loyally the little senate worked for the glory of its individual members, and with what a gentle hand Addison ruled his friends. Finally, when some pedantic curmudgeon wrote to The Spectator protesting against the epilogue, the letter was printed to be suitably pulverized in a later number.2

2

The Spectator

"La sagesse ! quel thème inépuisable ! ”—Amiel.

ADDISON'S period of enforced political idleness was not given over only to such occasions, for he was chiefly engaged upon the work whereon his fame most firmly rests, journalistic essay writing.

In 1709, bettering a method initiated by Defoe, Steele launched The Tatler, of which the name was chosen in compliment to the Fair Sex. The sheets were sent to Dublin, whence Addison, guessing by an allusion in one of them that their author was his friend, at once began to contribute. It was the very thing for him; there, without fear of exposure, he could try his hand. It was, as Miss Aikin said, "what his diffidence required, a safe and private channel ". If he failed, the papers need never be known to be his; if he succeeded, he could in course of time step forward to take the honours due. In any case, modesty apart, it was a wise precaution to be anonymous, for the expression of views might be attended by uncomfortable results: bread cast upon calm waters might return in an unpleasant form after many days, when the waters were stormy. But in such a journal as The Tatler Addison really could express himself—and did, with the result that nothing reveals him more clearly than the long series of essays he wrote for various periodicals.

Of course absolute concealment over a great stretch. of time could not be hoped for, but there would always be a doubt as to who had written any particular paper.

T

And here Steele, with his lamentable recklessness, came in useful. He was the ideal collaborator; he served as whipping-boy, a happy state of affairs not unobserved by Gay. "I have thought ", he wrote of Steele and Addison, “that the conjunction of those two great geniuses (who seem to stand in a class by themselves, so high above all other wits), resembles that of two famous statesmen [Somers and Halifax] in a late reign . . . the first was continually at work behind the curtain; drew up and prepared all the schemes and designs which the latter still drove on, and stood out exposed to the world, to receive its praise or censures." I

Indeed, left by himself, Addison had not the nerve to ' drive on ' a journal, and his attempt to set up The Whig Examiner in 1710 proved a failure, though to be sure political polemics were not his forte. If Somers and Halifax had reared him for this, they made a mistake in the subject they chose for training, for in that field he was no match for Prior, whom they had foolishly allowed to secede. Addison's Whig Examiners have, as Macaulay said, "as little merit as anything that he wrote "," and in December, after eight numbers, hearing that Swift was to take over The Examiner, the Tory instrument, he "avoided the contest as at once doubtful, harassing and invidious ".3

At about this time Steele abruptly ended The Tatler, not that it was beginning to be thought dull, except by Swift, but that one or two opinions too Whiggish for the ruling powers had made certain difficulties. It was impossible to keep Steele's pen out of the political inkpot. But the venture had been so successful, so much to Addison's taste, that the friends almost at once started another journal: but this time it was Addison Present State of Wit. 2 Macaulay MS.

3 Scott, 112.