Gazetteer that suggested to him the project of The Tatler, with which the periodical literature of England takes its rise. English journalism, of course, is older than the Tatler by more than halfa-century, beginning, as it practically does (for one need hardly go back to Nathaniel Butters), with the 'Mercuries'-Mercurius Aulicus, Politicus Britannicus, Anti-Britannicus, Pragmaticus, and so on-that came forth in shoals at the outbreak of the great Civil War. In the reign of Queen Anne there were in London plenty of newspapers, or rather meagre news-sheets, in addition to the official Gazetteer, which endeavoured to report the politics-and especially the foreign politics-of the day. The crazed upholsterer, for example, whom Addison sketched in some of the later issues of the Tatler had his poor brain turned by much speculation on the movements of Marlborough and Prince Eugene and the King of Sweden, as reported in the Postman, the Post-Boy, the Daily Courant, the Supplement, and the English Post. Besides these there was Defoe's Review, started in 1704, which may be described as the first of our organs of opinion on politics, giving, as it did, political criticism in addition to bare news. And, lastly, the obliging sheets which undertook, after the example of John Dunton's Athenian Mercury (1690-97), to resolve all the most nice and curious questions proposed by the ingenious of either sex,' had started that line of journalistic development which is still continued in the 'answers to correspondents' in provincial weekly newspapers.

The Tatler, however, was altogether different from these, and represented a departure which in the end was to issue, not in the modern newspaper, but in the magazine. Its descent from the news-sheets is shown by the scraps of political tidings which Steele borrowed from the Gazette for its earlier numbers; but its essential purpose from the first was the description and criticism of polite society in London. In the notice prefixed to the opening numbers, Steele describes himself as writing 'for the use of politic persons, who are so publick spirited as to neglect their own affairs to look into transactions of state.' Something is to be offered whereby such worthy and well-affected members of the commonwealth may be instructed, after their reading, what to think; and there is to be something also 'which may be of entertainment to the fair sex,' in honour of whom the title of the paper is declared to be invented. The contents of the numbers are dated, according to their subjects, from the various social resorts about town. 'All accounts of gallantry, pleasure, and entertainment,' for example, are 'under the article of White's Chocolate-House; Poetry under that of Will's Coffee-House; Learning under the title of Grecian; Foreign and Domestick News from St James's Coffee-House.' This last kind of intelligence was inserted to

give sober ballast and actuality to the paper; but, being evidently found superfluous, it was gradually excluded, and the Tatler became entirely a description and criticism of the manners and morals of the day.

The first number- a double-columned folio sheet-appeared on the 12th of April 1709, and its successors came out regularly three times a week, on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, at the price of a penny, until the 2nd of January 1711. They were written in the character of an imaginary Isaac Bickerstaff, a benevolent old bachelor, whose name, in the preceding year, had been made famous by Swift's employment of it in his mystification of the astrologer Partridge. Steele was now on terms of friendship with Swift, who for about eighteen months had been in London on ecclesiastical business, and a few of the papers in the Tatler are from the Vicar's caustic pen. A far more important contributor was Addison, whose assistance was acknowledged by Steele with characteristic and exaggerated generosity. The forty-two papers known or believed to have been written by him contain, doubtless, some of the finest thoughts and most finished writing in the Tatler; yet Steele spoke rather as a friend than a critic when he said, 'I fared like a distressed prince who calls in a powerful neighbour to his aid: I was undone by my auxiliary; when I had once called him in I could not subsist without dependence on him.' Other contributors-but only to a very trifling extent were Congreve, Hughes, Ambrose Philips, and Harrison. Of the two hundred and seventyone numbers, Steele wrote about one hundred and eighty-eight himself, and twenty-five in cooperation with Addison; and he was editorially responsible, as we should now say, for the whole.

