'the gentlemen met after church on Sunday to discuss the news of the
week; the 'Spectators' were read as regularly as the 'Journal'.'
So the political draught of bitterness came sweetened with the wisdom of
good-humour. The good-humour of the essayists touched with a light and
kindly hand every form of affectation, and placed every-day life in the
light in which it would be seen by a natural and honest man. A sense of
the essentials of life was assumed everywhere for the reader, who was
asked only to smile charitably at its vanities. Steele looked through
all shams to the natural heart of the Englishman, appealed to that, and
found it easily enough, even under the disguise of the young gentleman
cited in the 77th 'Tatler',
'so ambitious to be thought worse than he is that in his degree of
understanding he sets up for a free-thinker, and talks atheistically
in coffee-houses all day, though every morning and evening, it can be
proved upon him, he regularly at home says his prayers.'
But as public events led nearer to the prospect of a Jacobite triumph
that would have again brought Englishmen against each other sword to
sword, there was no voice of warning more fearless than Richard
Steele's. He changed the 'Spectator' for the 'Guardian', that was to be,
in its plan, more free to guard the people's rights, and, standing
forward more distinctly as a politician, he became member for
Stockbridge. In place of the 'Guardian', which he had dropped when he
felt the plan of that journal unequal to the right and full expression
of his mind, Steele took for a periodical the name of 'Englishman', and
under that name fought, with then unexampled abstinence from
personality, against the principles upheld by Swift in his 'Examiner'.
Then, when the Peace of Utrecht alarmed English patriots, Steele in a
bold pamphlet on 'The Crisis' expressed his dread of arbitrary power and
a Jacobite succession with a boldness that cost him his seat in
Parliament, as he had before sacrificed to plain speaking his place of
Gazetteer.
Of the later history of Steele and Addison a few words will suffice.
This is not an account of their lives, but an endeavour to show why
Englishmen must always have a living interest in the 'Spectator', their
joint production. Steele's 'Spectator' ended with the seventh volume.
The members of the Club were all disposed of, and the journal formally
wound up; but by the suggestion of a future ceremony of opening the
'Spectator's' mouth, a way was made for Addison, whenever he pleased, to
connect with the famous series an attempt of his own for its revival. A
year and a half later Addison made this attempt, producing his new
journal with the old name and, as far as his contributions went, not
less than the old wit and earnestness, three times a week instead of
daily. But he kept it alive only until the completion of one volume.
Addison had not Steele's popular tact as an editor. He preached, and he
suffered drier men to preach, while in his jest he now and then wrote
what he seems to have been unwilling to acknowledge. His eighth volume
contains excellent matter, but the subjects are not always well chosen
or varied judiciously, and one understands why the 'Spectator' took a
firmer hold upon society when the two friends in the full strength of
their life, aged about forty, worked together and embraced between them
a wide range of human thought and feeling. It should be remembered also
that Queen Anne died while Addison's eighth volume was appearing, and
the change in the Whig position brought him other occupation of his time.
In April, 1713, in the interval between the completion of the true
'Spectator' and the appearance of the supplementary volume, Addison's
tragedy of 'Cato', planned at College; begun during his foreign travels,
retouched in England, and at last completed, was produced at Drury Lane.
Addison had not considered it a stage play, but when it was urged that
the time was proper for animating the public with the sentiments of
Cato, he assented to its production. Apart from its real merit the play
had the advantage of being applauded by the Whigs, who saw in it a Whig
political ideal, and by the Tories, who desired to show that they were
as warm friends of liberty as any Whig could be.
Upon the death of Queen Anne Addison acted for a short time as secretary
to the Regency, and when George I. appointed Addison's patron, the Earl
of Sunderland, to the Lord-lieutenancy of Ireland, Sunderland took
Addison with him as chief secretary. Sunderland resigned in ten months,
and thus Addison's secretaryship came to an end in August, 1716. Addison
was also employed to meet the Rebellion of 1715 by writing the
'Freeholder'. He wrote under this title fifty-five papers, which were
published twice a week between December, 1715, and June, 1716; and he
was rewarded with the post of Commissioner for Trade and Colonies. In
August, 1716, he married the Countess Dowager of Warwick, mother to the
young Earl of Warwick, of whose education he seems to have had some
charge in 1708. Addison settled upon the Countess £4000 in lieu of an
estate which she gave up for his sake. Henceforth he lived chiefly at
Holland House. In April, 1717, Lord Sunderland became Secretary of
State, and still mindful of Marlborough's illustrious supporter, he made
Addison his colleague. Eleven months later, ill health obliged Addison
to resign the seals; and his death followed, June 17, 1719, at the age
of 47.
