To this extent Addison was the historian by purpose.  A moderate partisan, he eulogized King William, Marlborough, Lord Somers, Lord Halifax, and others, and thus commended himself to the crown; and in several elegant articles in The Spectator, he sought to mitigate the fierce party spirit of the time.

SIR ROGER DE COVERLEY.—­But it is the unconscious historian with whom we are most charmed, and by whom we are best instructed.  It is in this character that Addison presents himself in his numerous contributions to The Spectator, The Tatler, and The Guardian.  Amid much that is now considered pedantic and artificial, and which, in those faults, marks the age, are to be found as striking and truthful delineations of English life and society in that day as Chaucer has given us of an earlier period.

Those who no longer read The Spectator as a model of style and learning, must continue to prize it for these rare historic teachings.  The men and women walk before us as in some antique representation in a social festival, when grandmothers’ brocades are taken out, when curious fashions are displayed, when Honoria and Flavia, Fidelia and Gloriana dress and speak and ogle and flirt just as Addison saw and photographed them.  We have their subjects of interest, their forms of gossip, the existing abuses of the day, their taste in letters, their opinions upon the works of literature, in all their freshness.

The fullest and most systematic of these social delineations is found in the sketch of The Club and Sir Roger de Coverley.  The creation of character is excellent.  Each member, individual and distinct, is also the type of a class.

THE CLUB.—­There is Will Honeycomb, the old beau, “a gentleman who, according to his years, should be in the decline of his life, but having ever been careful of his person, and always had an easy fortune, time has made but very little impression, either by wrinkles on his forehead or traces on his brain.”  He knew from what French woman this manner of curling the hair came, who invented hoops, and whose vanity to show her foot brought in short dresses.  He is a woman-killer, sceptical about marriage; and at length he gives the fair sex ample satisfaction for his cruelty and egotism by marrying, unknown to his friends, a farmer’s daughter, whose face and virtues are her only fortune.

Captain Sentry, the nephew of Sir Roger, is, it may be supposed, the essayist’s ideal of what an English officer should be—­a courageous soldier and a modest gentleman.

Sir Andrew Freeport is the retired merchant, drawn to the life.  He is moderate in politics, as expediency in that age would suggest.  Thoroughly satisfied of the naval supremacy of England, he calls the sea, “the British Common.”  He is the founder of his own fortune, and is satisfied to transmit to posterity an unsullied name, a goodly store of wealth, and the title he has so honorably won.