and May 19th, 1711, but, feeble from the first, it then collapsed.  Nor had the Tatler been without rivals.  In the two hundred and twenty-ninth number of the Tatler, Addison, enumerating his antagonists, says, ’I was threatened to be answered weekly Tit for Tat, I was undermined by the Whisperer, scolded at by a Female Tatler, and slandered by another of the same character under the title of Atalantis.’  To confine ourselves, however, to the publications mentioned by Gay.  The Growler appeared on the 27th of January 1711, on the discontinuance of the Tatler.  The Whisperer was first published on October 11th, 1709, under the character of ’Mrs. Jenny Distaff, half-sister to Isaac Bickerstaff.’  The Tell Tale appears to be a facetious title for the Female Tatler, the first number of which appeared on July 8th, 1709, and was continued for a hundred and eleven numbers, under the editorship of Thomas Baker, till March 3rd, 1710.  The allusion in the postscript to the British Apollo is to a paper entitled The British Apollo:  or Curious Amusements for the Ingenious, the first number of which appeared on Friday, March 13th, 1708, the paper regularly continuing on Wednesdays and Fridays till March 16th, 1711.  Selections from this curious miscellany were afterwards printed in three volumes, and ran into three editions.  Gay does not appear to be aware that this periodical had ceased.  The reference in ’the two statesmen of the last reign whose characters are well expressed in their mottoes’ are to Lord Somers and the Earl of Halifax, as what follows refers respectively to Addison and Steele.  The tract closes with a reference to the Spectator, the first number of which had appeared on the first of the preceding March.

Gay’s brochure attracted the attention of Swift, who thus refers to it in his Journal to Stella, May 14th, 1711:  ’Dr. Freind was with me and pulled out a two-penny pamphlet just published called The State of Wit.  The author seems to be a Whig, yet he speaks very highly of a paper called the Examiner, and says the supposed author of it is Dr. Swift, but above all he praises the Tatler and Spectator.’

The two tracts which follow consist of the Life of Addison, which forms the preface to Addison’s collected works, published by Tickell in 1721, and of the Dedicatory Epistle prefixed by Steele to an edition of Addison’s Drummer in 1722.  To the student of the literary history of those times they are of great interest and importance.  Of all Addison’s friends, Steele had long been the most intimate of the younger men whom he had taken under his patronage.  Tickell was the most loyal and the most attached.  While still at Oxford he had expressed his admiration of Addison in extravagant terms:  on arriving in London he made his acquaintance.  Tickell was an accomplished poet and man of letters,