'will be so honest, as only to tell the World of what everybody will own to be scandalous, we reckon we shall be welcome.

'This Corporation has been set up some months, and open'd their first Sessions about last Bartholomew Fair; but having not yet obtain'd a Patent, they have never, till now, 'made their Resolves publick.

'The Business of this Society is to censure the Actions of Men, not of Parties, and in 'particular, those Actions which are made publick so by their Authors, as to be, in their 'own Nature, an Appeal to the general Approbation.

They do not design to expose Persons but things; and of them, none but such as more than ordinarily deserve it; they who would not be censur'd by this Assembly, are desired to act with caution enough, not to fall under their Hands; for they resolve to 'treat Vice, and Villanous Actions, with the utmost Severity.

'The First considerable Matter that came before this Society, was about Bartholomew 'Fair; but the Debates being long, they were at last adjourned to the next Fair, when 'we suppose it will be decided; so being not willing to trouble the World with anything twice over, we refer that to next August.

'On the 10th of September last, there was a long Hearing, before the Club, of a 'Fellow that said he had kill'd the Duke of Bavaria. Now as David punish'd the 'Man that said he had kill'd King Saul, whether it was so or no, 'twas thought this 'Fellow ought to be delivered up to Justice, tho' the Duke of Bavaria was alive.

Upon the whole, 'twas voted a scandalous Thing, That News-Writers shou'd kill 'Kings and Princes, and bring them to life again at pleasure; and to make an Example of this Fellow, he was dismiss'd, upon Condition he should go to the Queen's-bench ' once a Day, and bear Fuller, his Brother of the Faculty, company two hours for four'teen Days together; which cruel Punishment was executed with the utmost Severity.

The Club has had a great deal of trouble about the News-Writers, who have been 'continually brought before them for their ridiculous Stories, and imposing upon Man'kind; and tho' the Proceedings have been pretty tedious, we must give you the trouble ' of a few of them in our next.'

The addition to the heading, 'Translated out of French,' appears only in No. 1, and the first title Mercure Scandale (adopted from a French book published about 1681) having been much criticized for its grammar and on other grounds, was dropped in No. 18. Thenceforth Defoe's pleasant comment upon passing follies appeared under the single head of 'Advice from the Scandalous Club. Still the verbal Critics exercised their wits upon the title. 'We have been so often on the Defence of our Title,' says Defoe, in No. 38, 'that the world begins to think Our Society wants Employment. If Scandalous must signify nothing but Personal Scandal, respecting the Subject of 'which it is predicated; we desire those gentlemen to answer for us how Post-Man or Post-Boy can signify a News-Paper, the Post Man or Post Boy being in all my reading 'properly and strictly applicable, not to the Paper, but to the Person bringing or carry'ing the News? Mercury also is, if I understand it, by a Transmutation of Meaning, 'from a God turned into a Book-From hence our Club thinks they have not fair Play, in 'being deny'd the Privilege of making an Allegory as well as other People.' In No. 46 Defoe made, in one change more, a whimsical half concession of a syllable, by putting a sign of contraction in its place, and thenceforth calling this part of his Review, Advice from the Scandal. Club. Nothing can be more evident than the family likeness between this forefather of the Tatler and Spectator and its more familiar descendants. There is a trick of voice common to all, and some papers of Defoe's might have been written for the Spectator. The little allegory, for instance, in No. 45, which tells of a desponding young Lady brought before the Society, as found by Rosamond's Pond in the Park in a strange condition, taken by the mob for a lunatic, and whose clothes were all out of fashion, but whose face, when it was seen, astonished the whole society by its extraordinary sweetness and majesty. She told how she had been brought to despair, and her name proved to be-Modesty. In letters, questions, and comments also which might be taken from Defoe's Monthly Supplementary Journal to the Advice from the Scandal. Club, we catch a likeness to the spirit of the Tatler and Spectator now and then exact. Some censured Defoe for not confining himself to the weightier part of his purpose in establishing the Review. He replied, in the Introduction to his first Monthly Supple

ment, that many men care but for a little reading at a time,' and said, 'thus we 'wheedle them in, if it may be allow'd that Expression, to the Knowledge of the World, who rather than take more Pains, would be content with their Ignorance, and search 'into nothing.'