The contents of the Tatler, which were immediately republished in successive volumes as The Lucubrations of Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq., are as various as the aspects of the life it professed to describe and criticise. In its numbers a dramatic criticism is followed by an imaginary character-sketch of a pair of beauties; a pathetic love-story or scene of domestic life is found alongside a gentle satire on fopperies in dress and conversation; a serious discourse on the evils of gaming and duelling is relieved by a picture of some odd frequenter of the coffee-houses or the Mall. In his self-imposed rôle of observer and censor of polite society, Mr Bickerstaff takes note of every social foible and vice and humour from the 'nice conduct of a clouded cane' or the exor bitant circumference of a hooped petticoat to the evils of loveless marriages for an establishment, and from the insipid affectations of the visitingday and the noisy utterance of responses in church to the arts of the well-bred cheat and the brutality of the bully. The treatment of these subjects is, as a rule, much less formal and elaborate than in the Spectator, where every paper

is a substantive essay, usually on a set theme. In its later days, indeed, the Tatler assumed this form; but its earlier numbers each dealt with three or four subjects, which of course were lightly and never exhaustively handled. As a consequence, while the Spectator has a more solid literary value, the Tatler gives us perhaps the more lively picture of the varied life of the period. Turning over its pages, one can see Betterton in Love for Love, and Wilkes as Sir Harry Wildair, and watch Tom Modely and Will Courtly tapping their snuff-boxes at White's or ogling Chloe and Clarinda in Pall Mall. The ladies, patched and powdered, trip to and from their sedan chairs and coaches; the preacher at St Paul's or St Clement Dane's holds forth for or against Dr Sacheverell; at the Grecian the Templars discuss tragedy and epic according to the rules of Aristotle and Bossu; the Mohocks scour the ill-lit streets at night. The bluff country squire amuses the coffee-house by calling for a morning draught of ale and Dyer's newsletter; at the rich man's table the poor parson rises ruefully before the dessert, and in the long stage-coach journey to Bristol or Exeter the travellers are bored and jolted into a state of sullen ennui mitigated only by dread of the highwayman's pistol. Through it all, too, there comes an echo of the great events of the time-the tramp of the armies of Marlborough and Vendôme, and the distant thunder of the cannon of Malplaquet and Pultowa.

Steele's share in the Tatler is so marked and preponderant as to have caused the general association of the paper with his name, and without any disparagement of the invaluable aid given by Addison, it must be owned that the scope and main features of the venture were determined by Steele. To him, for one thing, its strong moral purpose was due. Steele was essentially a preacher, ever bent on the reformation of society, and in the Tatler he set himself not only with energy, but also with much tactical skill, to make assault on the many flagrant corruptions of the age. Conspicuous among his attacks were those on gaming and duelling, of which he says himself, with justifiable complaisance, that in spight of all the force of fashion and prejudice, in the face of all the world, I alone bewailed the condition of an English gentleman, whose fortune and life are at this day precarious, while his estate is liable to the demands of gamesters through a false sense of justice, and his life to the demands of duellists through a false sense of honour.'

But his best service to morality was rendered in his persistent efforts to raise the general estimate of women and the level of feminine culture and self-respect. Steele's chivalrous regard for women was one of the finest points in his character, and prompted perhaps his best and most famous sentence in eulogy of Aspasia (Lady Elizabeth Hastings), of whom he said in the 49th Tatler

that to love her was 'a liberal education.' In striving to rectify the position of what he called 'the fair sex,' he struck deep and straight at the worst evils of the day, for undoubtedly the frivolity of fashionable women in the late Stuart period was both cause and effect of the profligacy and brutality of the Rochesters and Sedleys and Mohuns. From the first, Steele made his appeal to women equally with men, and throughout he was never weary of urging on them the duty of acquiring mental culture, of taking a sensible view of life, and acquiring a proper conception of the seriousness and sanctity of marriage. His 'message' on this head is well summarised in a few sentences of the admirable 248th Tatler:

'It is with great indignation that I see such crowds of the female world lost to human society, and condemned to a laziness which makes life pass away with less relish than in the hardest labour. . . . Those who are in the quality of gentlewomen should propose to themselves some suitable method of passing away their time. This would furnish them with reflections and sentiments proper for the companions of reasonable men, and prevent the unnatural marriages which happen every day between the most accomplish'd women and the veriest oafs, the Were worthiest men and the most insignificant females. the general turn of women's education of another kind than it is at present, we should want one another for more reasons than we do as the world now goes.'

