’I heartily wish what I have done here were as honorary to that sacred
  name as learning, wit, and humanity render those pieces which I have
  taught the reader how to distinguish for his.’

So wrote Steele; and the ‘Spectator’ will bear witness how religiously his friendship was returned.  In number 453, when, paraphrasing David’s Hymn on Gratitude, the ‘rising soul’ of Addison surveyed the mercies of his God, was it not Steele whom he felt near to him at the Mercy-seat as he wrote

  Thy bounteous hand with worldly bliss
    Has made my cup run o’er,
  And in a kind and faithful Friend
    Has doubled all my store?

The Spectator, Steele-and-Addison’s Spectator, is a monument befitting the most memorable friendship in our history.  Steele was its projector, founder, editor, and he was writer of that part of it which took the widest grasp upon the hearts of men.  His sympathies were with all England.  Defoe and he, with eyes upon the future, were the truest leaders of their time.  It was the firm hand of his friend Steele that helped Addison up to the place in literature which became him.  It was Steele who caused the nice critical taste which Addison might have spent only in accordance with the fleeting fashions of his time, to be inspired with all Addison’s religious earnestness, and to be enlivened with the free play of that sportive humour, delicately whimsical and gaily wise, which made his conversation the delight of the few men with whom he sat at ease.  It was Steele who drew his friend towards the days to come, and made his gifts the wealth of a whole people.  Steele said in one of the later numbers of his Spectator, No. 532, to which he prefixed a motto that assigned to himself only the part of whetstone to the wit of others,

  ’I claim to myself the merit of having extorted excellent productions
  from a person of the greatest abilities, who would not have let them
  appear by any other means.’

There were those who argued that he was too careless of his own fame in unselfish labour for the exaltation of his friend, and, no doubt, his rare generosity of temper has been often misinterpreted.  But for that Addison is not answerable.  And why should Steele have defined his own merits?  He knew his countrymen, and was in too genuine accord with the spirit of a time then distant but now come, to doubt that, when he was dead, his whole life’s work would speak truth for him to posterity.

The friendship of which this work is the monument remained unbroken from boyhood until death.  Addison and Steele were schoolboys together at the Charterhouse.  Addison was a dean’s son, and a private boarder; Steele, fatherless, and a boy on the foundation.  They were of like age.  The register of Steele’s baptism, corroborated by the entry made on his admission to the Charterhouse (which also implies that he was baptized on the day of his birth) is March 12, 1671, Old Style; New Style, 1672.  Addison was born on May-day, 1672.  Thus there was a difference of only seven weeks.