Steele lost his position as gazetteer, and the Tatler was discontinued after less than two years’ life, but not till it won an astonishing popularity and made ready the way for its successor.  Two months later, on March 1, 1711, appeared the first number of the Spectator.  In the new magazine politics and news, as such, were ignored; it was a literary magazine, pure and simple, and its entire contents consisted of a single light essay.  It was considered a crazy venture at the time, but its instant success proved that men were eager for some literary expression of the new social ideals.  The following whimsical letter to the editor may serve to indicate the part played by the Spectator in the daily life of London: 

Mr. Spectator,—­Your paper is a part of my tea equipage; and my servant knows my humor so well, that in calling for my breakfast this morning (it being past my usual hour) she answered, the Spectator was not yet come in, but the teakettle boiled, and she expected it every moment.

It is in the incomparable Spectator papers that Addison shows himself most “worthy to be remembered.”  He contributed the majority of its essays, and in its first number appears this description of the Spectator, by which name Addison is now generally known: 

There is no place of general resort wherein I do not often make my appearance; sometimes I am seen thrusting my head into a round of politicians at Will’s [Coffeehouse] and listening with great attention to the narratives that are made in those little circular audiences.  Sometimes I smoke a pipe at Child’s, and, whilst I seem attentive to nothing but The Postman, overhear the conversation of every table in the room.  I appear on Sunday nights at St. James’s, and sometimes join the little committee of politics in the inner room, as one who comes to hear and improve.  My face is likewise very well known at the Grecian, the Cocoa Tree, and in the theaters both of Drury Lane and the Haymarket.  I have been taken for a merchant upon the Exchange for above these ten years; and sometimes pass for a Jew in the assembly of stock jobbers at Jonathan’s....  Thus I live in the world rather as a spectator of mankind than as one of the species,... which is the character I intend to preserve in this paper.

The large place which these two little magazines hold in our literature seems most disproportionate to their short span of days.  In the short space of four years in which Addison and Steele worked together the light essay was established as one of the most important forms of modern literature, and the literary magazine won its place as the expression of the social life of a nation.

SAMUEL JOHNSON (1709-1784)