Lord Wharton took to Ireland Clayton to write him musical entertainments, and a train of parasites of quality.  He was a great borough-monger, and is said at one critical time to have returned thirty members.  He had no difficulty, therefore, in finding Addison a seat, and made him in that year, 1709, M.P. for Malmesbury.  Addison only once attempted to speak in the House of Commons, and then, embarrassed by encouraging applause that welcomed him he stammered and sat down.  But when, having laid his political cards down for a time, and at ease in his own home, pen in hand, he brought his sound mind and quick humour to the aid of his friend Steele, he came with him into direct relation with the English people.  Addison never gave posterity a chance of knowing what was in him till, following Steele’s lead, he wrote those papers in ‘Tatler’, ‘Spectator’, and ‘Guardian’, wherein alone his genius abides with us, and will abide with English readers to the end.  The ‘Tatler’, the ‘Spectator’, and the ‘Guardian’ were, all of them, Steele’s, begun and ended by him at his sole discretion.  In these three journals Steele was answerable for 510 papers; Addison for 369.  Swift wrote two papers, and sent about a dozen fragments.  Congreve wrote one article in the ‘Tatler’; Pope wrote thrice for the ‘Spectator’, and eight times for the ‘Guardian’.  Addison, who was in Ireland when the ‘Tatler’ first appeared, only guessed the authorship by an expression in an early number; and it was not until eighty numbers had been issued, and the character of the new paper was formed and established, that Addison, on his return to London, joined the friend who, with his usual complete absence of the vanity of self-assertion, finally ascribed to the ally he dearly loved, the honours of success.

It was the kind of success Steele had desired—­a widely-diffused influence for good.  The ‘Tatlers’ were penny papers published three times a week, and issued also for another halfpenny with a blank half-sheet for transmission by post, when any written scraps of the day’s gossip that friend might send to friend could be included.  It was through these, and the daily ‘Spectators’ which succeeded them, that the people of England really learnt to read.  The few leaves of sound reason and fancy were but a light tax on uncultivated powers of attention.  Exquisite grace and true kindliness, here associated with familiar ways and common incidents of everyday life, gave many an honest man fresh sense of the best happiness that lies in common duties honestly performed, and a fresh energy, free as Christianity itself from malice—­for so both Steele and Addison meant that it should be—­in opposing themselves to the frivolities and small frauds on the conscience by which manliness is undermined.

A pamphlet by John Gay—­’The Present State of Wit, in a Letter to a Friend in the Country’—­was dated May 3, 1711, about two months after the ‘Spectator’ had replaced the ‘Tatler’.  And thus Gay represents the best talk of the town about these papers: