being in the habit of publishing a yearly almanac containing among other rubbish several learned predictions of events destined to happen, Swift conceived the idea of issuing a rival almanac under the name of Bickerstaff, in which he made the startling prediction that Mr. Partridge would infallibly die on a certain day in March. Accordingly, upon the day following this date, Swift issued a small pamphlet announcing with great detail the unfortunate demise of the Doctor upon the previous night. The indignant Partridge at once wrote a statement to the effect that he was, on the contrary, very much alive; whereupon Swift in a second pamphlet assured the public that the Doctor was, despite his own assertions, unquestionably dead. For, only a day or two before, he, Swift, had heard several gentlemen declare, upon reading the Doctor's almanac, that they were sure no man alive ever writ such damned nonsense as that. Wherefore Dr. Partridge must either disown his almanac or admit himself to be "no man alive." The town wits swore the joke was a good one; and the name of the sardonic Bickerstaff became instantly famous. The Tatler, therefore, began under happy auspices. The reading public at once caught up the name and the paper. The circulation steadily increased and the success of the new venture was soon assured. And it was indeed a new venture. Though at first clearly political, it soon became chiefly literary and social. It had none of the crude qualities of its predecessors. Everything was in good taste. If there were any trivialities and whispers of society scandal, they were such as could not offend. It was a periodical adapted to the drawing-room as well as to the coffee-house. And it was full of instruction as well as entertainment. It showed throughout sound common-sense. And it did not overshoot the heads of its readers. In modern journalistic phraseology, it was not "high-brow." One could trust Dick Steele for that. He had seen the world and was a man of the world. He knew men and women - their higher moments and their lower, their habits, their ambitions, their little foibles and weaknesses. And on these various strings he played, never without success.

When Addison joined him, as he did after the eightieth number, the journal had even greater success. When, in 1710, it was

merged in the Spectator, its circulation, then about 5,000, quickly doubled and trebled. In 1712 Dr. Fleetwood, in a letter to the Bishop of Salisbury, estimated its daily sales at 14,000. Certainly it found a public never before obtained. It caught the people outside of London, in great numbers. Even in Scotland it was read regularly; and from across the water, in France, came praises of its prodigious variety of style and subject. This variety, indeed, was one secret of its hold: it never wearied its readers. Upon opening its pages, with their neat print and fine paper, they always found something new. Those inexhaustible writers, Steele and Addison, were always masters of the situation. They were peculiarly fitted to their task. No other men of the time could have accomplished it—not even Swift or Defoe. Yet both were exceedingly clever writers of occasional essays, and Swift contributed several to the Spectator. But a peculiar temperament was needed, in order to evolve these little entertaining papers day after day and keep them all at a high level of excellence; and this temperament was possessed by both Steele and Addison.

ous.

The two men had much in common: both were flexible, resourceful, ingenious; both possessed geniality and unfailing good sense; both were sympathetic, yet pleasantly satirical and humorThey knew what was good breeding, proper conduct; they had a feeling, by no means shallow, of what is fine in literature and life. Stamped to some degree with the individuality and idiosyncrasy of the age, they nevertheless rose above it and became its instructors and leaders. Addison, it is true, was in some respects superior to Steele; his touch was more delicate, more sure; his discrimination was finer, his humor less broad. His literary sense was higher, and his style more finished and refined. Where Addison was genial, Steele leaned toward the jovial. He seldom succeeded in striking the keys with quite so delicate and perfect a touch. Yet he had a pleasing vein of sentiment which Addison lacked, and his pathos was more touching.

Steele laid much emphasis upon the importance of good breeding. His remarks on this point are significant of the social spirit of the time :

We see a world of pains taken and the best years of life spent in collecting a set of thoughts in a college for the conduct of life; and, after all, the man so qualified shall hesitate in his speech to a good suit of clothes, and want common sense before an agreeable woman. Hence it is that wisdom, valour, justice, and learning cannot keep a man in countenance that is possessed of these excellencies, if he wants that inferior art of life and behaviour called Goodbreeding. A man endowed with great perfections, without this, is like one who has his pockets full of gold, but always wants change for his ordinary occasions.

