With how keen an interest the public entered into the humour of the paper is shown by the following letter, signed “Philo-Spec:”
“I was this morning in a company of your well-wishers, when we read over, with great satisfaction, Tully’s observations on action adapted to the British theatre, though, by the way, we were very sorry to find that you have disposed of another member of your club. Poor Sir Roger is dead, and the worthy clergyman dying; Captain Sentry has taken possession of a fair estate; Will Honeycomb has married a farmer’s daughter; and the Templar withdraws himself into the business of his own profession.”[49]
It is no wonder that readers anticipated with regret the dissolution of a society that had provided them with so much delicate entertainment. Admirably as the club was designed for maintaining that variety of treatment on which Mr. Trusty comments in the letter quoted above, the execution of the design is deserving of even greater admiration. The skill with which the grave speculations of the Spectator are contrasted with the lively observations of Will Honeycomb on the fashions of the age, and these again are diversified with papers descriptive of character or adorned with fiction, while the letters from the public outside form a running commentary on the conduct of the paper, cannot be justly appreciated without a certain effort of thought. But it may safely be said that, to have provided society day after day, for more than two years, with a species of entertainment which, nearly two centuries later, retains all its old power to interest and delight, is an achievement unique in the history of literature. Even apart from the exquisite art displayed in their grouping, the matter of many of the essays in the Spectator is still valuable. The vivid descriptions of contemporary manners, the inimitable series of sketches of Sir Roger de Coverley, the criticisms in the papers on True and False Wit and Milton’s Paradise Lost, have scarcely less significance for ourselves than for the society for which they were immediately written.
Addison’s own papers were 274 in number, as against 236 contributed by Steele. They were, as a rule, signed with one of the four letters C. L. I. O., either because, as Tickell seems to hint in his Elegy, they composed the name of one of the Muses, or, as later scholars have conjectured, because they were respectively written from four different localities—viz., Chelsea, London, Islington, and the Office.
The sale of the Spectator was doubtless very large relatively to the number of readers in Queen Anne’s reign. Johnson, indeed, computes the number sold daily to have been only sixteen hundred and eighty, but he seems to have overlooked what Addison himself says on the subject very shortly after the paper had been started: “My publisher tells me that there are already three thousand of them distributed every day.”[50] This number must have gone on increasing with the growing reputation of the Spectator. When the Preface of the Four Sermons of Dr. Fleetwood, Bishop of Llandaff, was suppressed by order of the House of Commons, the Spectator printed it in its 384th number, thus conveying, as the Bishop said in a letter to Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury, “fourteen thousand copies of the condemned preface into people’s hands that would otherwise have never seen or heard of it.” Making allowance for the extraordinary character of the number, it is not unreasonable to conclude that the usual daily issue of the Spectator to readers in all parts of the kingdom would, towards the close of its career, have reached ten thousand copies. The separate papers were afterwards collected into octavo volumes, which were sold, like the volumes of the Tatler, for a guinea apiece. Steele tells us that more than nine thousand copies of each volume were sold off.[51]
Nothing could have been better timed than the appearance of the Spectator; it may indeed be doubted whether it could have been produced with success at any other period. Had it been projected earlier, while Addison was still in office, his thoughts would have been diverted to other subjects, and he would have been unlikely to survey the world with quite impartial eyes; had the publication been delayed it would have come before the public when the balance of all minds was disturbed by the dangers of the political situation. The difficulty of preserving neutrality under such circumstances was soon shown by the fate of the Guardian. Shortly after the Spectator was discontinued this new paper was designed by the fertile invention of Steele, with every intention of keeping it, like its predecessor, free from the entanglements of party. But it had not proceeded beyond the forty-first number when the vehement partizanship of Steele was excited by the Tory Examiner; in the 128th number appeared a letter, signed “An English Tory,” calling for the demolition of Dunkirk, while soon afterwards, finding that his political feelings were hampered by the design on which the Guardian was conducted, he dropped it and replaced it with a paper called the Englishman. Addison himself, who had been a frequent contributor to the Guardian, did not aid in the Englishman, of the violent party tone of which he strongly disapproved. A few years afterwards the old friends and coadjutors in the Tatler and Spectator found themselves maintaining an angry controversy in the opposing pages of the Old Whig and the Plebeian.
CHAPTER VI.
CATO.