of duelling was carried to a most irrational excess. In the theatre, as well as in society, the corruption of Charles II.'s reign continued to prevail; and men of the highest rank were the habitual encouragers of the coarse amusements of bull-baiting, bear-baiting, and prize-fighting. To the amelioration of this wretched state of public taste and manners did Steele and Addison apply themselves with equal zeal and success, operating by the means thus stated in the Spectator: I shall endeavour to enliven morality with wit, and to temper wit with morality, that my readers may, if possible, both ways find their account in the speculation of the day. And to the end that their virtue and discretion may not be short, transient, intermittent starts of thought, I have resolved to refresh their memories from day to day, till I have recovered them out of that desperate state of vice and folly into which the age is fallen. The mind that lies fallow but a single day, sprouts up in follies that are only to be killed by a constant and assiduous culture. It was said of Socrates, that he brought philosophy down from heaven to inhabit among men; I shall be ambitious to have it said of me, that I have brought philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and in coffee-houses.'

Of the excellent effects produced by the essays of Steele and Addison, we possess the evidence not only of the improved state of society and literature which has since prevailed, but likewise of writers contemporary with the authors themselves. All speak of a decided and marked improvement in society and manners.

The acquisition,' says Dr Drake, of a popular relish for elegant literature, may be dated, indeed, from the period of the publication of the " Tatler;" to the progress of this new-formed desire, the "Spectator" and "Guardian" gave fresh acceleration; nor has the impulse which was thus received for a moment ceased to spread and propagate its influence through every rank of British society. To these papers, in the department of polite letters, we may ascribe the following great and never-to-be-forgotten obligations. They, it may be affirmed, first pointed out, in a popular way, and with insinuating address, the best authors of classical antiquity and of modern times, and infused into the public mind an enthusiasm for their beauties; they, calling to their aid the colouring of humour and imagination, effectually detected the sources of bad writing, and exposed to neverdying ridicule the puerilities and meretricious decorations of false wit and bloated composition; they first rendered criticism familiar and pleasing to the general taste, and excited that curiosity, that acuteness and precision, which have since enabled so many classes of readers to enjoy, and to appreciate with judgment, the various productions of genius and learning.

To the essays of Addison, in particular, are we likewise indebted for the formation of a style beyond all former precedent pure, fascinating, and correct, that may be said to have effected a revolution in our language and literature, and which, notwithstanding all the refinements of modern criticism, is still entitled to the praise of a just and legitimate model.

ascribed the commencement of a just taste in the fields of fancy and picturesque beauty. The critique on Milton, the inimitable ridicule on the Gothic style of gardening, and the vivid descriptions of rural elegance, the creations either of nature or of art, which are dispersed through the pages of the "Tatler," "Spectator," and "Guardian,' soon disseminated more correct ideas of simplicity in the formation of landscape, and more attractive views of sublimity and beauty in the loftier regions of true poetry. In fact, from the perusal of these essays, that large body of the people included in the middle class of society first derived their capability of judging of the merits and the graces of a refined writer; and the nation at large gradually, from this epoch, became entitled to the distinguished appellations of literary and critical. The readers of the "Spectator" had been thoroughly imbued with the fine enthusiasm for literature which characterised the genius of Addison; they had felt and admired the delicacy, the amenity, and the purity of his composition, and were soon able to balance and adjust by comparison the pretensions of succeeding candidates for fame.

If in taste and literature such numerous benefits were conferred upon the people through the medium of these papers, of still greater importance were the services which they derived from them in the department of manners and morals. Both public and private virtue and decorum, indeed, received a firmer tone and finer polish from their precepts and examples ; the acrimony and malevolence that had hitherto attended the discussion of political opinion were in a short time greatly mitigated; and the talents which had been almost exclusively occupied by controversy, were diverted into channels where elegance and learning mutually assisted in refining and purifying the passions.'

