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Steele, who seems to have gathered new life and have a new fund of wit; it is in the same nature as his 'Tatlers', and they have all of them had something pretty. I believe Addison and he club. Then he adds a complaint of the chill in their friendship. A month after the date of this paper Swift wrote in his journal,
You will be sorry to know that, a few Tatlers further on, the kind mother of this happy family dies. But Steele was himself so much touched by the thought of all the misery he was bringing upon the others by giving such a sad ending to his story, that he could not go on with the paper, and Addison had to finish it for him.
Johnson, or in the half German jargon of the present day, his genius would have triumphed over all faults of manner. As a moral satirist he stands unrivalled. If ever the best Tatlers and Spectators were equalled in their own kind, we should be inclined to guess that it must have been by the lost comedies of Menander. In wit, properly so called, Addison was not inferior to Cowley or Butler.
Steele said, "She did not know, but the Captain brought home this queer little creature when she was in bed with her first boy, and it was a mercy he had come no sooner; and Dick raved about his genus, and was always raving about some nonsense or other." "Which of the 'Tatlers' do you prefer, Mrs. Steele?" asked Mr. St. John.
But of the many eminent men who have made Addison their model, though several have copied his mere diction with happy effect, none has been able to catch the tone of his pleasantry. In the World, in the Connoisseur, in the Mirror, in the Lounger, there are numerous Papers written in obvious imitation of his Tatlers and Spectators.
We had at first, indeed, no manner of notion how a diurnal paper could be continued in the spirit and style of our present 'Spectators': but, to our no small surprise, we find them still rising upon us, and can only wonder from whence so prodigious a run of Wit and Learning can proceed; since some of our best judges seem to think that they have hitherto, in general, outshone even the 'Esquire's' first 'Tatlers'.
Here is the first 'little Diversion'; the germ of 'Tatlers' and 'Spectators' which in after years amused and edified the town. 'Mercure Scandale: or, ADVICE from the Scandalous CLUB. 'Translated out of French'.
About this he tells us himself in one of the Tatlers: "The first sense of sorrow I ever knew was upon the death of my father, at which time I was not quite five years of age. But was rather amazed at what all the house meant, than possessed with a real understanding, why nobody was willing to play with me. I remember I went into the room where his body lay, and my mother sat weeping alone by it.
It came in again, by a natural reaction, with the returning Stuarts, and throughout the period of the Restoration it enjoyed a perfunctory favor. There is mention of it; often enough in the eighteenth-century essayists, in the Spectators and Idlers and Tatlers; but the world about the middle of the last century laments the neglect into which it had fallen.
In the earlier contributions of Addison to the Tatler his peculiar powers were not fully exhibited. Yet from the first, his superiority to all his coadjutors was evident. Some of his later Tatlers are fully equal to anything that he ever wrote. Among the portraits we most admire "Tom Folio," "Ned Softly," and the "Political Upholsterer."
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