Informing all his writings too, besides intense feeling and an omnipresent and controlling art, is strong common sense.  His aphorisms, both those collected under the heading of Thoughts on Various Subjects, and countless others scattered up and down his pages, are a treasury of sound, if a little sardonic, practical wisdom.  His most insistent prejudices foreshadow in their essential sanity and justness those of that great master of life, Dr. Johnson.  He could not endure over-politeness, a vice which must have been very oppressive in society of his day.  He savagely resented and condemned a display of affection—­particularly marital affection—­in public.  In an age when it was the normal social system of settling quarrels, he condemned duelling; and he said some very wise things—­things that might still be said—­on modern education.  In economics he was as right-hearted as Ruskin and as wrong-headed.  Carlyle, who was in so many respects an echo of him, found in a passage in his works a “dim anticipation” of his philosophy of clothes.

The leading literary invention of the period—­after that of the heroic couplet for verse—­was the prose periodical essay.  Defoe, it is hardly necessary to say, began it; it was his nature to be first with any new thing:  but its establishment as a prevailing literary mode is due to two authors, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele.  Of the two famous series—­the Tatler and the Spectator—­for which they were both responsible, Steele must take the first credit; he began them, and though Addison came in and by the deftness and lightness of his writing took the lion’s share of their popularity, both the plan and the characters round whom the bulk of the essays in the Spectator came to revolve was the creation of his collaborator.  Steele we know very intimately from his own writings and from Thackeray’s portrait of him.  He was an emotional, full-blooded kind of man, reckless and dissipated but fundamentally honest and good-hearted—­a type very common in his day as the novels show, but not otherwise to be found in the ranks of its writers.  What there is of pathos and sentiment, and most of what there is of humour in the Tatler and the Spectator are his.  And he created the dramatis personae out of whose adventures the slender thread of continuity which binds the essays together is woven.  Addison, though less open to the onslaughts of the conventional moralist, was a less lovable personality.  Constitutionally endowed with little vitality, he suffered mentally as well as bodily from languor and lassitude.  His lack of enthusiasm, his cold-blooded formalism, caused comment even in an age which prided itself in self-command and decorum.