The success and utility of the 'Tatler,' 'Spectator," and Guardian,' led to the appearance, throughout the eighteenth century, of many works similar in form and purpose; but of these, with the excep tion of the Rambler, Adventurer, Idler, World, Con- | noisseur, Mirror, and Lounger, none can be said to have obtained a place in the standard literature of our country. Of the productions just named, an account will be given when we come to speak of the authors principally concerned in them; and with respect to the others, it is sufficient to remark, that so slender is their general merit, that from fortyone of the best among them, Dr Drake has been able to compile only four volumes of papers above mediocrity.*

*The selection was published in 1811, under the title of The Gleaner; a Series of Periodical Essays, selected and arranged from scarce or neglected volumes. By Nathan Drake, M.D.' 8vo.

the greatest respect for your good sense and address. When one of these has a little cunning, he passes his time in the utmost satisfaction to himself and his friends; for his position is never to report or speak a displeasing thing to his friend. As for letting him go on in an error, he knows advice against them is the office of persons of greater talents and less dis

cretion.

The Latin word for a flatterer (assentator) implies no more than a person that barely consents; and indeed such a one, if a man were able to purchase or maintain him, cannot be bought too dear. Such a one never contradicts you, but gains upon you, not by a fulsome way of commending you in broad terms, but liking whatever you propose or utter; at the same time is ready to beg your pardon, and gainsay you, if you chance to speak ill of yourself. An old lady is very seldom without such a companion as this, who can recite the names of all her lovers, and the matches refused by her in the days when she minded such vanities (as she is pleased to call them, though she so much approves the mention of them). It is to be noted, that a woman's flatterer is generally elder than herself, her years serving to recommend her patroness's age, and to add weight to her complaisance in all other particulars.

We gentlemen of small fortunes are extremely necessitous in this particular. I have, indeed, one who smokes with me often; but his parts are so low, that all the incense he does me is to fill his pipe with me, and to be out at just as many whiffs as I take. This is all the praise or assent that he is capable of, yet there are more hours when I would rather be in his company than that of the brightest man I know, It would be a hard matter to give an account of this inclination to be flattered; but if we go to the bottom of it, we shall find that the pleasure in it is something like that of receiving money which lay out. Every man thinks he has an estate of reputation, and is glad to see one that will bring any of it home to him; it is no matter how dirty a bag it is conveyed to him in, or by how clownish a messenger, so the money is good. All that we want to be pleased with flattery, is to believe that the man is sincere who gives it us. It is by this one accident that absurd creatures often outrun the most skilful in this art. Their want of ability is here an advantage, and their bluntness, as it is the seeming effect of sincerity, is the best cover to artifice.

Terence introduces a flatterer talking to a coxcomb, whom he cheats out of a livelihood, and a third person on the stage makes on him this pleasant remark, 'This fellow has an art of making fools madmen.' The love of flattery is indeed sometimes the weakness of a great mind; but you see it also in persons who otherwise discover no manner of relish of anything above mere sensuality. These latter it sometimes improves, but always debases the former. A fool is in himself the object of pity till he is flattered. By the force of that, his stupidity is raised into affectation, and he becomes of dignity enough to be ridiculous. I remember a droll, that upon one's saying the times are so ticklish that there must great care be taken what one says in conversation, answered with an air of surliness and honesty, If people will be free, let them be so in the manner that I am, who never abuse a man but to his face. He had no reputation for saying dangerous truths; therefore when it was repeated, You abuse a man but to his face? Yes, says he, I flatter him.

It is, indeed, the greatest of injuries to flatter any but the unhappy, or such as are displeased with themselves for some infirmity. In this latter case we have a member of our club, that, when Sir Jeffrey falls asleep, wakens him with snoring. This makes Sir Jeffrey hold up for some moments the longer, to see

there are men younger than himself among us, who are more lethargic than he is.

When flattery is practised upon any other consideration, it is the most abject thing in nature; nay, I cannot think of any character below the flatterer, except he that envies him. You meet with fellows prepared to be as mean as possible in their condescensions and expressions; but they want persons and talents to rise up to such a baseness. As a coxcomb is a fool of parts, so a flatterer is a knave of parts. The best of this order that I know, is one who disguises it under a spirit of contradiction or reproof. He told an arrant driveller the other day, that he did not care for being in company with him, because he heard he turned his absent friends into ridicule. And upon Lady Autumn's disputing with him about something that happened at the Revolution, he replied with a very angry tone, Pray, madam, give me leave to know more of a thing in which I was actually concerned, than you who were then in your nurse's arms.