Steele's political difficulties ended at the death of Queen Anne. The
return of the Whigs to power on the accession of George I. brought him
the office of Surveyor of the Royal Stables at Hampton Court; he was
also first in the Commission of the peace for Middlesex, and was made
one of the deputy lieutenants of the county. At the request of the
managers Steele's name was included in the new patent required at Drury
Lane by the royal company of comedians upon the accession of a new
sovereign. Steele also was returned as M.P. for Boroughbridge, in
Yorkshire, was writer of the Address to the king presented by the
Lord-lieutenant and the deputy lieutenants of Middlesex, and being
knighted on that occasion, with two other of the deputies, became in the
spring of the year, 1714, Sir Richard Steele. Very few weeks after the
death of his wife, in December, 1718, Sunderland, at a time when he had
Addison for colleague, brought in a bill for preventing any future
creations of peers, except when an existing peerage should become
extinct. Steele, who looked upon this as an infringement alike of the
privileges of the crown and of the rights of the subject, opposed the
bill in Parliament, and started in March, 1719, a paper called the
'Plebeian', in which he argued against a measure tending, he said, to
the formation of an oligarchy. Addison replied in the 'Old Whig', and
this, which occurred within a year of the close of Addison's life, was
the main subject of political difference between them. The bill,
strongly opposed, was dropped for that session, and reintroduced (after
Addison's death) in the December following, to be thrown out by the
House of Commons.
Steele's argument against the government brought on him the hostility of
the Duke of Newcastle, then Lord Chamberlain; and it was partly to
defend himself and his brother patentees against hostile action
threatened by the Duke, that Steele, in January, 1720, started his paper
called the 'Theatre'. But he was dispossessed of his government of the
theatre, to which a salary of £600 a-year had been attached, and
suffered by the persecution of the court until Walpole's return to
power. Steele was then restored to his office, and in the following
year, 1722, produced his most successful comedy, 'The Conscious Lovers'.
After this time his health declined; his spirits were depressed. He left
London for Bath. His only surviving son, Eugene, born while the
'Spectator' was being issued, and to whom Prince Eugene had stood
godfather, died at the age of eleven or twelve in November, 1723. The
younger also of his two daughters was marked for death by consumption.
He was broken in health and fortune when, in 1726, he had an attack of
palsy which was the prelude to his death. He died Sept. 1, 1729, at
Carmarthen, where he had been boarding with a mercer who was his agent
and receiver of rents. There is a pleasant record that
'he retained his cheerful sweetness of temper to the last; and would
often be carried out, of a summer's evening, where the country lads
and lasses were assembled at their rural sports,--and, with his
pencil, gave an order on his agent, the mercer, for a new gown to the
best dancer.'
Two editions of the 'Spectator', the tenth and eleventh, were published
by Tonson in the year of Steele's death. These and the next edition,
dated 1739, were without the translations of the mottos, which appear,
however, in the edition of 1744. Notes were first added by Dr. Percy,
the editor of the 'Reliques of Ancient Poetry', and Dr. Calder. Dr. John
Calder, a native of Aberdeen, bred to the dissenting ministry, was for
some time keeper of Dr. Williams's Library in Redcross Street. He was a
candidate for the office given to Dr. Abraham Rees, of editor and
general super-intendent of the new issue of Chambers's Cyclopædia,
undertaken by the booksellers in 1776, and he supplied to it some new
articles. The Duke of Northumberland warmly patronized Dr. Calder, and
made him his companion in London and at Alnwick Castle as Private
Literary Secretary. Dr. Thomas Percy, who had constituted himself cousin
and retainer to the Percy of Northumberland, obtained his bishopric of
Dromore in 1782, in the following year lost his only son, and suffered
from that failure in eyesight, which resulted in a total blindness.
Having become intimately acquainted with Dr. Calder when at
Northumberland House and Alnwick, Percy intrusted to him the notes he
had collected for illustrating the 'Tatler', 'Spectator', and
'Guardian'. These were after-wards used, with additions by Dr. Calder,
in the various editions of those works, especially in the six-volume
edition of the 'Tatler', published by John Nichols in 1786, where
Percy's notes have a P. attached to them, and Dr. 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. They were slightly
annotated, both as regards the number and the value of the notes; but
Percy and Calder lived when 'Spectator' traditions were yet fresh, and
oral information was accessible as to points of personal allusion or as
to the authorship of a few papers or letters which but for them might
have remained anonymous. Their notes are those of which the substance
has run through all subsequent editions. Little, if anything, was added
to them by Bisset or Chalmers; the energies of those editors having been
chiefly directed to the preserving or multiplying of corruptions of the
text. Percy, when telling Tonson that he had completed two volumes of
the 'Spectator', said that he had corrected 'innumerable corruptions'
which had then crept in, and could have come only by misprint. Since
that time not only have misprints been preserved and multiplied, but
punctuation has been deliberately modernized, to the destruction of the
freshness of the original style, and editors of another 'understanding
age' have also taken upon themselves by many a little touch to correct
Addison's style or grammar.
