You know that the books many of your grown-up friends read most are called novels.  But in the days when Joseph Addison and Richard Steele wrote the Spectator, there were no novels.  Even Defoe’s stories had not yet appeared, and it was therefore a new delight for our forefathers to have the adventures of the Spectator Club each day with their morning cup of tea or chocolate.  “Mr. Spectator,” writes one lady, “your paper is part of my tea equipage, and my servant knows my humour so well, that calling for my breakfast this morning (it being past my usual hour) she answered, the Spectator was not yet come in, but that the tea-kettle boiled, and she expected it every moment.”

Thus the Spectator had then become part of everyday life just as our morning newspapers have now, and there must have been many regrets among the readers when one member of the supposed Club died, another married and settled down, and so on until at length the Club was entirely dispersed and the Spectator ceased to appear.  It may interest you to know that the paper we now call the Spectator was not begun until more than a hundred years after its great namesake ceased to appear, the first number being published in 1828.

It was after the Spectator ceased that Addison published his tragedy called Cato.  Cato was a great Roman who rebelled against the authority of Caesar and in the end killed himself.  His is a story out of which a good tragedy might be made.  But Addison’s genius is not dramatic, and the play does not touch our hearts as Shakespeare’s tragedies do.  Yet, although we cannot look upon Addison’s Cato as a really great tragedy, there are lines in it which every one remembers and quotes, although they may not know where they come from.  Such are, for instance, “Who deliberates is lost,” and

    “’Tis not in mortals to command success,
    But we’ll do more, Sempronius, we’ll deserve it.”

But although Cato is not really great, the writer was perhaps the most popular man of his day, and so his tragedy was a tremendous success.  With Cato Addison reached the highest point of his fame as an author in his own day, but now we remember him much more as a writer of delightful essays, and as the creator or at least the perfecter of Sir Roger, for to Steele is due the first invention of the worthy knight.

Fortune still smiled on Addison.  When George I came to the throne, the Whigs once more returned to power, and Addison again became Secretary for Ireland.  He still wrote, both on behalf of his Government and to please himself.

And now, in 1716, when he was already a man of forty-four, Addison married.  His wife was the Dowager Countess of Warwick, and perhaps she was that great lady whom he had lost a few years before when he lost his post of Secretary of State.  Of all Addison’s pleasant prosperous life these last years ought to have been most pleasant and most prosperous.  But it has been said that his marriage was not happy, and that plain Mr. Addison was glad at times to escape from the stately grandeur of his own home and from the great lady, his wife, to drink and smoke with his friends and “subjects” at his favorite coffee-house.  For Addison held sway and was surrounded by his little court of literary admirers, as Dryden and Ben Jonson before him.