It was during Addison’s stay in Ireland that Richard Steele projected the Tatler, and brought out the first number in 1709.  His friendship for Addison amounted almost to a passion; their intimacy was cemented by harmony of tastes and diversity of character.  Steele was ardent, impulsive, warm-hearted, mercurial; full of aspiration and beset by lamentable weaknesses,—­preaching the highest morality and constantly falling into the prevalent vices of his time; a man so lovable of temper, so generous a spirit, and so frank a nature, that his faults seem to humanize his character rather than to weaken and stain it.  Steele’s gifts were many, and they were always at the service of his feelings; he had an Irish warmth of sympathy and an Irish readiness of humor, with great facility of inventiveness, and an inexhaustible interest in all aspects of human experience.  There had been political journals in England since the time of the Revolution, but Steele conceived the idea of a journal which should comment on the events and characteristics of the time in a bright and humorous way; using freedom with judgment and taste, and attacking the vices and follies of the time with the light equipment of wit rather than with the heavy armament of the formal moralist.  The time was ripe for such an enterprise.  London was full of men and women of brilliant parts, whose manners, tastes, and talk presented rich material for humorous report and delineation or for satiric comment.  Society, in the modern sense, was fast taking form, and the resources of social intercourse were being rapidly developed.  Men in public life were intimately allied with society and sensitive to its opinion; and men of all interests—­public, fashionable, literary—­gathered in groups at the different chocolate or coffee houses, and formed a kind of organized community.  It was distinctly an aristocratic society:  elegant in dress, punctilious in manner, exacting in taste, ready to be amused, and not indifferent to criticism when it took the form of sprightly badinage or of keen and trenchant satire.  The informal organization of society, which made it possible to reach and affect the Town as a whole, is suggested by the division of the Tatler:—­

“All accounts of Gallantry, Pleasure, and Entertainment, shall be under the article of White’s Chocolate-House; Poetry under that of Will’s Coffee-House; Learning under the title of Grecian; Foreign and Domestic News you will have from St. James’s Coffee-House; and what else I have to offer on any other subject shall be dated from my own apartment.”

So wrote Steele in his introduction to the readers of the new journal, which was to appear three times a week, at the cost of a penny.  Of the coffee-houses enumerated, St. James’s and White’s were the headquarters of men of fashion and of politics; the Grecian of men of legal learning; Will’s of men of Letters.  The Tatler was successful from the start.  It was novel in form and in spirit;