[Quack Advertisements.]

It gives me much despair in the design of reforming the world by my speculations, when I find there always arise, from one generation to another, successive cheats and bubbles, as naturally as beasts of prey and those which are to be their food. There is hardly a man in the world, one would think, so ignorant as not to know that the ordinary quack-doctors, who publish their abilities in little brown billets, distributed to all who pass by, are to a man impostors and murderers; yet such is the credulity of the vulgar, and the impudence of these professors, that the affair still goes on, and new promises of what was never done before are made every day. What aggravates the jest is, that even this promise has been made as long as the memory of man can trace it, and yet nothing performed, and yet still prevails. As I was passing along to-day, a paper given into my hand by a fellow without a nose, tells us as follows what good news is come to town, to wit, that there is now a certain cure for the French disease, by a gentleman just come from his travels.

'In Russel Court, over against the Cannon Ball, at the Surgeons' Arms, in Drury Lane, is lately come from his travels a surgeon, who hath practised surgery and physic, both by sea and land, these twenty-four years. He, by the blessing, cures the yellow jaundice, green-sickness, scurvy, dropsy, surfeits, long sea voyages, campaigns, &c., as some people that has been lame these thirty years can testify; in short, he cureth all diseases incident to men, women, or children.'

If a man could be so indolent as to look upon this havoc of the human species which is made by vice and ignorance, it would be a good ridiculous work to comment upon the declaration of this accomplished traveller. There is something unaccountably taking among the vulgar in those who come from a great way off. Ignorant people of quality, as many there are of such, dote excessively this way; many instances of which every man will suggest to himself, without my enumeration of them. The ignorants of lower order, who cannot, like the upper ones, be profuse of their money to those recommended by coming from a distance, are no less complaisant than the others; for they venture their lives for the same admiration.

The doctor is lately come from his travels, and has practised both by sea and land, and therefore cures the green-sickness, long sea voyages, and campaigns.' Both by sea and land! I will not answer for the distempers called 'sea voyages and campaigns,' but I daresay that of green-sickness might be as well taken care of if the doctor stayed ashore. But the art of managing mankind is only to make them stare a little to keep up their astonishment;

to let nothing be familiar to them, but ever to have something in their sleeve, in which they must think you are deeper than they are. There is an ingenious fellow, a barber, of my acquaintance, who, besides his broken fiddle and a dried sea-monster, has a twine-cord, strained with two nails at each end, over his window, and the words, 'rainy, dry, wet,' and so forth, written to denote the weather, according to the rising or falling of the cord. We very great scholars are not apt to wonder at this; but I observed a very honest fellow, a chance customer, who sat in the chair before me to be shaved, fix his eye upon this miraculous performance during the operation upon his chin and face. When those and his head also were cleared of all incumbrances and excrescences, he looked at the fish, then at the fiddle, still grubling in his pockets, and casting his eye again at the twine, and the words writ on each side; then altered his mind as to farthings, and gave my friend a silver sixpence. The business, as I said, is to keep up the amazement; and if my friend had only the skeleton and kit, he must have been contented with a less payment. But the doctor we were talking of, adds to his long voyages the testimony of some people that has been thirty years lame.' When I received my paper, a sagacious fellow took one at the same time, and read until he came to the thirty years' confinement of his friends, and went off very well convinced of the doctor's sufficiency. You have many of these prodigious persons, who have had some extraordinary accident at their birth, or a great disaster in some part of their lives. Anything, however foreign from the business the people want of you, will convince them of your ability in that you profess. There is a doctor in Mouse Alley, near Wapping, who sets up for curing cataracts upon the credit of having, as his bill sets forth, lost an eye in the emperor's service. His patients come in upon this, and he shows his muster-roll, which confirms that he was in his imperial majesty's troops; and he puts out their eyes with great success. Who would believe that a man should be a doctor for the cure of bursten children, by declaring that his father and grandfather were born bursten? But Charles Ingoltson, next door to the Harp in Barbican, has made a pretty penny by that asseveration. The generality go upon their first conception, and think no further; all the rest is granted. They take it that there is something uncommon in you, and give you credit for the rest. You may be sure it is upon that I go, when, sometimes, let it be to the purpose or not, I keep a Latin sentence in my front; and I was not a little pleased when I observed one of my readers say, casting his eye on my twentieth paper, More Latin still? What a prodigious scholar is this man!' But as I have here taken much liberty, with this learned doctor, I must make up all I have said by repeating what he seems to be in earnest in, and honestly promise to those who will not receive him as a great man, to wit, "That from eight to twelve, and from two till six, he attends for the good of the public to bleed for threepence.'

