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Chief interests: Russian Jewesses and American dollars. In more sober truth, education: Presentation Brothers Schools, Cork School of Art, Cork School of Music, Metropolitan School of Art, Dublin, and Royal College of Art, London. Profession: sculptor and dramatist. Chief interests: literature, art, and music. First magazine to publish his work, The Tatler.
When the civil war broke down the barriers of intellectual non-intercourse behind which the South had ensconced itself, it was found to be in a colonial condition. Its libraries were English libraries, mostly composed of old English literature. Its literary growth stopped with the reign of George III. Its latest news was the Spectator and the Tatler.
The penny bi-weekly broadside of session 1823-4 was almost wholly dedicated to Momus. Epigrams, pointless letters, amorous verses, and University grievances are the continual burthen of the song. But Mr. Tatler was not without a vein of hearty humour; and his pages afford what is much better: to wit, a good picture of student life as it then was.
With the Bible open before them, and with hearts alive to the teachings of holiness, the generality of religious-minded Quakers were not likely to be satisfied with what Warburton rightly called not so much a religion as 'a divine philosophy, not fit for such a creature as man, nor with a religious vocabulary summed up, as a writer in the 'Tatler' humorously said, in the three words, 'Light, 'Friend, and 'Babylon. There was no reason why the worship of the individual should not be very free from the prevalent errors of the sect, and be in a high sense pure and Christian.
Yet if Diderot had read the Tatler, he would certainly have referred to the story in No. 55, how William Jones of Newington, born blind, was brought to sight at the age of twenty a story told in a manner after Diderot's own heart. It is proper in this place to mention a short philosophic piece which Diderot wrote in 1751, his Letter on the Deaf and Dumb for the Use of those who Hear and Talk.
Dean Swift, also, in the Tatler, No. 228, in describing a City shower, thus alludes to the common use of the Umbrella by women:
Steele, as an officer, then, or soon afterwards, made a Captain of Fusiliers, could not refuse to fight, but stood on the defensive; yet in parrying a thrust his sword pierced his antagonist, and the danger in which he lay quickened that abiding detestation of the practice of duelling, which caused Steele to attack it in his plays, in his 'Tatler', in his 'Spectator', with persistent energy.
Of these latter, the Coffee-House Politician; or, The Justice caught in his own Trap, 1730, succeeded the Author's Farce. The leading idea, that of a tradesman who neglects his shop for "foreign affairs," appears to be derived from Addison's excellent character-sketch in the Tatler of the "Political Upholsterer."
What there is of pathos and sentiment, and most of what there is of humour in the Tatler and the Spectator are his. And he created the dramatis personae out of whose adventures the slender thread of continuity which binds the essays together is woven. Addison, though less open to the onslaughts of the conventional moralist, was a less lovable personality.
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.
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