“Before I proceed further in the account of our weekly papers, it will be necessary to inform you that at the beginning of the winter, to the infinite surprise of all the Town, Mr. Steele flung up his ‘Tatler’, and instead of Isaac Bickerstaff, Esquire, subscribed himself Richard Steele to the last of those papers, after a handsome compliment to the Town for their kind acceptance of his endeavours to divert them.

The chief reason he thought fit to give for his leaving off writing was, that having been so long looked on in all public places and companies as the Author of those papers, he found that his most intimate friends and acquaintance were in pain to speak or act before him.

  The Town was very far from being satisfied with this reason, and most
  people judged the true cause to be, either

    That he was quite spent, and wanted matter to continue his
      undertaking any longer; or
    That he laid it down as a sort of submission to, and composition
      with, the Government for some past offences; or, lastly,
    That he had a mind to vary his Shape, and appear again in some new
      light.

However that were, his disappearance seemed to be bewailed as some general calamity.  Every one wanted so agreeable an amusement, and the Coffee-houses began to be sensible that the Esquire’s ‘Lucubrations’ alone had brought them more customers than all their other newspapers put together.

It must indeed be confessed that never man threw up his pen, under stronger temptations to have employed it longer.  His reputation was at a greater height, than I believe ever any living author’s was before him.  It is reasonable to suppose that his gains were proportionably considerable.  Every one read him with pleasure and good-will; and the Tories, in respect to his other good qualities, had almost forgiven his unaccountable imprudence in declaring against them.

Lastly, it was highly improbable that, if he threw off a Character, the ideas of which were so strongly impressed in every one’s mind, however finely he might write in any new form, that he should meet with the same reception.

To give you my own thoughts of this gentleman’s writings I shall, in the first place, observe, that there is a noble difference between him and all the rest of our gallant and polite authors.  The latter have endeavoured to please the Age by falling in with them, and encouraging them in their fashionable vices and false notions of things.  It would have been a jest, some time since, for a man to have asserted that anything witty could be said in praise of a married state, or that Devotion and Virtue were any way necessary to the character of a Fine Gentleman.  ‘Bickerstaff’ ventured to tell the Town that they were a parcel of fops, fools, and coquettes; but in such a manner as even pleased them, and made