which, save in the case of a single paper not included in this edition, we again hear but little further of Mr. Spectator's club associates, we suddenly learn, in Spectator No. 517, of Sir Roger's death at Coverley Hall, whither, we are left to infer, he has returned in the interim. With this paper, dated October 23, 1712, and written more than a year and a half after Sir Roger's first introduction to the reader, the entire series is brought to an abrupt conclusion.

From the foregoing analysis we see that Sir Roger occupies a position of much greater prominence at the end of the de Coverley series than he does at the beginning. In the first five papers of the series, Steele and Addison pay no more attention to Sir Roger than to any other member of the club. It is not until Mr. Spectator appears as a guest at Coverley Hall that Sir Roger first merges into conspicuous prominence. From that point to the end of the series he holds the center of the stage. Henceforth the other members of Mr. Spectator's club are relegated to positions of subordinate importance and when, at last, Sir Roger dies, these members disperse and the club disbands.

The instinct that led Steele and Addison to exalt Sir Roger above his fellows was a sound one. In the first five de Coverley papers no one member of the club enjoys a position of superiority over any other member. They all stand on the same level. The reason for this is obvious. As appears from the description contained in the second and third papers, all these members were originally intended to figure as typical representatives of the several classes of society to which they respectively belong. But since individuals are more interesting than abstract

types, Steele and Addison soon conceived the idea of lifting one of these gentlemen above the artificial limitations imposed by class and of describing him as a unique human personality interesting on his own account and not merely on account of the particular station in life which he happens to occupy. Of the several classes represented in Mr. Spectator's club, the old-fashioned, conservative class of landed gentry contained, no doubt, the largest number of curious, whimsical personalities. It was, apparently, for this reason that Steele and Addison selected Sir Roger de Coverley for individual characterization. Accordingly, in the papers that open with Mr. Spectator's appearance at Coverley Hall, what interests us most is not that Sir Roger goes to church on Sunday, rides to hounds, and serves as justice of the peace. These are pursuits in which we should expect any country squire to engage as a matter of course. What interests us most are those little singularities of deportment which hold Sir Roger apart from other country squires and put him in a class by himself. The good knight's praise of the gallant ancestor who narrowly escaped death at the battle of Worcester, his habit of standing up in church to count his tenants, his awkward behavior in the presence of the perverse widow," his thought of the fine tobacco-stopper that might be carved from the coronation chair of Edward the Second, his surprise to discover that tragic actors sometimes talk to be understood-these and a score of other peculiarities distinguish Sir Roger as an individual from other members of his class.

Had Steele and Addison extended this method of individual characterization from Sir Roger to Mr. Spectator's other associates, we might then be able to dignify the Sir

Roger de Coverley Papers with the appellation of our first English novel. One of the most noticeable characteristics of the little narrative unfolded in these papers, is that it lacks movement and progress. Sir Roger is a stationary character. He neither acts nor is he acted upon. He remains at the end of the series precisely the same sort of a person that he was at the beginning. Nothing happens to alter or change the even tenor of his existence. Once, to be sure, he had a love affair with the " perverse widow. But we may be permitted to doubt, despite his own assertions to the contrary, whether that event had ever colored his life or character to any considerable extent. It had, at any rate, long ceased to have any such effect by the time that we first meet him.

Now this evident lack of progress in the Sir Roger de Coverley Papers is due to the absence of any second figure commensurate in importance to Sir Roger. The de Coverley Papers contain but a single life-like portrait. They lack the variety and diversity of character that we find, for example, in a novel of Dickens. Sir Roger stands upon a solitary eminence. He has no equals with whom he can be brought into relations of enmity or friendship, of sympathy or antipathy. In default of such equals, there is no chance for a contrariety of interests, a clash of personalities, for the species of dramatic conflict we call plot. Without a plot we can have no novel and the Sir Roger de Coverley Papers lack a plot. These papers, accordingly, may most fittingly be designated as a series of loosely connected scenes illustrative of the life of a singularly fascinating individual by the name of Sir Roger de Coverley. They are descriptive rather than dramatic, and have no further object

than to picture Sir Roger in precisely the same way that the portraits in the good knight's own picture gallery picture his ancestors.

But while the Sir Roger de Coverley Papers fail to meet the requirements of the novel, they may nevertheless be said to contain the germ out of which the novel afterwards evolved. No English writer, prior to Steele and Addison, had ever drawn so life-like a portrait as that of Sir Roger. To develop the novel it remained only for some future author to devise a group or collection of equally well executed characters and to engage them in that consecutive chain of closely related events that we call plot. This task was performed later in the eighteenth century by Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett.

It may be unnecessary to add that the separate de Coverley Papers bear no titles in the early editions of the Spectator, being supplied by later editors.

DESCRIPTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY

I

STEELE

BRIEF sketches of Steele's life occur in G. A. Aitken's essay prefixed to his edition of Steele's Plays (the Mermaid Series, Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1894), and in G. R. Carpenter's Introduction to Selections from Steele (the Athenæum Press, Ginn & Co., Boston, 1897). A longer life is Austin Dobson's Richard Steele (Appleton & Co., New York, 1886). The fullest biography is G. A. Aitken's Life of Richard Steele (two volumes, the Riverside Press, Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1889).

Incidental comments upon the character of Steele are made by Johnson in his life of Addison in Lives of the Poets, first published in 1781, and by Macaulay in his essay on Addison, first published in the Edinburgh Review in 1843. Both biographers are led, however, by superior interest in Addison to underrate Steele. Macaulay, in particular, is inclined to regard Addison as a paragon of all the virtues and to picture Steele as in all respects his direct antithesis. Less harsh but equally unfair to Steele is Thackeray, who has given us two brilliant portraits of that author-one in the eleventh chapter of the second book of Henry Esmond, first published in 1852, and the other in his essay on Steele in the English Humorists of the Eighteenth Century, first published in 1853. By lay