so far comply with your Inclinations, as to forbear celebrating such extraordinary Qualities. It is in vain that You have endeavoured to conceal your Share of Merit, in the many National Services which You have effected. Do what You will, the present Age will be talking of your Virtues, tho' Posterity alone will do them Justice. Other Men pass through Oppositions and contending Interests in the ways of Ambition, but Your Great Abilities have been invited to Power, and importuned to accept of Advancement. Nor is it strange that this should happen to your Lordship, who could bring into the Service of Your Sovereign the Arts and Policies of Ancient Greece and Rome; as well as the most exact knowledge of our own Constitution in particular, and of the interests of Europe in general; to which I must also add, a certain Dignity in Yourself, that (to say the least of it) has been always equal to those great Honours which have been conferred upon You. It is very well known how much the Church owed to You in the most dangerous Day it ever saw, that of the Arraignment of its Prelates; and how far the Civil Power, in the Late and present Reign, has been indebted to your Counsels and Wisdom. But to enumerate the great Advantages which the publick has received from your Administration, would be a more proper Work for an History, than an Address of this Nature. Your Lordship appears as great in your Private Life, as in the most Important Offices which You have born. I would therefore rather chuse to speak of the Pleasure You afford all who are admitted into your Conversation, of Your Elegant Taste in all the Polite Parts of Learning, of Your great Humanity and Complacency of Manners, and of the surprising Influence which is peculiar to You in making every one who Converses with your Lordship prefer You to himself, without thinking the less meanly of his own Talents. But if I should take notice of all that might be observed in your Lordship, I should have nothing new to say upon any other Character of Distinction. I am, My Lord, Your Lordship's Most Obedient, Most Devoted Humble Servant, THE SPECTATOR. The SPECTATOR. No. 1.] Thursday, March 1, 1711. [Addison. | I HAVE observed, that a Reader seldom peruses a Book with Pleasure 'till he knows whether the Writer of it be a black or a fair Man, of a mild or cholerick Disposition, Married or a Batchelor, with other Particulars of the like nature, that conduce very much to the right Understanding of an Author. To gratify this Curiosity, which is so natural to a Reader, I design this Paper, and my next, as Prefatory Discourses to my following Writings, and shall give some Account in them of the several persons that are engaged in this Work. As the chief trouble of Compiling, Digesting, and 'tion to merit. Hickes, the fiercest and most 'intolerant of all the non-jurors, obtained, by the 'influence of Somers, permission to study Teutonic 'antiquities in freedom and safety. Vertue, a strict Roman Catholic, was raised, by the dis'criminating and liberal patronage of Somers, 'from poverty and obscurity to the first rank among the engravers of the age.' Correcting will fall to my Share, I must do myself the Justice to open the Work with my own History. I was born to a small Hereditary Estate, which [according to the tradition of the village where it lies,] was bounded by the same Hedges and Ditches in William the Conqueror's Time that it is at present, and has been delivered down from Father to Son whole and entire, without the Loss or Acquisition of a single Field or Meadow, during the Space of six hundred Years. There [runs2] a Story in the Family, that when my Mother was gone with Child of me about three Months, she dreamt that she was brought to Bed of a Judge. Whether this might proceed from a Law-suit which was then depending in the Family, or my Father's being a Justice of the Peace, I cannot determine; for I am not so vain as to think it presaged any Dignity that I should arrive at in my future Life, though that was the Interpretation which the Neighbourhood put upon it. The Gravity of my Behaviour at my very first Appearance in the World, and all the Time that I sucked, seemed to favour my Mother's Dream: For, as she has often told me, I threw away my Rattle before I was two Months old, and would not make use of my Coral till they had taken away the Bells from it. do not often make my appearance; sometimes I am seen thrusting my Head into a Round of Politicians at Will's, and listning with great Attention to the Narratives that are made in those little Circular Audiences. Sometimes I smoak a thing but the Post-Man,3 over-hear the Conversation of every Table in the Room. I appear on Sunday nights at St. James's Coffee House, 4 and sometimes join the little Committee of Politicks in the Inner-Room, as one who comes there to hear and improve. My Face is likewise very well known at As for the rest of my Infancy, there being nothing in it remarkable, I shall pass it over in Si-Pipe at Child's; and, while I seem attentive to nolence. I find that, during my Nonage, I had the reputation of a very sullen Youth, but was