’for the want of those studied similies and repartees which we, who have writ before him, have thrown into our plays, to indulge and gain upon a false taste that has prevailed for many years in the British theatre.  I believe the author would have condescended to fall into this way a little more than he has, had he before the writing of it been often present at theatrical representations.  I was confirmed in my thoughts of the play by the opinion of better judges to whom it was communicated, who observed that the scenes were drawn after Moliere’s manner, and that an easy and natural vein of humour ran through the whole.  I do not question but the reader will discover this, and see many beauties that escaped the audience; the touches being too delicate for every taste in a popular assembly.  My brother-sharers’ (in the Drury Lane patent) ’were of opinion, at the first reading of it, that it was like a picture in which the strokes were not strong enough to appear at a distance.  As it is not in the common way of writing, the approbation was at first doubtful, but has risen every time it has been acted, and has given an opportunity in several of its parts for as just and good actions as ever I saw on the stage.’

Addison’s comedy was not produced till 1715, the year after his unsuccessful attempt to revive the ‘Spectator’, which produced what is called the eighth volume of that work.  The play, not known to be his, was so ill spoken of that he kept the authorship a secret to the last, and Tickell omitted it from the collection of his patron’s works.  But Steele knew what was due to his friend, and in 1722 manfully republished the piece as Addison’s, with a dedication to Congreve and censure of Tickell for suppressing it.  If it be true that the ‘Drummer’ made no figure on the stage though excellently acted, ‘when I observe this,’ said Steele, ‘I say a much harder thing of this than of the comedy.’  Addison’s Drummer is a gentleman who, to forward his suit to a soldier’s widow, masquerades as the drumbeating ghost of her husband in her country house, and terrifies a self-confident, free-thinking town exquisite, another suitor, who believes himself brought face to face with the spirit world, in which he professes that he can’t believe.  ’For my part, child, I have made myself easy in those points.’  The character of a free-thinking exquisite is drawn from life without exaggeration, but with more than a touch of the bitter contempt Addison felt for the atheistic coxcomb, with whom he was too ready to confound the sincere questioner of orthodox opinion.  The only passages of his in the ‘Spectator’ that border on intolerance are those in which he deals with the free-thinker; but it should not be forgotten that the commonest type of free-thinker in Queen Anne’s time was not a thoughtful man who battled openly with doubt and made an independent search for truth, but an idler who repudiated thought and formed his character upon tradition of the Court of Charles the Second.