It was natural that a man who wrote thus should glorify all cleanly and kindly sentiments, as they are glorified in the Tatler. Sometimes indeed, in pathetic pictures of true lovers' woes like the stories of Philander and Chloe (No. 94), the sentiment is a trifle maudlin; but in the charming domestic pictures as a rule-in such masterpieces as the account of his father's death (No. 181), the description of the family where Mr Bickerstaff visits as an old friend (Nos. 95 and 114), and the relation of the little matrimonial jars of Tranquillus and Jenny (No. 85)-the pathos and tenderness of Steele are unerring. No man has written more simply and beautifully of the love of husband and wife and parents and children, and of the innocent joys of home.

Of the other features of Steele's work in the Tatler one need only notice the uniform kindliness of satire (it was Steele's creed that every satirist should be a good-natured man); the humour, broader and less refined than Addison's; the negligently easy style so free from sententiousness despite the moral burden of the content; and the justice of the literary and dramatic criticism. Steele, it is true, seldom or never analyses his judgments, and shows nothing that can be called a critical theory; but his judgments themselves are sound; his taste is good. He frankly admires what is admirable, and transcribes it generously for the reader's benefit. Hardly any one of our writers quotes Shakespeare so often.

Two months after the Tatler, to the great regret of the town, had been discontinued, there

appeared (1st March 1711) the more famous Spectator, which ran until the 6th of December in the next year. It came out every week-day, and, like its predecessor, cost a penny until the Stamp Act passed by Harley's Government caused its price to be doubled. It was a signal proof of the paper's popularity that it continued to exist, though with a diminished circulation, in spite of a tax which killed most of the journals of the day. Its highest circulation seems to have been 14,000 copies, and even after the half-penny tax had been laid on, 10,000 copies of it were sold on an average every day. The honours of the Spectator have fallen mainly to Addison; yet Steele's part in it was far from unimportant. Of the 555 numbers, 236 (signed with the letter R. or T.) were written by him, as against Addison's 274. Among the other contributors were Ambrose Philips (who signs X.), Pope (whose Messiah appeared in No. 378), Hughes, Tickell, Parnell, and Eusden. Steele, it should be added, had no hand in Addison's brief revival of the Spectator in June 1714.

The idea of the Spectator's Club, which is described in the second number, was Steele's invention, and from him consequently came not only the pictures of Sir Andrew Freeport, Will Honeycomb, and Captain Sentry, but also the first sketch of Sir Roger de Coverley, which was afterwards developed into the immortal series of papers forming Addison's masterpiece. To Steele also belong one or two of the most pleasing papers ordinarily reckoned in that series, containing (Nos. 113 and 118) the account of Sir Roger's hopeless passion for the widow; and to him, according to the best critical opinion, must not be attributed the degradation of the knight's character by showing him in an adventure with a woman of the town. The well-known tale of Inkle and Yarico, one of the oftenest-quoted examples of Steele's pathos, is to be found in the Spectator (No. 11); and there also, as first-rate specimens of his humour, criticism, and satire, we may instance the amusing narrative of the stage-coach journey with the Quaker and the brisk captain (No. 132), the account of Raphael's cartoons (Nos. 226 and 244), and the peculiarly vigorous and plain-spoken attack (No. 51) on the grossness of the stage. The steady moral purpose which had guided the Tatler is maintained in numerous papers on the evils of profaneness, profligacy, female frivolity, and even the blessedness of keeping out of debt. Poor Steele always preached much better than he practised, and it can well be believed that there was some truth in the ingenuous confession with which he closed the Tatler, that as 'severity of manners was absolutely necessary for him who would censure others,' the purpose of the paper was 'wholly lost' by his being so long understood as the author.'

