lively examples of the courage and generosity of the nation he represented. Your friends and companions in your absence frequently talk these things of you; and you cannot hide from us (by the most discreet silence in any thing which regards yourself) that the frank entertainment we have at your table, your easy condescension in little incidents of mirth and diversion, and general complacency of manners, are far from being the greatest obligations we have to you. I do assure you, there is not one of your friends has a greater sense of your merit in general, and of the favours you every day do us, than, SIR, Your most obedient, and most humble servant RICHARD STEELE. VOL. VIII. ΤΟ WILLIAM HONEYCOMB, ESQ.* THE seven former volumes of the Spectator having been dedicated to some of the most celebrated persons of the age, I take leave to inscribe+ this eighth and last to you, as to a gentleman who hath ever been ambitious of appearing in the best company. * Generally supposed to be Col. Cleland. + This dedication is suspected to have been written by Eustace Budgell, who might have better dedicated it to Will Wimble. You are now wholly retired from the busy part of mankind, and at leisure to reflect upon your past achievements; for which reason I look upon you as a person very well qualified for a dedication. I may possibly disappoint my readers, and yourself too, if I do not endeavour on this occasion to make the world acquainted with your virtues. And here, Sir, I shall not complement you upon your birth, person, or fortune; nor on any other the like perfections which you possess, whether you will or no; but shall only touch upon those which are of your own acquiring, and in which every one must allow you have a real merit. Your janty air and easy motion, the volubility of your discourse, the suddenness of your laugh, the management of your snuff-box, with the whiteness of your hands and teeth (which have justly gained you the envy of the most polite part of the male world, and the love of the greatest beauties in the female) are entirely to be ascribed to your own personal genius and application. You are formed for these accomplishments by a happy turn of nature, and have finished yourself in them by the utmost improvements of art. A man that is defective in either of these qualifications (whatever may be the secret ambition of his heart) must never hope to make the figure you have done, among the fashionable part of his species. It is therefore no wonder we see such multitudes of aspiring young men fall short of you in all these beauties of your character, notwithstanding the study and practice of them is the whole business of their lives. But I need not tell you that the free and disengaged behaviour of a fine gentleman makes as many awkward beaux, as the easiness of your favourite hath made insipid poets. At present you are content to aim all your charms at your own spouse, without farther thought of mischief to any others of the sex. I know you had formerly a very great contempt for that pedantic race of mortals who call themselves philosophers; and yet, to your honour be it spoken, there is not a sage of them all could have better acted up to their precepts in one of the most important points of life: I mean, in that generous disregard of popular opinion which you shewed some years ago, when you chose for your wife an obscure young woman, who doth not indeed pretend to an ancient family, but has certainly as many forefathers as any lady in the land, if she could but reckon up their names. I must own I conceived very extraordinary hopes of you from the moment that you confessed your age, and from eight-and-forty (where you had stuck so many years) very ingeniously stepped into your grand climacteric. Your deportment has since been very venerable and becoming If I am rightly informed, you make a regular appearance every quarter-sessions among your brothers of the quorum; and if things go on as they do, stand fair for being a colonel of the militia. I am told that your time passes away as agreeably in the amusements of a country life, as it ever did in the gallantries of the town; and that you now take as much pleasure in the planting of young trees, as you did formerly in the cutting down of your old ones. In short, we hear from all hands that you are thoroughly reconciled to your dirty acres, and have not too much wit to look into your own estate. After having spoken thus much of my patron, I must take the privilege of an author in saying something of myself. I shall therefore beg leave to add, that I have purposely omitted setting those marks to the end of every paper, which appeared in my former volumes, that you may have an opportunity of shewing Mrs. Honeycomb the shrewdness of your conjectures, by ascribing every speculation to its proper author: though you know how often many profound critics in style and sentiments have very judiciously erred in this particular, before they were let into the secret. I am, Sir, Your most faithful humble Servant, THE SPECTATOR. THE BOOKSELLER TO THE READER. In the six hundred and thirty-second Spectator the reader will find an account of the rise of this eighth and last volume. I have not been able to prevail upon the several gentlemen who were concerned in this work to let me acquaint the world with their names. Perhaps it will be unnecessary to inform the reader, that no other papers which have appeared under the title of the Spectator, since the closing of this eighth volume, were written by any of those gentlemen who had a hand in this or the former volumes. THE SPECTATOR. N° 1. THURSDAY, MARCH 1, 1710-11. I Non fumum ex fulgore, sed ex fumo dare lucem HOR. ARS POET. ver. 143. One with a flash begins, and ends in smoke; ROSCOMMON. 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 choleric disposition, married or a bachelor, 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 correcting, will fall to my |