This volume reprints for the first time in the present century the text
of the 'Spectator' as its authors left it. A good recent edition
contains in the first 18 papers, which are a fair sample of the whole,
88 petty variations from the proper text (at that rate, in the whole
work more than 3000) apart from the recasting of the punctuation, which
is counted as a defect only in two instances, where it has changed the
sense. Chalmers's text, of 1817, was hardly better, and about two-thirds
of the whole number of corruptions had already appeared in Bisset's
edition of 1793, from which they were transferred. Thus Bisset as well
as Chalmers in the Dedication to Vol. I. turned the 'polite _parts_ of
learning' into the 'polite _arts_ of learning,' and when the silent
gentleman tells us that many to whom his person is well known speak of
him 'very currently by Mr. What-d'ye-call him,' Bisset before Chalmers
rounded the sentence into 'very correctly by _the appellation_ of Mr.
What-d'ye-call him.' But it seems to have been Chalmers who first
undertook to correct, in the next paper, Addison's grammar, by turning
'have laughed _to have seen_' into 'have laughed _to see_' and
transformed a treaty '_with_ London and Wise,'--a firm now of historical
repute,--for the supply of flowers to the opera, into a treaty
'_between_ London and Wise,' which most people would take to be a very
different matter. If the present edition has its own share of misprints
and oversights, at least it inherits none; and it contains no wilful
alteration of the text.
The papers as they first appeared in the daily issue of a penny (and
after the stamp was imposed two-penny) folio half-sheet, have been
closely compared with the first issue in guinea octavos, for which they
were revised, and with the last edition that appeared before the death
of Steele. The original text is here given precisely as it was left
after revision by its authors; and there is shown at the same time the
amount and character of the revision.
Sentences added in the reprint are placed between square brackets [ ],
without any appended note.
Sentences omitted, or words altered, are shown by bracketing the revised
version, and giving the text as it stood in the original daily issue
within corresponding brackets as a foot-note.[1]
Thus the reader has here both the original texts of the 'Spectator'. The
Essays, as revised by their authors for permanent use, form the main
text of the present volume.
But if the words or passages in brackets be omitted; the words or
passages in corresponding foot-notes,--where there are such
foot-notes,--being substituted for them; the text becomes throughout
that of the 'Spectator' as it first came out in daily numbers.
As the few differences between good spelling in Queen Anne's time and
good spelling now are never of a kind to obscure the sense of a word, or
lessen the enjoyment of the reader, it has been thought better to make
the reproduction perfect, and thus show not only what Steele and Addison
wrote, but how they spelt, while restoring to their style the proper
harmony of their own methods of punctuating, and their way of sometimes
getting emphasis by turning to account the use of capitals, which in
their hands was not wholly conventional.
The original folio numbers have been followed also in the use of
_italics_ [_shown between underscored thus_] and other little details of
the disposition of the type; for example, in the reproduction of those
rows of single inverted commas, which distinguish what a correspondent
called the parts 'laced down the side with little c's.' [This last
detail of formatting has not been reproduced in this file. Text Ed.]
The translation of the mottos and Latin quotations, which Steele and
Addison deliberately abstained from giving, and which, as they were
since added, impede and sometimes confound and contradict the text, are
here placed in a body at the end, for those who want them. Again and
again the essayists indulge in banter on the mystery of the Latin and
Greek mottos; and what confusion must enter into the mind of the unwary
reader who finds Pope's Homer quoted at the head of a 'Spectator' long
before Addison's word of applause to the young poet's 'Essay on
Criticism.' The mottos then are placed in an Appendix.
There is a short Appendix also of advertisements taken from the original
number of the 'Spectator', and a few others, where they seem to
illustrate some point in the text, will be found among the notes.
In the large number of notes here added to a revision of those
bequeathed to us by Percy and Calder, the object has been to give
information which may contribute to some nearer acquaintance with the
writers of the book, and enjoyment of allusions to past manners and
events.
Finally, from the 'General Index to the Spectators, &c.,' published as a
separate volume in 1760, there has been taken what was serviceable, and
additions have been made to it with a desire to secure for this edition
of the 'Spectator' the advantages of being handy for reference as well
as true to the real text.