To the Spectator, on the 12th of March 1713, succeeded the comparatively short-lived Guardian, the last of the three great periodicals of Queen Anne's reign. It also appeared daily at the price

of a penny, running till the 1st of October in the same year. Nearly half the papers were by Steele, rather less than a third by Addison, and most of the rest by Dr George (afterwards Bishop) Berkeley. The place of Isaac Bickerstaff and Mr Spectator is here taken by an equally imaginary Nestor Ironside, and the reader at the outset is informed that his chief entertainment will arise from what passes at the tea-table of My Lady Lizard, to whose family Mr Ironside stands in loco parentis. Briefly, the Guardian may be described as showing, with an inevitable lack of freshness, the same kind of contents and qualities as had made the fortune of its predecessor. The introduction of party politics spoiled it for its own day and for posterity. Always a very militant Whig, Steele had allowed hits at the Tories even in the Tatler; and Swift, when ratting to the side of Harley and St John in 1712, grumbled that he had been 'mighty impertinent of late in his Spectators. The greatly intensified rage of faction in the last years of Queen Anne had its effect on the Guardian, which was often little better than a party pamphlet.

In politics, indeed, Steele had become ever more and more deeply engaged during those stormy years which saw the downfall of Godolphin and Marlborough, the administration of Oxford and Bolingbroke, and the ending of the great war by the Peace of Utrecht. The dismissal of the Whigs had deprived him of his post of Gazetteer, but not of the commissionership of stamps which had been bestowed on him in 1710, and which he retained till 1713. His gradual breach with Swift, who in the former of these years had turned pamphleteer on the Tory side, is traceable in the Journal to Stella, which contains some graphic and caustic notices of his character and habits. 'He is governed by his wife,' we read, 'most abominably. I never saw her since I came, nor has he ever made me an invitation; either he does not, or is such a thoughtless Tisdall fellow that he never minds it. So what care I for his wit? for he is the worst company in the world till he has a bottle of wine in his head.' 'Once, when he was to have made one of a tavern party,' we are told that he 'came not, nor never did twice, since I knew him, to any appointment.' In 1713 the Guardian brought the two into open paper-warfare, Swift attacking Steele in the Examiner and also in a tract called The Importance of the Guardian considered. When the Guardian came to an end, Steele carried on his campaign against the Government in its successor, The Englishman (October 1713-February 1714), memorable only because its twenty-sixth number contains the account of Alexander Selkirk which is supposed to have given Defoe the hint for Robinson Crusoe. In January 1714 Steele published the pamphlet entitled The Crisis, and followed it up with The Lover and The Reader, two polemical periodicals which had the very shortest life. The climax was reached in his election to the Parliament of 1714

and his almost instant expulsion by a vote of the House of Commons on the 12th of March for 'seditious' paragraphs in the Crisis and the Englishman. Addison prompted him in the three hours' speech of 'great temper, modesty, and unconcern' which he made in his defence, and Stanhope and Walpole were among his supporters; but the Tory majority were resolved, after the fashion of the day, to have their revenge on the leading Whig pamphleteer. The persecution had one good result in the publication of the Apology for Himself and his Writings October 1714), which contains many interesting biographical details.

In a very few months, however, came a turn of the wheel of political fortune. The accession of George I. brought the Whigs again to the top, and with them, of course, rose Steele. By the goodwill of the actors, who gratefully remembered his Tatler criticisms, he became a patentee and manager of Drury Lane Theatre, with a substantial share of the profits. In the beginning of 1715 he entered Parliament again, and in April of the same year he was knighted. Soon afterwards a place was found for him on the commission for inquiring into the estates forfeited by the rebels of 1715; and this appointment necessitated a journey to Edinburgh in 1718, when he was welcomed in verse by Allan Ramsay and Alexander Pennecuik. His literary activity was maintained in a new volume of the Englishman (1715) and one or two other ephemeral periodicals Town Talk, Tea-Table, Chit-Chat—in that and the next year.

Yet withal, prosperity was not secured. Steele's thriftless habits and his proneness to speculation, manifested conspicuously in a luckless project for the carriage of live fish by sea, kept him in his normal state of impecuniosity and debt. But there were worse misfortunes still. 'Dear Prue' died in 1718, and next year came the end of that friendship with Addison of which he had boasted so often with a touching humility and generosity that are among the best proofs of his real excellence of character. Addison's decorous instincts must often have been shocked by Steele's prodigality, and there seems no reason to doubt the well-known story which represents him reclaiming a loan by means of an execution on his friend, to teach him a lesson in frugality--a lesson which is said to have been accepted with perfect good humour, but of course without any good result. The quarrel, however, was not about money, but politics, for the two friends differed, and proceeded to a paper-war on the question of Stanhope's Peerage Bill. Steele attacked the bill in the Plebeian, Addison replied with acrimony in the Old Whig, and the two were still unreconciled when Addison died in June 1719. Steele lived ten years longer, publishing The Theatre, another shortlived periodical, in 1720, and, after one or two pamphlets, his fourth play, The Conscious Lovers, in 1722. Another play was announced but never

completed, although a few fragments of it have been preserved.

