Lord Lyttelton (the projector), Edward Moore, Horace Walpole, Chesterfield, the Earls of Bath and Cork, Richard Cambridge, who was one of the few literary men of means and elegant leisure; Jenyns, and other men of mark in that day. Moore, the editor, died just after preparing the concluding paper for the World, which, oddly enough, wittily announced that the discontinuance of the periodical was owing to the death of the editor! It is not to be wondered at that this coincidence led Chesterfield to remark that it "induces us to wish that death may be less frequently included among the topics of wit."

Contemporary with the World was the Connoisseur, started by George Colman (the Elder) in 1754, when its projector was but twenty-two years of age. Although hardly equalling in literary polish its rival, it was the wittier sheet of the two. In 1758 Dr. Johnson began the publication of the Idler, as a department of the Universal Chronicle. By this means of publication the Idler reached many more readers than it could have done if published by itself: the author has grown more genial, too, and though perhaps no less given to long words of Latin derivation, his style was less ponderous and more popular in the Idler than in the Rambler.

The Observer was started in 1783 by Cumberland, who was its sole contributor. The editor was a man of

much culture, broad views, fine powers of expression, and would even in our own day have conducted with credit as good a literary journal as we possess. He was enough of a philanthropist to plead for a better feeling toward the Jews; this alone is cause for regret that his mantle has found no fit shoulders upon which to fall.

The Looker-on contained many excellent essays; while the Mirror and the Lounger, both published in Scotland during the last quarter of the eighteenth century, and with editors and contributors who successfully preserved their incognito, exerted upon manners and morals an excellent influence which was not confined in its operation to Scotch society alone.

Besides the periodicals alluded to, there are others, of equal age, which in spite of great ability are not popular. The canon of the "British Classics" is as solemnly respected as that of the King James Bible, and the conservative souls who have it in charge have not thought while to arrange an apocrypha of doubtful essayists. As a consequence of this neglect, at least one noble series of papers, to wit, Addison's Freeholder, is but little read even by the author's own admirers.

The effect of these old books is in every way delightful upon such latter-day readers as have chanced to make their acquaintance. Excellent as are many of our current

periodicals, we search most of them in vain for the rare facility of expression, the gradual development of thought, the finish of taste, the earnestness of argument, and directness of statement which characterized the leisurely editors who had no facilities for learning bad English, no schooling in sophistry, no personalities to issue or answer, and no demon of over-work to turn intention to naught. These old periodicals are read more largely than most people suppose, and by a very different class from that to which the possession of such books is generally attributed. The most graceful and powerful of American essayists read them frequently, and urge them upon others with more earnestness than they have ever manifested when speaking of any other writers. Aside from their historical and literary merits, these old writers, as Hazlitt happily says, attract and charm because they "take note of our looks, words, thoughts and actions, show us what we are and what we are not, play the whole game of human life over before us, and by making us enlightened spectators of its many-colored scenes, enable us, if possible, to become tolerably reasonable agents in the one in which we have to perform a part.”

T

THE SPECTATOR.

I

THURSDAY, March 1, 1711.

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 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.