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This is exactly in Steele's style; but we find erelong in the "Tatler" a spiritual quality that was not a part of Steele's nature. From current gossip and easy society commonplace, the tone is exalted, and this we know was the result of Addison's influence. Out of two hundred seventy-one articles in the "Tatler," one hundred eighty-eight were produced by Steele and forty-two by Addison.
You may remember, I told you before, that one cause assigned for the laying down the 'Tatler' was, Want of Matter; and, indeed, this was the prevailing opinion in Town: when we were surprised all at once by a paper called the 'Spectator', which was promised to be continued every day; and was written in so excellent a style, with so nice a judgment, and such a noble profusion of wit and humour, that it was not difficult to determine it could come from no other hands but those which had penned the 'Lucubrations'.
As Addison had now no Government post, it left him all the more time for writing, and his essays in the Spectator are what we chiefly remember him by. The Spectator was still further from the ordinary newspaper than the Tatler. It was more perhaps what our modern magazines are meant to be, but, instead of being published once a week or once a month, it was published every morning.
Dryden died in 1700 and for a time Will's maintained its position as the resort of the poets. Did not Steele say that all his accounts of poetry in the Tatler would appear under the name of that house? But the supremacy of Will's was slowly undermined, so that even in the Tatler the confession had soon to be made that the place was very much altered since Dryden's time.
In September, 1713, the Guardian ceased to appear. Steele had gone mad about politics. A general election had just taken place; he had been chosen member for Stockbridge; and he fully expected to play a first part in Parliament. The immense success of the Tatler and Spectator had turned his head.
Steele had had a predecessor in Defoe, whose Review had been in existence since 1704, but the more airy graces which characterized the Tatler and the Spectator gave the "lucubrations" of "Isaac Bickerstaffe" and of "Mr. Spectator" a greater hold on the public than Defoe's paper was ever able to establish.
Calder's are signed 'Annotator. The 'Tatler' was annotated fully, and the annotated 'Tatler' has supplied some pieces of information given in the present edition of the 'Spectator'. Percy actually edited two volumes for R. Tonson in 1764, but the work was stopped by the death of the bookseller, and the other six were added to them in 1789.
Every man with two or three ideas and ten dollars' capital started a magazine. Steele, teeming with thoughts demanding expression, at war with smug society, and possessing wit withal, started the "Tatler," to be issued three times a week, price one penny. Seizing upon a creation of Swift's, "Isaac Bickerstaff," a character already known to the public, was introduced as editor.
At least this will not be dull; when I was younger, I could have welcomed such a world with relief; but it is the New-Old with a vengeance, and irresistibly suggests the growth of military powers and the foundation of new empires. On the 2nd of January 1824 was issued the prospectus of the Lapsus Linguae; or, the College Tatler; and on the 7th the first number appeared.
In our study we have noted: the Augustan or Classic Age; the meaning of Classicism; the life and work of Alexander Pope, the greatest poet of the age; of Jonathan Swift, the satirist; of Joseph Addison, the essayist; of Richard Steele, who was the original genius of the Tatler and the Spectator; of Samuel Johnson, who for nearly half a century was the dictator of English letters; of James Boswell, who gave us the immortal Life of Johnson; of Edmund Burke, the greatest of English orators; and of Edward Gibbon, the historian, famous for his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
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