Steele's debts seem to have so accumulated as to make it prudent for him to leave London, whether for fear of duns or desire of retrenchment and repayment; and apparently he did not return to the capital after 1723. His last years were spent partly at Hereford, where his friend Hoadly was bishop, and partly at Carmarthen, where 'Prue's' property lay. Stricken by paralysis, he suffered partial loss of mind; and at Carmarthen, on 1st September 1729, he died. It is said that 'he retained his cheerful sweetness of temper to the last, and would often be carried out in a summer's evening, where the country lads and lasses were assembled at their rural sports, and with his pencil write an order for a new gown to the best dancer' -surely no unfitting final glimpse of the kindliest sentimentalist in our literature.

Love, Grief, and Death.

The first sense of sorrow I ever knew was upon the death of my father, at which time I was not quite five years of age; but was rather amazed at what all the house meant, than possessed with a real understanding why nobody was willing to play with me. I remember I went into the room where his body lay, and my mother sat weeping alone by it. I had my battledoor in my hand, and fell a-beating the coffin, and calling Papa,' for I know not how I had some slight idea that he was locked up there. My mother catched me in her arms, and transported beyond all patience of the silent grief she was before in, she almost smothered me in her embrace, and told me, in a flood of tears, papa could not hear me, and would play with me no more, for they were going to put him under ground, whence he could never come to us again. She was a very beautiful woman, of a noble spirit, and there was a dignity in her grief amidst all the wildness of her transport, which methought struck me with an instinct of sorrow, which, before I was sensible what it was to grieve, seized my very soul, and has made pity the weakness of my heart ever since. The mind in infancy is, methinks, like the body in embryo, and receives impressions so forcible that they are as hard to be removed by reason as any mark with which a child is born is to be taken away by any future application.

(From The Tatler, No. 181.)

Agreeable Companions and Flatterers. An old acquaintance who met me this morning seemed overjoyed to see me, and told me I looked as well as he had known me do these forty years; but, continued he, not quite the man you were when we visited together at Lady Brightly's. Oh! Isaac, those days are over. Do you think there are any such fine creatures now living as we then conversed with? He went on with a thousand incoherent circumstances, which, in his imagination, must needs please me; but they had the quite contrary effect. The flattery with which he began, in telling me how well I wore, was not disagreeable; but his indiscreet mention of a set of acquaintance we had outlived, recalled ten thousand things to my memory, which made me reflect upon my present condition with regret. Had he indeed been so kind as, after a long absence, to felicitate me upon an

indolent and easy old age, and mentioned how much he and I had to thank for, who at our time of day could walk firmly, eat heartily, and converse cheerfully, he had kept up my pleasure in myself. But of all mankind, there are none so shocking as these injudicious civil people. They ordinarily begin upon something that they know must be a satisfaction; but then, for fear of the imputation of flattery, they follow it with the last thing in the world of which you would be reminded. It is this that perplexes civil persons. The reason that there is such a general outcry among us against flatterers is, that there are so very few good ones. It is the nicest art in this life, and is a part of eloquence which does not want the preparation that is necessary to all other parts of it, that your audience should be your well-wishers; for praise from an enemy is the most pleasing of all commendations.

