This volume reprints for the first time in the present century the text of the ‘Spectator’ as its authors left it.  A good recent edition contains in the first 18 papers, which are a fair sample of the whole, 88 petty variations from the proper text (at that rate, in the whole work more than 3000) apart from the recasting of the punctuation, which is counted as a defect only in two instances, where it has changed the sense.  Chalmers’s text, of 1817, was hardly better, and about two-thirds of the whole number of corruptions had already appeared in Bisset’s edition of 1793, from which they were transferred.  Thus Bisset as well as Chalmers in the Dedication to Vol.  I. turned the ’polite parts of learning’ into the ‘polite arts of learning,’ and when the silent gentleman tells us that many to whom his person is well known speak of him ‘very currently by Mr. What-d’ye-call him,’ Bisset before Chalmers rounded the sentence into ’very correctly by the appellation of Mr. What-d’ye-call him.’  But it seems to have been Chalmers who first undertook to correct, in the next paper, Addison’s grammar, by turning ‘have laughed to have seen’ into ‘have laughed to see’ and transformed a treaty ’with London and Wise,’—­a firm now of historical repute,—­for the supply of flowers to the opera, into a treaty ‘between London and Wise,’ which most people would take to be a very different matter.  If the present edition has its own share of misprints and oversights, at least it inherits none; and it contains no wilful alteration of the text.

The papers as they first appeared in the daily issue of a penny (and after the stamp was imposed two-penny) folio half-sheet, have been closely compared with the first issue in guinea octavos, for which they were revised, and with the last edition that appeared before the death of Steele.  The original text is here given precisely as it was left after revision by its authors; and there is shown at the same time the amount and character of the revision.

Sentences added in the reprint are placed between square brackets [ ], without any appended note.

Sentences omitted, or words altered, are shown by bracketing the revised version, and giving the text as it stood in the original daily issue within corresponding brackets as a foot-note.[1]

Thus the reader has here both the original texts of the ‘Spectator’.  The Essays, as revised by their authors for permanent use, form the main text of the present volume.

But if the words or passages in brackets be omitted; the words or passages in corresponding foot-notes,—­where there are such foot-notes,—­being substituted for them; the text becomes throughout that of the ‘Spectator’ as it first came out in daily numbers.

As the few differences between good spelling in Queen Anne’s time and good spelling now are never of a kind to obscure the sense of a word, or lessen the enjoyment of the reader, it has been thought better to make the reproduction perfect, and thus show not only what Steele and Addison wrote, but how they spelt, while restoring to their style the proper harmony of their own methods of punctuating, and their way of sometimes getting emphasis by turning to account the use of capitals, which in their hands was not wholly conventional.