’the gentlemen met after church on Sunday to discuss the news of the
  week; the ‘Spectators’ were read as regularly as the ‘Journal’.’

So the political draught of bitterness came sweetened with the wisdom of good-humour.  The good-humour of the essayists touched with a light and kindly hand every form of affectation, and placed every-day life in the light in which it would be seen by a natural and honest man.  A sense of the essentials of life was assumed everywhere for the reader, who was asked only to smile charitably at its vanities.  Steele looked through all shams to the natural heart of the Englishman, appealed to that, and found it easily enough, even under the disguise of the young gentleman cited in the 77th ‘Tatler’,

’so ambitious to be thought worse than he is that in his degree of understanding he sets up for a free-thinker, and talks atheistically in coffee-houses all day, though every morning and evening, it can be proved upon him, he regularly at home says his prayers.’

But as public events led nearer to the prospect of a Jacobite triumph that would have again brought Englishmen against each other sword to sword, there was no voice of warning more fearless than Richard Steele’s.  He changed the ‘Spectator’ for the ‘Guardian’, that was to be, in its plan, more free to guard the people’s rights, and, standing forward more distinctly as a politician, he became member for Stockbridge.  In place of the ‘Guardian’, which he had dropped when he felt the plan of that journal unequal to the right and full expression of his mind, Steele took for a periodical the name of ‘Englishman’, and under that name fought, with then unexampled abstinence from personality, against the principles upheld by Swift in his ‘Examiner’.  Then, when the Peace of Utrecht alarmed English patriots, Steele in a bold pamphlet on ‘The Crisis’ expressed his dread of arbitrary power and a Jacobite succession with a boldness that cost him his seat in Parliament, as he had before sacrificed to plain speaking his place of Gazetteer.

Of the later history of Steele and Addison a few words will suffice.  This is not an account of their lives, but an endeavour to show why Englishmen must always have a living interest in the ‘Spectator’, their joint production.  Steele’s ‘Spectator’ ended with the seventh volume.  The members of the Club were all disposed of, and the journal formally wound up; but by the suggestion of a future ceremony of opening the ‘Spectator’s’ mouth, a way was made for Addison, whenever he pleased, to connect with the famous series an attempt of his own for its revival.  A year and a half later Addison made this attempt, producing his new journal with the old name and, as far as his contributions went, not less than the old wit and earnestness, three times a week instead of daily.  But he kept it alive only until the completion of one volume.  Addison had not Steele’s popular tact as an editor.