Single-minded, quick-witted, and prompt to act on the first suggestion of a higher point of usefulness to which he might attain, Steele saw the mind of the people ready for a new sort of relation to its writers, and he followed the lead of Defoe.1 But though he turned from the more frivolous temper of the enfeebled playhouse audience, to commune in free air with the country at large, he took fresh care for the restraint of his deep earnestness within the bounds of a cheerful, unpretending influence. Drop by drop it should fall, and its strength lie in its persistence. He would bring what wit he had out of the playhouse, and speak his mind, like Defoe, to the people themselves every postday. But he would affect no pedantry of moralizing, he would appeal to no passions, he would profess himself only a Tatler.' Might he not use, he thought, modestly distrustful of the charm of his own mind, some of the news obtained by virtue of the office of Gazetteer Harley had given him, to bring weight and acceptance to that writing of his which he valued only for the use to which it could be put. For, as he himself truly says in the Tatler, 'wit, if a man had it, unless it be directed to some useful end, is but 'a wanton, frivolous quality; all that one should value himself upon in this kind is that 'he had some honourable intention in it.'

Swift, not then a deserter to the Tories, was a friend of Steele's, who, when the first Tatler appeared, had been amusing the town at the expense of John Partridge, astrologer and almanac-maker, with Predictions for the year 1708,' professing to be written by Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq. The first prediction was of the death of Partridge, 'on the '29th of March next, about eleven at night, of a raging fever.' Swift answered himself, and also published in due time 'The Accomplishment of the first of Mr. Bickerstaff's 'Predictions being an account of the death of Mr. Partridge, the almanack-maker, ' upon the 29th instant.' Other wits kept up the joke, and, in his next year's almanac (that for 1709), Partridge advertised that, 'whereas it has been industriously given out by Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq., and others, to prevent the sale of this year's almanack, that 'John Partridge is dead, this may inform all his loving countrymen that he is still living, in health, and they are knaves that reported it otherwise.' Steele gave additional lightness to the touch of his Tatler, which first appeared on the 12th of April, 1709, by writing in the name of Isaac Bickerstaff, and carrying on the jest, that was to his serious mind a blow dealt against prevailing superstition. Referring in his first Tatler to this advertisement of Partridge's, he said of it, 'I have in another place, and in a paper by ' itself, sufficiently convinced this man that he is dead; and if he has any shame, I do 'not doubt but that by this time he owns it to all his acquaintance. For though the legs 'and arms and whole body of that man may still appear and perform their animal func'tions, yet since, as I have elsewhere observed, his art is gone, the man is gone.' To Steele, indeed, the truth was absolute, that a man is but what he can do.

In this spirit, then, Steele began the Tatler, simply considering that his paper was to be published for the use of the good people of England,' and professing at the outset that he was an author writing for the public, who expected from the public payment for his work, and that he preferred this course to gambling for the patronage of men in office. Having pleasantly shown the sordid spirit that underlies the mountebank's sublime professions of disinterestedness, we have a contempt,' he says, 'for such paltry barterers, ' and have therefore all along informed the public that we intend to give them our ad'vices for our own sakes, and are labouring to make our lucubrations come to some price ' in money, for our more convenient support in the service of the public. It is certain that many other schemes have been proposed to me, as a friend offered to show me in a 'treatise he had writ, which he called, The whole Art of Life; or, The Introduction to

་.

I There is adopted here, and in some paragraphs of the preceding narrative, the account given in the Introduction to English Writers of the relation of the Spectator and of Steele and Addison to the period of popular influence on English literature. The purpose of that Introduction was only to explain the division of the whole work into periods; but even in such a sketch the place of the Spectator is so important that there was much to be said that, when it has to be told by the same person, can only be repeated in an Introduction to the work itself.

