RICHARD STEELE.
I suppose there never was a newspaper so eagerly watched for as the "Daily Spectator." You must remember that daily newspapers at that time were very new and strange things. And indeed this was more like a story book than a newspaper, only "The Spectator" went among real people, and told just what they said and did.
Joseph Addison wrote a great deal for this paper, and by this time the scholarly boy had become a great man; his writings were very much admired. Indeed, to this day scholars love to read Addison. When I was a little girl I remember seeing a copy of "The Spectator," which my father had among his treasures, and he used occasionally to take it out, and read bits of it to me, explaining why certain things in it were so witty, or so sharp, and I remember thinking that "Sir Roger" (one of the people whom The Spectator went often to see) was the nicest man who ever lived. I did not understand at the time that he was an imaginary man that Addison and Steele had created.
There is ever so much I would like to tell you about these two men. How, after a couple of years, they changed their paper again, calling it "The Guardian"; how, as the two men grew older, the difference between them kept growing. Joseph Addison being the scholarly gentleman, and Richard Steele being the good-humored, thoughtless, selfish man, always getting into debt, and looking to Addison or some one else to help him out. But I have only time to introduce them to you. When you begin to study English literature you will find a good deal in it about these two friends and the great difference there was between them.