[Story-Telling.]

Tom Lizard told us a story the other day, of some persons which our family know very well, with so much humour and life, that it caused a great deal of mirth at the tea-table. His brother Will, the Templar, was highly delighted with it; and the next day being with some of his Inns-of-court acquaintance, resolved (whether out of the benevolence or the pride of his heart, I will not determine) to entertain them with what he called a pleasant humour enough.' I was in great pain for him when I heard him begin; and was not at all surprised to find the company very little moved by it. Will blushed, looked round the room,

and with a forced laugh, 'Faith, gentlemen,' said he, 'I do not know what makes you look so grave: it was an admirable story when I heard it.'

When I came home, I fell into a profound contemplation upon story-telling, and, as I have nothing so much at heart as the good of my country, I resolved to lay down some precautions upon this subject. I have often thought that a story-teller is born, as well as a poet. It is, I think, certain that some men have such a peculiar cast of mind, that they see things in another light than men of grave dispositions. Men of a lively imagination and a mirthful temper will represent things to their hearers in the same manner as they themselves were affected with them; and whereas serious spirits might perhaps have been disgusted at the sight of some odd occurrences in fe, yet the very same occurrences shall please them in a well-told story, where the disagreeable parts of the images are concealed, and those only which are pleasing exhibited to the fancy. Story-telling is therefore not an art, but what we call a 'knack;' it doth not so much subsist upon wit as upon humour; and I will add, that it is not perfect without proper gesticulations of the body, which naturally attend such merry emotions of the mind. I know very well that a certain gravity of countenance sets some stories off to advantage, where the hearer is to be surprised in the end. But this is by no means a general rule; for it is frequently convenient to aid and assist by cheerful looks and whimsical agitations. I will go yet further, and affirm that the success of a story very often depends upon the make of the body, and the formation of the features, of him who relates it. I have been of this opinion ever since I criticised upon the chin of Dick Dewlap. I very often had the weakness to repine at the prosperity of his conceits, which made him pass for a wit with the widow at the coffee-house, and the ordinary mechanics that frequent it; nor could I myself forbear laughing at them most heartily, though upon examination I thought most of them very flat and insipid. I found, after some time, that the merit of his wit was founded upon the shaking of a fat paunch, and the tossing up of a pair of rosy jowls. Poor Dick had a fit of sickness, which robbed him of his fat and his fame at once; and it was full three months before he regained his reputation, which rose in proportion to his floridity. He is now very jolly and ingenious, and hath a good constitution for wit.

Those who are thus adorned with the gifts of nature, are apt to show their parts with too much ostentation. I would therefore advise all the professors of this art never to tell stories but as they seem to grow out of the subject-matter of the conversation, or as they serve to illustrate or enliven it. Stories that are very common are generally irksome; but may be aptly introduced, provided they be only hinted at and mentioned by way of allusion. Those that are altogether new, should never be ushered in without a short and pertinent character of the chief persons concerned, because, by that means, you may make the company acquainted with them; and it is a certain rule, that slight and trivial accounts of those who are familiar to us, administer more mirth than the brightest points of wit in unknown characters. A little circumstance in the complexion or dress of the man you are talking of, sets his image before the hearer, if it be chosen aptly for the story. Thus, I remember Tom Lizard, after having made his sisters merry with an account of a formal old man's way of complimenting, owned very frankly that his story would not have been worth one farthing, if he had made the hat of him whom he represented one inch narrower. Besides the marking distinct characters, and selecting pertinent circumstances, it is likewise necessary to leave off in time, and end smartly; so that there is a kind of drama in the forming of a story; and the manner of con