'Great Men, illustrated in a Pack of Cards." But being a novice at all manner of play, 'I declined the offer.'

Addison took these cards, and played an honest game with them successfully. When, at the end of 1708, the Earl of Sunderland, Marlborough's son-in-law, lost his secretaryship, Addison lost his place as under-secretary; but he did not object to go to Ireland as chief secretary to Lord Wharton, the new Lord-lieutenant, an active party man, a leader on the turf with reputation for indulgence after business hours according to the fashion of the court of Charles II. Lord Wharton took to Ireland Clayton to write him musical entertainments, and a train of parasites of quality. He was a great borough-monger, and is said at one critical time to have returned thirty members. He had no difficulty, therefore, in finding Addison a seat, and made him in that year, 1709, M.P. for Malmesbury. Addison only once attempted to speak in the House of Commons, and then, embarrassed by encouraging applause that welcomed him, he stammered and sat down. But when, having laid his political cards down for a time, and at ease in his own home, pen in hand, he brought his sound mind and quick humour to the aid of his friend Steele, he came with him into direct relation with the English people. Addison never gave posterity a chance of knowing what was in him till, following Steele's lead, he wrote those papers in Tatler, Spectator, and Guardian, wherein alone his genius abides with us, and will abide with English readers to the end. The Tatler, the Spectator, and the Guardian were, all of them, Steele's, begun and ended by him at his sole discretion. In these three journals Steele was answerable for 510 papers; Addison for 369. Swift wrote two papers, and sent about a dozen fragments. Congreve wrote one article in the Tatler; Pope wrote thrice for the Spectator, and eight times for the Guardian. Addison, who was in Ireland when the Tatler first appeared, only guessed the authorship by an expression in an early number; and it was not until eighty numbers had been issued, and the character of the new paper was formed and established, that Addison, on his return to London, joined the friend who, with his usual complete absence of the vanity of self-assertion, finally ascribed to the ally he dearly loved, the honours of success.

It was the kind of success Steele had desired-a widely-diffused influence for good. The Tatlers were penny papers published three times a week, and issued also for another halfpenny with a blank half-sheet for transmission by post, when any written scraps of the day's gossip that friend might send to friend could be included. It was through these, and the daily Spectators which succeeded them, that the people of England really learnt to read. The few leaves of sound reason and fancy were but a light tax on uncultivated powers of attention. Exquisite grace and true kindliness, here associated with familiar ways and common incidents of every-day life, gave many an honest man fresh sense of the best happiness that lies in common duties honestly performed, and a fresh energy, free as Christianity itself from malice-for so both Steele and Addison meant that it should be-in opposing themselves to the frivolities and small frauds on the conscience by which manliness is undermined.

There was high strife of faction; and there was real peril to the country by a possible turn of affairs after Queen Anne's death, that another Stuart restoration, in the name of divine right of kings, would leave the rights of the people to be reconquered in civil war. The chiefs of either party were appealing to the people, and engaging all the wit they could secure to fight on their side in the war of pamphlets. Steele's heart was in the momentous issue. Both he and Addison had it in mind while they were blending their calm playfulness with all the clamour of the press. The spirit in which these friends worked, young Pope must have felt; for after Addison had helped him in his first approach to fame by giving honour in the Spectator to his 'Essay on Criticism,' and when he was thankful for that service, he contributed to the Spectator his_' Messiah.' Such offering clearly showed how Pope interpreted the labour of the essayists.

In the fens of Lincolnshire the antiquary Maurice Johnson collected his neighbours of Spalding. Taking care,' it is said, 'not to alarm the country gentlemen by any pre'mature mention of antiquities, he endeavoured at first to allure them into the more 'flowery paths of literature. In 1709 a few of them were brought together every post-day at the coffee-house in the Abbey Yard; and after one of the party had read aloud the 'last published number of the Tatler, they proceeded to talk over the subject among themselves.'

