been written for the ‘Spectator’.  Take the little allegory, for instance, in No. 45, which tells of a desponding young Lady brought before the Society, as found by Rosamond’s Pond in the Park in a strange condition, taken by the mob for a lunatic, and whose clothes were all out of fashion, but whose face, when it was seen, astonished the whole society by its extraordinary sweetness and majesty.  She told how she had been brought to despair, and her name proved to be—­Modesty.  In letters, questions, and comments also which might be taken from Defoe’s Monthly Supplementary Journal to the Advice from the Scandal Club, we catch a likeness to the spirit of the ‘Tatler’ and ‘Spectator’ now and then exact.  Some censured Defoe for not confining himself to the weightier part of his purpose in establishing the ‘Review’.  He replied, in the Introduction to his first Monthly Supplement, that many men

‘care but for a little reading at a time,’ and said, ’thus we wheedle them in, if it may be allow’d that Expression, to the Knowledge of the World, who rather than take more Pains, would be content with their Ignorance, and search into nothing.’

Single-minded, quick-witted, and prompt to act on the first suggestion of a higher point of usefulness to which he might attain, Steele saw the mind of the people ready for a new sort of relation to its writers, and he followed the lead of Defoe.  But though he turned from the more frivolous temper of the enfeebled playhouse audience, to commune in free air with the country at large, he took fresh care for the restraint of his deep earnestness within the bounds of a cheerful, unpretending influence.  Drop by drop it should fall, and its strength lie in its persistence.  He would bring what wit he had out of the playhouse, and speak his mind, like Defoe, to the people themselves every post-day.  But he would affect no pedantry of moralizing, he would appeal to no passions, he would profess himself only ‘a Tatler.’  Might he not use, he thought, modestly distrustful of the charm of his own mind, some of the news obtained by virtue of the office of Gazetteer that Harley had given him, to bring weight and acceptance to writing of his which he valued only for the use to which it could be put.  For, as he himself truly says in the ‘Tatler’,

  ’wit, if a man had it, unless it be directed to some useful end, is
  but a wanton, frivolous quality; all that one should value himself
  upon in this kind is that he had some honourable intention in it.’

Swift, not then a deserter to the Tories, was a friend of Steele’s, who, when the first ‘Tatler’ appeared, had been amusing the town at the expense of John Partridge, astrologer and almanac-maker, with ‘Predictions for the year 1708,’ professing to be written by Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq.  The first prediction was of the death of Partridge,

  ‘on the 29th of March next, about eleven at night, of a raging fever.’