always a Favourite of my School-master, who used to say, that my parts were solid, and would wear well. I had not been long at the University, before I distinguished myself by a most profound Silence: For, during the Space of eight Years, excepting in the publick Exercises of the College, I scarce uttered the Quantity of an hundred Words; and indeed do not remember that I ever spoke three Sentences together in my whole Life. Whilst I was in this Learned Body, I applied myself with so much Diligence to my Studies, that there are very few celebrated Books, either in the Learned or the Modern Tongues, which I am not acquainted with. Upon the Death of my Father I was resolved to travel into Foreign Countries, and therefore left the University, with the Character of an odd unaccountable Fellow, that had a great deal of Learning, if I would but show it. An insatiable Thirst after Knowledge carried me into all the Countries of Europe, [in which'] there was any thing new or strange to be seen; nay, to such a Degree was my curiosity raised, that having read the controversies of some great Men concerning the Antiquities of Egypt, I made a Voyage to Grand Cairo, on purpose to take the Measure of a Pyramid; and, as soon as I had set my self right in that Particular, returned to my Native Country with great Satisfaction.2 I have passed my latter Years in this City, where I am frequently seen in most publick Places, tho' there are not above half a dozen of my select Friends that know me; of whom my next Paper shall give a more particular Account. There is no place of [general3] Resort wherein I [where] I Will's Coffee House, which had been known successively as the Red Cow and the Rose before it took a permanent name from Will Urwin, its proprietor, was the corner house on the north side of Russell Street, at the end of Bow Street, now No. 21. Dryden's use of this Coffee House caused the wits of the town to resort there, and after Dryden's death, in 1700, it remained for some years the Wits' Coffee House. There the strong interest in current politics took chiefly the form of satire, epigram, or entertaining narrative. credit was already declining in the days of the Spectator; wit going out and card-play coming in. Its 2 Child's Coffee House was in St. Paul's Churchyard. Neighbourhood to the Cathedral and Doctors' Commons made it a place of resort for the Clergy. The College of Physicians had been first established in Linacre's House, No. 5, Knightrider Street, Doctors' Commons, whence it had removed to Amen Corner, and thence in 1674 to the adjacent Warwick Lane. The Royal Society, until its removal in 1711 to Crane Court, Fleet Street, had its rooms further east, at Gresham College. Physicians, therefore, and philosophers, as well as the clergy, used Child's as a convenient place of resort. 3 The Postman, established and edited by M. Fonvive, a learned and grave French Protestant, who was said to make 600 a year by it, was a penny paper in the highest repute, Fonvive having 2 This is said to allude to a description of the secured for his weekly chronicle of foreign news a Pyramids of Egypt, by John Greaves, a Persian good correspondence in Italy, Spain, Portugal, scholar and Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Germany, Flanders, Holland. John Dunton, the Oxford, who studied the principle of weights and bookseller, in his 'Life and Errors,' published in measures in the Roman Foot and the Denarius, 1705, thus characterized the chief newspapers of and whose visit to the Pyramids in 1638, by the day: 'the Observator is best to towel the aid of his patron Laud, was described in his Jacks, the Review is best to promote peace, the 'Pyramidographia.' That work had been pub-Flying Post is best for the Scotch news, the Postlished in 1646, sixty-five years before the ap-boy is best for the English and Spanish news, the pearance of the Spectator, and Greaves died in 'Daily Courant is the best critic, the English 1652. But in 1706 appeared a tract, ascribed to 'Post is the best collector, the London Gazette has him by its title-page, and popular enough to have the best authority, and the Postman is the best been reprinted in 1727 and 1745, entitled, "The ' for everything.' 'Origine and Antiquity of our English Weights and Measures discovered by their near agree'ment with such Standards that are now found in one of the Egyptian Pyramids.' It based its arguments on measurements in the 'Pyramidographia,' and gave to Professor Greaves, in Addison's time, the same position with regard to Egypt that has been taken in our time by the Astronomer-Royal for Scotland, Professor Piazzi Smyth. 3 [publick] 4 St. James's Coffee House was the last house but one on the south-west corner of St. James's Street; closed about 1806. On its site is now a pile of buildings looking down Pall Mall. Near St. James's Palace, it was a place of resort for Whig officers of the Guards and men of fashion. It was famous also in Queen Anne's reign, and long after, as the house most favoured by Whig statesmen and members of Parliament, who could there privately discuss their party tactics. |