Even in distant Perthshire 'the gentlemen met after church on Sunday to discuss the news of the week; the Spectators were read as regularly as the Journal.' So the political draught of bitterness came sweetened with the wisdom of good-humour. The goodhumour of the essayists touched with a light and kindly hand every form of affectation, and placed every-day life in the light in which it would be seen by a natural and honest man. A sense of the essentials of life was assumed everywhere for the reader, who was asked only to smile charitably at its vanities. Steele looked through all shams to the natural heart of the Englishman, appealed to that, and found it easily enough, even under the disguise of the young gentleman cited in the 77th Tatler, 'so ambitious to be thought worse than he is that in his degree of understanding he sets up for a free-thinker, and talks atheistically in coffee-houses all day, though every morning and evening, it can be proved 'upon him, he regularly at home says his prayers.'

But as public events led nearer to the prospect of a Jacobite triumph that would have again brought Englishmen against each other sword to sword, there was no voice of warning more fearless than Richard Steele's. He changed the Spectator for the Guardian, that was to be, in its plan, more free to guard the people's rights, and, standing forward more distinctly as a politician, he became member for Stockbridge. For the Guardian, which he had dropped when he felt the plan of that journal unequal to the right and full expression of his mind, Steele took for a periodical the name of Englishman, and under that name fought, with then unexampled abstinence from personality, against the principles upheld by Swift in his Examiner. Then, when the Peace of Utrecht alarmed English patriots, Steele in a bold pamphlet on 'The Crisis' expressed his dread of arbitrary power and a Jacobite succession with a boldness that cost him his seat in Parliament, as he had before sacrificed to plain speaking his place of Gazetteer.]

Of the later history of Steele and Addison a few words will suffice. This is not an account of their lives, but an endeavour to show why Englishmen must always have a living interest in the Spectator, their joint production. [Steele's Spectator ended with the seventh volume. The members of the Club were all disposed of, and the journal formally wound up, but by the suggestion of a future ceremony of opening the Spectator's mouth, a way was made for Addison, whenever he pleased, to connect with the famous series an attempt of his own for its revival. A year and a half later Addison made this attempt, producing his new journal with the old name and, as far as his contributions went, not less than the old wit and earnestness, three times a week instead of daily. But he kept it alive only until the completion of one volume. Addison had not Steele's popular tact as an editor. He preached, and he suffered drier men to preach, while in his jest he now and then wrote what he seems to have been unwilling to acknowledge. His eighth volume contains excellent matter, but the subjects are not always well chosen or varied judiciously, and one understands why the Spectator took a firmer hold upon society when the two friends in the full strength of their life, aged about forty, worked together and embraced between them a wide range of human thought and feeling.

In April, 1713, in the interval between the completion of the true Spectator and the appearance of the supplementary volume, Addison's tragedy of Cato, planned at College, begun during his foreign travels, retouched in England, and at last completed, was produced at Drury Lane. Addison had not considered it a stage play, but when it was urged that the time was proper for animating the public with the sentiments of Cato, he assented to its production. Apart from its real merit the play had the advantage of being applauded by the Whigs, who saw in it a Whig political ideal, and by the Tories, who desired to show that they were as warm friends of liberty as any Whig could be.

Upon the death of Queen Anne Addison acted for a short time as secretary to the Regency, and when George I. appointed Addison's patron, the Earl of Sunderland, to the Lord-lieutenancy of Ireland, Sunderland took Addison with him as chief secretary. Sunderland resigned in ten months, and thus Addison's secretaryship came to an end in August, 1716. Addison was also employed to meet the Rebellion of 1715 by writing the Freeholder. He wrote under this title fifty-five papers, which were published twice a week between December, 1715, and June, 1716; and he was rewarded with the post of Commissioner for Trade and Colonies. In August, 1716, he married the Countess Dowager of Warwick, mother to the young Earl of Warwick, of whose education he seems to have had some charge in 1708. Addison settled upon the Countess £4000 in lieu of an

