however to speak much by myself, and to draw upon me the whole attention of those I conversed with, I used, for some time, to walk every morning in the Mall", and talk in chorus with a parcel of Frenchmen. I found my modesty greatly relieved by the communicative temper of this nation, who are so very sociable, as to think they are never better company, than when they are all opening at the same time. I then fancied I might receive great benefit from female conversation, and that I should have a convenience of talking with 10 the greater freedom, when I was not under any impediment of thinking: I therefore threw myself into an assembly of ladies, but could not for my life get in a word among them; and found that if I did not change my company, I was in danger of being reduced to my primitive taciturnity. The coffeehouses have ever since been my chief places of resort, where I have made the greatest improvements; in order to which I have taken a particular care never to be of the same opinion with the man I conversed with. I was a Tory at Button's, and a Whig at Child's, a friend to the Englishman", or an advo20 cate for the Examiner ", as it best served my turn: some fancy me a great enemy to the French king, though, in reality, I only make use of him for a help to discourse. In short, I wrangle and dispute for exercise; and have carried this point so far, that I was once like to have been run through the body for making a little too free with my betters. In a word, I am quite another man to what I was. My old acquaintance scarce know me; nay I was asked the other day by a Jew at Jonathan's, whether I was not related to a dumb gentleman, who used to come to that coffeehouse? But 30 I think I was never better pleased in my life than about a week ago, when, as I was battling it across the table with a young Templar, his companion gave him a pull by the sleeve, begging him to come away, for that the old prig would talk him to death. Being now a very good proficient in discourse, I shall appear in the world with this addition to my character, that my countrymen may reap the fruits of my new-acquired loquacity. BUT STILL IMPARTIAL. 109 Those who have been present at public disputes in the university, know that it is usual to maintain heresies for argument's sake. I have heard a man a most impudent Socinian for half an hour, who has been an orthodox divine all his life after. I have taken the same method to accomplish myself in the gift of utterance, having talked above a twelve-month, not so much for the benefit of my hearers, as of myself. But since I have now gained the faculty I have been so long endeavouring after, I intend to make a right use of it, and shall think myself obliged, 10 for the future, to speak always in truth and sincerity of heart. While a man is learning to fence, he practises both on friend and foe; but when he is a master in the art, he never exerts it but on what he thinks the right side. That this last allusion may not give my reader a wrong idea of my design in this paper, I must here inform him, that the author of it is of no faction, that he is a friend to no interests but those of truth and virtue, nor a foe to any but those of vice and folly. Though I make more noise in the world than I used to do, I am still resolved to act in it as an indifferent Spectator. 20 It is not my ambition to increase the number either of Whigs or Tories, but of wise and good men, and I could heartily wish there were not faults common to both parties, which afford me sufficient matter to work upon, without descending to those which are peculiar to either. If in a multitude of counsellors there is safety, we ought to think ourselves the securest nation in the world. Most of our garrets are inhabited by statesmen, who watch over the liberties of their country, and make a shift to keep themselves from starving by taking into their care the properties of their fellow30 subjects. As these politicians of both sides have already worked the nation into a most unnatural ferment", I shall be so far from endeavouring to raise it to a greater height, that, on the contrary, it shall be the chief tendency of my papers to inspire my countrymen with a mutual good-will and benevolence. Whatever faults either party may be guilty of, they are rather inflamed than cured by those reproaches which they cast upon one another. The most likely method of rectifying any man's conduct, is, by re 40 and virtue; and so long as he acts with an eye to these prin commending to him the principles of truth and honour, religion a ciples, whatever party he is of, he cannot fail of being a good Englishman, and a lover of his country. As for the persons concerned in this work, the names of all of them, or at least of such as desire it, shall be published hereafter : till which time I must entreat the curious reader to suspend his curiosity, and rather to consider what is written, than who they are that write it. Having thus adjusted all necessary preliminaries with my reader, I shall not trouble him with any more prefatory discourses, but 10 proceed