I shall not think my pains, or indeed my life, to have been spent in vain."[2] At the close, speaking in his own name, Steele wrote:  “The general purpose of the whole has been to recommend truth, innocence, honour, and virtue, as the chief ornaments of life; but I considered, that severity of manners was absolutely necessary to him who would censure others, and for that reason, and that only, chose to talk in a mask.  I shall not carry my humility so far as to call myself a vicious man, but at the same time must confess my life is at best but pardonable."[3]

With his usual generosity, Steele more than once spoke in the warmest terms of the assistance rendered to him by Addison.  In the preface to the collected edition he said:  “I have only one gentleman, who will be nameless, to thank for any frequent assistance to me, which indeed it would have been barbarous in him to have denied to one with whom he had lived in an intimacy from childhood, considering the great ease with which he is able to despatch the most entertaining pieces of this nature.  This good office he performed with such force of genius, humour, wit, and learning that I fared like a distressed prince, who calls in a powerful neighbour to his aid; I was undone by my auxiliary; when I had called him in I could not subsist without dependence on him.”  And in 1722, after Addison’s death, in a preface to his friend’s play, “The Drummer,” Steele wrote of the Tatler, “That paper was advanced indeed! for it was raised to a greater thing than I intended it!  For the elegance, purity, and correctness which appeared in his writings were not so much my purpose, as (in any intelligible manner, as I could) to rally all those singularities of human life, through the different professions and characters in it, which obstruct anything that was truly good and great.”

It is only fair to Steele to point out that the original idea of the Tatler was entirely his own, and that he alone was responsible for the regular supply of material.  Addison was in Ireland when the paper was begun, and did not know who was the author until several numbers had appeared.  His occasional contributions were of little importance until after eighty numbers had been published; and of the whole 271 numbers Steele wrote about 188 and Addison only 42, while they were jointly responsible for 36.  Swift contributed only to about a dozen numbers; and the assistance received from other writers was so slight that it does not call for notice here.  Steele, unlike Addison, was probably at his best in the Tatler, where he had a freer hand, and described, in a perfectly fresh and unaffected style, the impressions of the moment.  Hastily composed in coffee-house or printing-office, as they often were, and at very short notice, his papers frequently appeal to the reader of the present day more than the carefully elaborated and highly finished work of his friend, who wrote only when he found a