estate which she gave up for his sake. Henceforth he lived chiefly at Holland House. In April, 1717, Lord Sunderland became Secretary of State, and still mindful of Marlborough's illustrious supporter, he made Addison his colleague. Eleven months later, ill health obliged Addison to resign the seals; and his death followed, June 17, 1719, at the age of 47. Steele's political difficulties ended at the death of Queen Anne. The return of the Whigs to power on the accession of George I. brought him the office of Surveyor of the Royal Stables at Hampton Court; he was also first in the Commission of the peace for Middlesex, and was made one of the deputy lieutenants of the county. At the request of the managers Steele's name was included in the new patent required at Drury Lane by the royal company of comedians upon the accession of a new sovereign. Steele also was returned as M. P. for Boroughbridge, in Yorkshire, was writer of the Address to the king presented by the Lord-lieutenant and the deputy lieutenants of Middlesex, and being knighted on that occasion, with two other of the deputies, became in the spring of the year, 1714, Sir Richard Steele. Very few weeks after the death of his wife, in December, 1718, Sunderland, at a time when he had Addison for colleague, brought in a bill for preventing any future creations of peers, except when an existing peerage should become extinct. Steele, who looked upon this as an infringement alike of the privileges of the crown and of the rights of the subject, opposed the bill in Parliament, and started in March, 1719, a paper called the Plebeian, in which he argued against a measure tending, he said, to the formation of an oligarchy. Addison replied in the Old Whig, and this, which occurred within a year of the close of Addison's life, was the main subject of political difference between them. The bill, strongly opposed, was dropped for that session, and reintroduced (after Addison's death) in the December following, to be thrown out by the House of Commons.

Steele's action against the government brought on him the hostility of the Duke of Newcastle, then Lord Chamberlain ; and it was partly to defend himself and his brother patentees against hostile action threatened by the Duke, that Steele, in January, 1720, started his paper called the Theatre. But he was dispossessed of his government of the theatre, to which a salary of £600 a year had been attached, and suffered by the persecution of the court until Walpole's return to power. Steele was then restored to his office, and in the following year, 1722, produced his most successful comedy, The Conscious Lovers. After this time his health declined; his spirits were depressed. He left London for Bath. His only surviving son, Eugene, born while the Spectator was being issued, and to whom Prince Eugene had stood godfather, died at the age of eleven or twelve in November, 1723. The younger also of his two daughters was marked for death by consumption. He was broken in health and fortune when, in 1726, he had an attack of palsy which was the prelude to his death. He died Sept. 1, 1729, at Carmarthen, where he had been boarding with a mercer who was his agent and receiver of rents. There is a pleasant record that he retained his cheerful sweetness of temper to the last; and would often be 'carried out, of a summer's evening, where the country lads and lasses were assembled 'at their rural sports,—and, with his pencil, gave an order on his agent, the mercer, for a new gown to the best dancer.'

Two editions of the Spectator, the tenth and eleventh, were published by Tonson in the year of Steele's death. These and the next edition, dated 1739, were without the translations of the mottos, which appear, however, in the edition of 1744. Notes were first added by Dr. Percy, the editor of the Reliques of Ancient Poetry, and Dr. Calder. Dr. John Calder, a native of Aberdeen, bred to the dissenting ministry, was for some time keeper of Dr. Williams's Library in Redcross Street. He was a candidate for the office given to Dr. Abraham Rees, of editor and general superintendent of the new issue of Chambers's Cyclopædia, undertaken by the booksellers in 1776, and he supplied to it some new articles. The Duke of Northumberland warmly patronized Dr. Calder, and made him his companion in London and at Alnwick Castle as Private Literary Secretary. Dr. Thomas Percy, who had constituted himself cousin and retainer to the Percy of Northumberland, obtained his bishopric of Dromore in 1782, in the following year lost his only son, and suffered from that failure in eyesight, which resulted in a total blindness. Having become intimately acquainted with Dr. Calder when at Northumberland House