in my old method, and entertain him with speculations on every useful subject that falls in my way. POLITICAL PAPERS. [Party politics, the vindication of this ministry or the incrimination of that, attacks upon individual statesmen and disclosures of administrative abuses, were judiciously forsworn by Addison and Steele when they commenced the Spectator. (See Introduction, p. xix.) However Addison did not think himself absolutely precluded from touching on political topics, as the first of the three following papers sufficiently shows. In fact this witty and ingenious essay has a very important political bearing, so much so that it is difficult to suppose that Addison's many Jacobite readers would have relished the Spectator so highly as they did, had there been many more papers in the same strain. The young man of twenty-two years of age' who brandishes his sword at the Act of Settlement, is the son and heir of James II, commonly called the first Pretender; he naturally is desirous of cancelling the Act of Parliament by which he and his descendants are excluded from the throne. He is accompanied by the genius of a commonwealth,' or, as we should say, of Repubcanism, by which it is insinuated that in politics extremes meet, and that Jacobites, equally with Republicans, are enemies to the British Constitution. The spunge' in his left hand implies that if the Pretender succeeds in effecting a counter-revolution, he will repudiate the National Debt, a suggestion full of horror to the capitalists and merchants on 'Change. Public Credit therefore faints and collapses at the approach of James the Pretender; but she revives and becomes radiant again when a person whom I had never seen,' that is, George the Electoral prince, son of the Princess Sophia, and afterwards George I, attended by the genius of Great Britain and all the other good powers which wait on prosperous states, enters the hall and approaches her throne. The second paper in this section, though ostensibly an imaginative essay on the operations of commerce, appears chiefly designed to show what political benefits accrue to a nation from a large and unrestricted trade. The third paper is a panegyric on the system of limited monarchy and popular government under which Englishmen are privileged to live.] No. 3. The Bank of England: vision of Public Credit'; her friends and enemies. Et quoi quisque fere studio devinctus adhæret, In somnis eadem plerumque videmur obire,-LUCR. iv. 959. In one of my late rambles, or rather speculations, I looked into the great hall where the Bank is kept, and was not a little pleased to see the directors, secretaries, and clerks, with all the other members of that wealthy corporation, ranged in their several stations, according to the parts they act in that just and regular oeconomy. This revived in my memory the many discourses which I had both read and heard concerning the decay of public credit, with the methods of restoring it, and which in my opinion have always been defective because they have been made with an eye to separate interests, and party-principles. The thoughts of the day gave my mind employment for the 10 whole night, so that I fell insensibly into a kind of methodical dream, which disposed all my contemplations into a vision or allegory, or what else the reader shall please to call it. Methought I returned to the great hall, where I had been the morning before, but, to my surprise, instead of the company that I left there, I saw, towards the upper end of the hall, a beautiful virgin, seated on a throne of gold. Her name, as they told me, was Public Credit. The walls, instead of being adorned with pictures and maps, were hung with many acts of parliament written in golden letters. At the upper end of the hall was the 20 Magna Charta with the Act of Uniformity on the right hand, and the Act of Toleration on the left". At the lower end of the hall was the Act of Settlement", which was placed full in the eye of the virgin that sat upon the throne. Both the sides of the hall were covered with such acts of parliament as had been made for the establishment of public funds. The lady seemed to set an unspeakable value upon these several pieces of furniture, insomuch that she often refreshed her eye with them, and often smiled with a secret pleasure, as she looked upon them; but, at the same time, shewed a very particular uneasiness, if she saw 30 any thing approaching that might hurt them. She appeared indeed infinitely timorous in all her behaviour: and, whether it was from the delicacy of her constitution, or that she was troubled with vapours, as I was afterwards told by one who I found was none of her well-wishers, she changed colour and startled at everything she heard. She was likewise, as I afterwards found, a greater valetudinarian than any I had ever met with, even in her own sex, and subject to such momentary consumptions, that in the twinkling of an eye, she would fall away from the most florid complexion, and the most healthful state of 40 body, and wither into a skeleton. Her recoveries were often as |