The Spectator was still further from the ordinary newspaper than the Tatler.  It was more perhaps what our modern magazines are meant to be, but, instead of being published once a week or once a month, it was published every morning.

In order to give interest to the paper, instead of dating the articles from various coffee-houses, as had been done in the Tatler, Addison and Steele between them imagined a club.  And it is the doings of these members, their characters, and their lives, which supply subjects for many of the articles.  In the first numbers of the Spectator these members are described to us.

First of all there is the Spectator himself.  He is the editor of the paper.  It is he who with kindly humorous smile and grave twinkle in his eye is to be seen everywhere.  He is seen, and he sees and listens, but seldom opens his lips.  “In short,” he says, “I have acted in all the parts of my life as a looker-on.”  And that is the meaning of Spectator—­the looker-on.  This on-looker, there can be little doubt, was meant to be a picture of Addison himself.  In a later paper he tells us that “he was a man of a very short face, extremely addicted to silence. . . . and was a great humorist in all parts of his life."* And when you come to know Mr. Spectator well, I think you will love this grave humorist.

Spectator, 101.

After Mr. Spectator, the chief member of the Club was Sir Roger de Coverley.  “His great-grandfather was inventor of that famous country dance which is called after him.  All who know that shire (in which he lives), are very well acquainted with the parts and merits of Sir Roger.  He is a gentleman that is very singular in his behaviour, but his singularities proceed from his good sense, and are contradictions to the manners of the world, only as he thinks the world is in the wrong.”  He was careless of fashion in dress, and wore a coat and doublet which, he used laughingly to say, had been in and out twelve times since he first wore it.  “He is now in his fifty-sixth year, cheerful, gay, and hearty; keeps a good house both in town and country; a great lover of mankind; but there is such a mirthful cast in his behaviour, that he is rather beloved than esteemed.  His tenants grow rich, his servants look satisfied.  All the young women profess love to him and the young men are glad of his company.  When he comes into a house he calls the servants by their names, and talks all the way upstairs to a visit.”

Next came a lawyer of the Inner Temple, who had become a lawyer not because he wanted to be one, but because he wanted to please his old father.  He had been sent to London to study the laws of the land, but he liked much better to study those of the stage.  “He is an excellent critic, and the time of the play is his hour of business.  Exactly at five he passes through New Inn, crosses through Russel Court, and takes a turn at Wills’ till the play begins.  He has his shoes rubbed and his periwig powdered at the barber’s as you go into the Rose.”