INTRODUCTION I. STEELE AND ADDISON On the morning of the 12th of April, 1709, there was laid upon all the coffee-house tables of London the first number of a double-column sheet in small folio, entitled The Tatler, or the Lucubrations of Isaac Bickerstaff. The Tatler was to be issued thrice a week, on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, and could be bought for the moderate price of one penny. The pseudonym Isaac Bickerstaff had been made familiar all over London, some months before, by an admirable jest played by Dr. Swift upon a notorious almanac maker and quack astrologer, one Partridge. Swift, writing over the signature of Bickerstaff, had gravely predicted that Partridge would infallibly die at a certain day and hour, and in another pamphlet had given a circumstantial account of his decease; while poor Partridge convulsed the town with frantic protestations that he was still alive. But the editor of The Tatler who now assumed this name of Bickerstaff was not Swift, but Richard Steele. It seems to have been Steele's intention to keep, for a time, his editorship a secret; but his disguise was soon penetrated by at least one of his friends. Joseph Addison, who was in Ireland when The Tatler appeared, detected the hand of his friend in the sixth. number. He furnished Steele, it is said, with many hints and suggestions for the early numbers of the paper, and after his return from Ireland in 1710 became himself a regular contributor. In January, 1711, The Tatler came suddenly to an end, with the 271st number. Steele, however, had no thought of abandoning this form of literary effort, and on the first of the following March he started that now more famous journal, The Spectator. The Spectator was similar in form and purpose to The Tatler, but it was to be issued daily. It is usually spoken of as Addison's Spectator; but it was no more Addison's than Steele's. The two men were associated in the conduct of it from the start, and their contributions were about equal in numberAddison writing 274 papers, and Steele 236. The second number of The Spectator, written by Steele, contains the account of that club, of which Sir Roger de Coverley was the most famous member; and the Coverley papers followed at intervals through the next year and a half. The friendship of Steele and Addison was not of recent growth. They had been boys together in the Charterhouse School, London. Dick Steele at that time was a fatherless,1 and almost friendless, lad who had been recommended to the Charterhouse by a distant relative, the Duke of Ormond. Addison was the son 1 Read the touching account of his father's death. The Tatler, No. 181. of the Dean of Lichfield, and came up to the Charterhouse from a home of culture and learning. The two young fellows formed here one of those school friendships that last a lifetime. Addison, though a little the younger, was doubtless a good deal the wiser of the two; and there may have been in his regard a touch of that patronizing temper which in later life he sometimes showed in too superior a fashion. But for Steele the acquaintance was certainly very fortunate. There are pleasant glimpses of the young Irish lad invited for a holiday to the home of his friend Addison, the quiet deanery under the trees at Lichfield. Good Dean Addison, Steele said many years after, loved him as one of his own sons; and in that home the fatherless boy saw how domestic love and purity lend a charm to manners that all the wit and fashion of the town can never give. In one of the most delightful of the Tatler papers1 he gives a portrait of a father, dignified and decorous yet affectionate, which is evidently drawn from his recollections of the Lichfield household. Addison was entered at Queen's College, Oxford, in 1687, at the early age of fifteen, and next year obtained a scholarship at Magdalen, where he continued in residence, as undergraduate, Master, and Fellow, until 1699. Steele, whose scholarship was probably not brilliant, though he had been in the Charterhouse two years longer than Addison, did not follow him to Oxford. until 1690, when he was matriculated at Christ Church. 1 No. 235. He did not remain there, however, long enough to take any degree. He never had the retiring and scholarly tastes of his friend Addison, and after three years in the university could resist the attractions of the great outside world no longer. Looking about for a career, he not unnaturally decided for the army; and in 1694 he left Oxford to enlist as a private in the Horse Guards. He soon received a commission as ensign in the regiment of Lord Cutts, and before 1700 is mentioned as Captain Steele. Steele's soldiering, which was nearly all done in London and served chiefly to make him acquainted with the town, might be passed over were it not for one thing that came of it. His life in the Guards was doubtless not so irregular as that of most soldiers; but it was more irregular than his conscience could approve. In the sincerity of his heart the young Captain of the Guards bethought himself of strengthening his moral and religious principles by writing them down in black and white, judging, as he said, that he might thereby be led to think about them the more and by his desire of consistency make his life conform to them the better. The result was the first if we except some verses printed at the death of Queen Mary in 1695 — of Steele's ventures in authorship, The Christian Hero, An Argument to prove that No Principles save those of Religion are sufficient to make a Great Man. The Christian Hero is by no means a piece of priggery, but a sensible and wise little book. It shows, moreover, |