The poet John Gay has given an excellent account of the work accomplished by Steele and Addison in a pamphlet called “The Present State of Wit” (1711).  Speaking of the discontinuance of the Tatler, he says:  “His disappearing 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....  There is this noble difference between him and all the rest of our polite and gallant 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 vain coquettes; but in such a manner as even pleased them, and made them more than half inclined to believe that he spoke truth.  Instead of complying with the false sentiments or vicious tastes of the age, either in morality, criticism, or good breeding, he has boldly assured them that they were altogether in the wrong, and commanded them, with an authority which perfectly well became him, to surrender themselves to his arguments for virtue and good sense.

“It is incredible to conceive the effect his writings have had on the town; how many thousand follies they have either quite banished, or given a very great check to; how much countenance they have added to virtue and religion; how many people they have rendered happy, by showing them it was their own fault if they were not so; and, lastly, how entirely they have convinced our fops and young fellows of the value and advantages of learning.  He has indeed rescued it out of the hands of pedants and fools, and discovered the true method of making it amiable and lovely to all mankind.  In the dress he gives it, it is a most welcome guest at tea-tables and assemblies, and is relished and caressed by the merchants on the ’Change; accordingly, there is not a lady at Court, nor a banker in Lombard Street, who is not verily persuaded that Captain Steele is the greatest scholar and best casuist of any man in England.

“Lastly, his writings have set all our wits and men of letters upon a new way of thinking, of which they had little or no notion before; and though we cannot yet say that any of them have come up to the beauties of the original, I think we may venture to affirm that every one of them writes and thinks much more justly than they did some time since.”