Such being his fundamental principles, Addison turned his kindly heart to the consideration of what, in the shape of literature, would be likely to do the most good to the greatest number of persons, men and women alike; and the Spectator was the result. To abstain from party politics, the animosities arising from which are generally out of all proportion to the importance of the question at stake, in religious and moral subjects to make 6 guesses at truth,' by throwing the light of sober reflection on many a secluded tract and bypath of speculation which had never before been popularly treated, on social customs and minor morals to be humorous, didactic, and judicially censorious,—such was the programme of the new periodical.

In the Tatler there had been no machinery, or next to none; the authorship is supposed to be in the hands of the snuffy astrologer, mountebank, and quack-doctor, Isaac Bickerstaff, assisted sometimes by his half-sister Jenny Distaff; no one else has anything to do with it. In the Spectator care was taken at the outset to provide more attractive machinery; and the success corresponded to the attempt. The Spectator does not, like the Tatler, frequent the various noted coffee-houses in town, and write from each to the public that which was in keeping with the place and company; he belongs to a small select club imagined for the occasion, the members of which, representing the gentry, the learned professions, commerce, the army, and the town, are supposed to take a lively interest in what their odd silent colleague, the Spectator, either publishes from his own resources, or receives from his various correspondents. Yet the existence of the

club seems to have little to do with the promotion of the work of criticism and reform which the Spectator has undertaken. None of the members are supposed to contribute papers except the Spectator himself; a few letters indeed of their composition are inserted; but the most prominent among them, Sir Roger de Coverley, does not take part in the work even to this extent. The club itself supplies the Spectator with materials for some of his most humorous and delightful papers; but it takes no share in elaborating them; it is for the most part passive machinery, not active. But his intimacy with Sir Roger de Coverley, arising from this club connection, makes it easy and natural for the Spectator to give us that full length portrait of an English country gentleman, generous, ignorant, loyal, patriotic, and prejudiced,—

which is exhibited in the first part of this work. Of the condition of the English bar, represented in the club by the Templar, we get only the faintest indications. The medical profession is unrepresented in the club; perhaps Addison thought that jokes enough had been made about physic in the Tatler. The Clergyman, who is not named, although we are told that his character and learning are such as to command the respect and admiration of his brother members, remains a shadowy personage to the last. Sir Andrew Freeport, the type of an upright, shrewd, methodical, and indefatigable British merchant, is introduced with effect in several papers, not only by Addison, but also by Steele and Hughes. The lively conversation on trade and thrift in No. 174, between Sir Roger de Coverley and Sir Andrew Freeport, is from the pen of Steele; Hughes (or, perhaps, Henry Martin) is the author of the sensible and characteristic remarks put in the mouth of Sir Andrew in No. 232, on giving alms to street beggars. Captain Sentry, the representative of the army, is, so far as Addison is concerned, hardly more than a name; it is Steele and Budgell who endow him with a distinct personality: the former by means of the discourse on courage which he attributes to him in No. 350, and his letter describing his uncle's death in No. 544; the latter by means of an amusing narrative, in No. 197, of a dispute between the captain and a young barrister. In this passage of arms poor Sentry, who is described as 'a man of good sense but dry conversation,' after giving way to the arguments of his opponent, is amazed to find him suddenly turn round, and volubly argue for the proposition which he had just demolished. Many of us know young barristers of the present day, who love to 'flesh their maiden sword' upon their friends in a similar fashion. As for Will Honeycomb, the man about town, the elderly rake, the fop à bonnes fortunes, who after boasting of fancied encouragement received from every reigning belle during the past thirty years, drops into matrimony at the ripe age of sixty with a farmer's daughter, the character is perhaps too unlike, at any rate in outward ways and manner of existing, to what we now see around us, for it to be possible that we should be so much amused as our great grandfathers were by his innocent vanity, his easy assurance, and his little airs of superiority. Yet of one or two of his letters the dialect is not so far antiquated but that we can still relish their racy flavour;

b

of these the reader will find one or two specimens in the present selection.

'The plan of the Spectator, so far as it regards the feigned person of the author, and of the several characters that compose his club, was concerted [by Addison] in concert with Sir Richard Steele.' So Tickell, Addison's college friend and protégé, tells us in the preface to the collected works.