It is generally to be observed, that the person most agreeable to a man for a constancy, is he that has no shining qualities, but is a certain degree above great imperfections, whom he can live with as his inferior, and who will either overlook or not observe his little defects. Such an easy companion as this, either now and then throws out a little flattery, or lets a man silently flatter himself in his superiority to him. If you take notice, there is hardly a rich man in the world who has not such a led friend of small consideration, who is a darling for his insignificancy. It is a great ease to have one in our own shape a species below us, and who, without being listed in our service, is by nature of our retinue. These dependents are of excellent use on a rainy day, or when a man has not a mind to dress; or to exclude solitude, when one has neither a mind to that nor to company. There are of this good-natured order who are so kind as to divide themselves, and do these good offices to many. Five or six of them visit a whole quarter of the town, and exclude the spleen, without fees, from the families they frequent. If they do not prescribe physic, they can be company when you take it. Very great benefactors to the rich, or those whom they call people at their ease, are your persons of no consequence. I have known some of them, by the help of a little cunning, make delicious flatterers. They know the course of the town, and the general characters of persons; by this means they will sometimes tell the most agreeable falsehoods imaginable. They will acquaint you that such an one of a quite contrary party said, that though you were engaged in different interests, yet he had the greatest respect for your good sense and address. When one of these has a little cunning, he passes his time in the utmost satisfaction to himself and his friends; for his position is never to report or speak a displeasing thing to his friend. As for letting him go on in an error, he knows advice against them is the office of persons of greater talents and less discretion.

The Latin word for a flatterer (assentator) implies no more than a person that barely consents; and indeed such an one, if a man were able to purchase or maintain him, cannot be bought too dear. Such a one never contradicts you, but gains upon you, not by a fulsome way of commending you in broad terms, but liking whatever you propose or utter; at the same time is ready to beg your pardon, and gainsay you if you chance to speak ill of yourself. An old lady is very seldom without such a companion as this, who can recite the names of all her lovers, and the matches refused by her in the days

when she minded such vanities-as she is pleased to call them, though she so much approves the mention of them. It is to be noted, that a woman's flatterer is generally elder than herself, her years serving at once to recommend her patroness's age, and to add weight to her complaisance in all other particulars.

We gentlemen of small fortunes are extremely neces sitous in this particular. I have indeed one who smokes with me often; but his parts are so low, that all the incense he does me is to fill his pipe with me, and to be out at just as many whiffs as I take. This is all the praise or assent that he is capable of, yet there are more hours when I would rather be in his company than that of the brightest man I know. It would be an hard matter to give an account of this inclination to be flattered; but if we go to the bottom of it, we shall find that the pleasure in it is something like that of receiving money which lay out. Every man thinks he

has an estate of reputation, and is glad to see one that will bring any of it home to him; it is no matter how dirty a bag it is conveyed to him in, or by how clownish a messenger, so the money is good. All that we want to be pleased with flattery, is to believe that the man is sincere who gives it us. It is by this one accident that absurd creatures often outrun the most skilful in this art. Their want of ability is here an advantage, and their bluntness, as it is the seeming effect of sincerity, is the best cover to artifice.

It is, indeed, the greatest of injuries to flatter any but the unhappy, or such as are displeased with themselves for some infirmity. In this latter case we have a member of our club, that, when Sir Jeffrey falls asleep, wakens him with snoring. This makes Sir Jeffrey hold up for some moments the longer, to see there are men younger than himself among us, who are more lethargic than he is.

When flattery is practised upon any other consideration, it is the most abject thing in nature; nay, I cannot think of any character below the flatterer, except he that envies him. You meet with fellows prepared to be as mean as possible in their condescensions and expressions; but they want persons and talents to rise up to such a baseness. As a coxcomb is a fool of parts, so a flatterer is a knave of parts.

And upon

The best of this order that I know is one who disguises it under a spirit of contradiction or reproof. He told an arrant driveller the other day, that he did not care for being in company with him, because he heard he turned his absent friends into ridicule. Lady Autumn's disputing with him about something that happened at the Revolution, he replied with a very angry tone: Pray, madam, give me leave to know more of a thing in which I was actually concerned, than you who were then in your nurse's arms.'

(From The Tatler, No. 208.)

Quack Advertisements.

It gives me much despair in the design of reforming the world by my speculations, when I find there always arise, from one generation to another, successive cheats and bubbles, as naturally as beasts of prey and those which are to be their food. There is hardly a man in the world, one would think, so ignorant as not to know that the ordinary quack-doctors, who publish their abilities in little brown billets, distributed to all who pass by, are to a man impostors and murderers; yet