Yet in spite of their being so different, as I told you, the two boys were great friends, and in vacations, Joseph used to take wild Richard home with him to the minister's house; for his father was a clergyman.
Well, the years passed on, and the two boys became young men and went to college together. Perhaps you think you will hear now that the fun-loving boy became a great scholar, and the sober Joseph grew tired of study! Not a bit of it; they kept just about as far apart as when they were children. Joseph was a scholar and a poet; Richard slipped along somehow, contriving to study very little.
Why am I telling you about them? Why, because I know you like to get acquainted with people, and these are not boys put into a story—they actually lived, and were just such persons as I have been describing. It is time you heard their full names: Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. Stop just here and look carefully at their pictures. Yes, they lived a good while ago, their style of dress would tell you so much.
It is a little more than two hundred years since they were born. If you want to be very particular about it, I might tell you that Richard was born in 1671 and Joseph in 1672.
When they were quite through with school life, among other things that they did, they published together a paper called "The Tattler." I suppose you never saw a paper quite like it. "Mr. Isaac Bickerstaff" was the imaginary name of a person, who, according to this paper, went everywhere and saw every thing and told his story in "The Tattler" to amuse and instruct other people. After two years the two friends changed the name and style of their paper. They called it "The Spectator," and in it a delightful man was made to visit all the interesting places in and about London, and elsewhere, and tell the most interesting things that took place.
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.