Of both the Tatler and the Spectator Johnson writes in his life of Addison, that they were 'published at a time when two parties, loud, restless, and violent, each with plausible declarations, and each perhaps without any distinct termination of its views, were agitating the nation. To minds heated with political contest they supplied cooler and more inoffensive reflections: and it is said by Addison, in a subsequent work, that they had a perceptible influence upon the conversation of that time, and taught the frolic and the gay to unite merriment with decency; an effect which they can never wholly lose while they continue to be among the first books by which both sexes are initiated in the elegances of knowledge.' Political topics were to be, as a rule, excluded. But this exclusion, even in the case of the Spectator, was not entire (see infra, p. 111), and it seems to have been suggested by special circumstances as much as by any settled principle. In one of the later numbers of the Tatler, Steele had introduced an attack upon Harley, who had then recently succeeded Lord Godolphin at the Treasury; the attack had cost him his place as conductor of the Gazette; and, if Swift may be believed, it was only through his intercession that Steele's other post in the Stamp Office was not taken from him. In October, 1710, the result of the general election had been to return what Addison calls 'a glut of Tories' to Parliament1. Against the stolid voting-power of an excited majority, eagerly looking out for the spoils of office, Addison knew that for the moment wit and raillery, sarcasm and argument, were all alike ineffectual. While the issue was doubtful, he combated stoutly in the political arena; witness his Whig Examiner, published in September and October, 1710; when the triumph of Toryism was assured, he wisely held his peace; waiting till the new men in power should have made the usual blunders, and been estranged by the usual

1 Letter to Marquis of Wharton, Oct. 17th, 1710.

misunderstandings, before again taking up the pen of a pamphleteer. Meantime, since his mind was teeming with the stores which his keen observation and rich fancy had been accumulating for years, he gladly accepted the outlet for its expression afforded by this new daily paper, the Spectator: from which he persuaded Steele also to withhold all those party missiles, which, under existing circumstances, could but recoil on their own heads. As soon as a fit occasion offered, Addison again became a political writer, and in the pages of the Freeholder (1715–16), attacked both the principles and the practices of the Jacobite party. Reviewing these circumstances, we have just cause to be thankful that, in what Steele called 'the four last inglorious years' of the queen's reign, Toryism was so completely in the ascendant; had it been otherwise, the 'Spectator' would have been a politician, not a censor morum, and indefinitely less interesting in consequence.

Addison and Steele were the chief contributors, and in nearly equal proportions, to the Spectator. Including the eighty numbers of the eighth volume of the resuscitated Spectator, the publication consisted of 635 papers. Of these, according to the computation of Dr. Drake, 274 were from the pen of Addison, and 240 from that of Steele. Eustace Budgell wrote 37, John Hughes 11, and Henry Grove four papers. Two or three, or even four, papers are supposed to be by Pope, but they cannot all be identified with certainty. More than a score of other writers are credited with the composition of one or two papers, or parts of papers. Fifty-three papers remain, for which all the researches of the last century editors were unable to find authors. On all these matters full information may be found in Dr. Drake's Essays, from which, and from other sources, we extract some account of the ascertained contributors, which those who do not care for biographical details may skip.

1. Addison. The chief dates and facts concerning the principal author of the Spectator are given at a later page.

2. Sir Richard Steele, born in Dublin in 1675, after passing through the Charter-house and Merton College-(at school he was Addison's fag, at college his admiring, but not imitating, friend)-entered the army as a private, had a commission given him, wrote The Christian Hero to recommend to the mess those virtues which he knew he did not possess, yet had the grace to

admire, and, returning to civil life about the end of King William's reign, embarked in the hazards of a literary life in London. His chief plays have been already mentioned. Thackeray has kindly and humorously sketched 'poor Dick Steele,' immersed in all the follies of the town, 'deep in debt and in drink,' continually sinning and repenting. He commenced the Tatler, as we have seen, in 1709; the Spectator was begun in March 1711, and terminated, as to the first continuous issue, with No. 555 (December 6, 1712), in which Steele announces the retirement of the Spectator, his club being dispersed, and states various particulars as to the authorship of the papers. In the renewed issue of 1714 Steele bore no part; but in the interim he had been writing busily in the Englishman and the Guardian. His vehement Whiggism and activity on behalf of the house of Hanover gave deep offence to the Tory majority of the House of Commons in the last year of Queen Anne, and he was expelled from the house in 1714 for having written a pamphlet called The Crisis. On this occasion Addison sat near him and helped him in his defence. But some years later a difference of opinion on the Peerage Bill caused an estrangement between them. Steele in the Plebeian attacked the measure, and was somewhat scornfully answered by Addison in the Old Whig, the last number of which was written but three months before his death. It is sad to think that the latest known relations between the two friends were of this nature; however we know that on Steele's mind the impression of the quarrel was but transitory; for in the preface to The Drummer, written after Addison's death, he speaks of him as his dear and honoured friend,' and vindicates himself warmly from the imagined imputation of injustice to his memory or fame. Never rising to sufficient self-command to free himself from debt, Steele, soon after Addison's death, left London, and retired to an estate in Wales belonging to his second wife, where he died in 1729.

3. Eustace Budgell. This man's life is a melancholy history. He was Addison's first cousin, his mother being a Miss Gulston. Bred to the bar, he spurned it for what seemed a more dazzling career; associated himself as much as possible with his cousin, and was a clerk in Addison's office when the latter went as Chief Secretary to Ireland in 1710. His papers in the first seven volumes of the Spectator are marked by the letter X. Addison

any occasions lent him a helping hand; some of the papers