The influence of the Tatler and the Spectator upon their age, though necessarily gradual, was in the end very considerable. When Steele and Addison began their task they found much of what Matthew Arnold was fond of calling "hideousness and rawness." The veneer of good manners was very superficial. The men of the time found their chief pleasure in bull-baiting and prize-fights, and these were attended with equal delight by the women. There is evidence, indeed, that the lower classes of women could themselves engage in prize-fights on occasion. In a newspaper of this period appeared the following advertisements, which speak for themselves:

Challenge: - I, Elizabeth Wilkinson, of Clerkenwell, having had some words with Hannah Ryfield, and requiring satisfaction, do write her to meet me upon the stage, and box me for three guineas; each woman holding half-a-crown in each hand, and the first woman that drops the money to lose the battle.

Answer: I, Hannah Ryfield, of Newgate Market, hearing of the resolutions of Elizabeth Wilkinson, will not fail, God willing, to give her more blows than words, desiring home blows, and from her no favour; she may expect a good thumping.

While the Tatler and the Spectator were doing their work of reform, they were not without imitators. Before the Spectator had been established, there had appeared a Female Tatler, "by Mrs. Crackenthorpe, a lady who knows everything!" It bore no resemblance to the real Tatler in spirit or genius, and was full of gross personalities. Other imitators were the Re-Tatler,

Condoler, Tit for Tat, Tory Tatler, Tell Tale, Whisperer, and Growler. The Lay Monastery, edited by Sir Richard Blackmore, which was started in 1713, was the only worthy imitator. Making a jest of the ridiculous titles of the others, Addison said: "I was threatened to be answered weekly tit-for-tat; I was undermined by the Whisperer; haunted by Tom Brown's Ghost; scolded at by a Female Tatler.-I have been annotated, re-tattled, examined, and condoled."

The newspaper tax of 1712 killed off most of these offenders. Swift writes in his Journal to Stella: "They are here intending to tax all little penny papers a half-penny every half-sheet, which will utterly ruin Grub Street, and I am endeavoring to prevent it." The Spectator survived the tax by doubling its price, but Grub Street perished. Thus for a short time Addison and Steele were left free to pursue their work unannoyed.

Dress

And an important work it was. They had entered upon their task, probably, without being conscious of it. But their ideals were steady, and their personalities, penetrating day by day the great masses of people, gradually raised them to a level whence they obtained an appreciation and a desire for what is really good and permanent. Slowly a taste for literature and refinement manifested itself. There was more real courtesy. and fashion were modified by the pleasant satire of the Spectator. Morals became more healthful. And all this was won by the disguise of triviality in which both Steele and Addison wrote their papers; by constant avoidance of anything openly didactic. The winning personalities of the two men had conquered the people. Where they found "hideousness and rawness" they left the beginnings of "sweetness and light."

University of Illinois.

HARRY T. BAKER.

LADY WINCHELSEA: A MODERNIST

Just how long the poems of the Countess of Winchelsea would have lain in obscurity if Wordsworth had not come upon them is doubtful. Edmond Gosse, sixty years later, might have discovered them for himself and set the stamp of his approval upon them without Wordsworth's recommendations, or they might still be extant only on an infrequent shelf of a collector's library. Probably Wordsworth's delight in his discovery of something akin to himself in an antagonistic century bears as its fruit our present possession of her work.

The very obscurity from which she was rescued permits a comfortable enjoyment in her. One need not harass oneself to trace any particular influence to her or from her. A woman possessed of quiet originality was recognized neither as a woman nor as a creator in the century which placed a ban on both. That she was a countess, and that Pope had condescended to notice her, gave her an ephemeral claim to distinction of which little trace was left when Wordsworth directed the new-born conceptions of his day toward her work.

To-day another set of standards tempts us to new measurements of old things. Perhaps the test of the permanently good is conformation in some degree to standards, which, being secondary as criticism must be to creation, shift with civilization's insecurity. The rule works both ways. Whatever is permanently good makes short work of false demands; whatever is sound in requirements, however new and radical, finds itself met by the permanently good.

Applied either way, some of the work of Lady Winchelsea has the essential qualifications of true poetry. Whether Wordsworth searches the poems for the "Spirit of genuine imagination," or the modern imagist applies to them the new tenet, freshness of phrase, here and there both have been able to find what they sought. The chameleon-like property of complete uniformity is obviously impossible. In so slight a genius as that of Lady Winchelsea, any conformity at all is perhaps the proof of a degree of genius.