Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 54.djvu/140

 the close of 1708 an execution for arrears of rent was put into the Bury Street house. In the following March his daughter Elizabeth was born, having for godfathers Addison and Wortley Montagu. A month later, without premonition of any kind, Steele inaugurated his career as an essayist by establishing the ‘Tatler.’

The first number of the ‘Tatler,’ a single folio sheet, was issued on 12 April 1709, and it came out three times a week. The first four numbers were given away gratis; after this the price was a penny. The supposed author was one ‘Isaac Bickerstaff,’ the pseudonym borrowed by Swift from a shopdoor to demolish John Partridge [q. v.] the astrologer. The paper's name, said Steele ironically, was invented in honour of the fair sex (No. 1), and it professed in general to treat, as its motto for many numbers indicated, of ‘Quicquid agunt homines,’ dating its accounts of gallantry, pleasure, and entertainment from White's coffee-house, its poetry from Wills's, its learning from the Grecian, and its foreign and domestic intelligence (which Steele hoped to supplement out of his own official gazette) from the St. James's. Whatever came under none of these heads was dated from ‘My own apartment.’ As time went on the project developed, and when the first volume was dedicated to Mainwaring (who, as already stated, had helped Steele to his gazetteership), it was already claimed for the new venture that it had aimed at ‘exposing the false arts of life, pulling off the disguises of cunning, vanity, and affectation, and recommending a general simplicity in our dress, our discourse, and our behaviour’ (see also Tatler, No. 89). In this larger task Steele was no doubt aided by Addison, who, playing but an inconspicuous part in the first volume (his earliest contribution was to No. 18), gave very substantial aid in its successors; and from a hotch-pot of news and town gossip the ‘Tatler’ became a collection of individual essays on social and general topics. In the preface to the fourth and final volume, Steele, with a generosity which never failed him, rendered grateful testimony to his anonymous coadjutor's assistance. In thanking Addison for his services as ‘a gentleman who will be nameless,’ he goes on to say: ‘This good office [of contributing] he performed with such force of genius, humour, wit, and learning, that I fared like a distressed Prince who calls in a powerful neighbour to his aid; I was undone by my auxiliary; when I had once called him in, I could not subsist without dependence on him.’

After a career, prolonged to 271 numbers, about 188 of which were from Steele's own pen, the ‘Tatler’ came to a sudden end on 2 Jan. 1711. The ostensible reason for this was that the public had penetrated the editor's disguise, and that the edifying precepts of the fictitious ‘Mr. Bickerstaff’ were less efficacious when they came to be habitually identified in the public mind with the fallible personality of Steele himself (Tatler, No. 271). But it has been shrewdly surmised that there were other and more pressing reasons (which Steele also hints at) for its abrupt cessation. In addition to his office of gazetteer, he had been made in January 1710 a commissioner of stamps, an office which increased his income by 300l. per annum. When in August of the same year Harley became head of the government, certain papers satirising him had recently made their appearance in the ‘Tatler;’ and in the following October Steele lost his gazetteership. That he was not deprived of his commissionership of stamps as well has been ascribed to the intervention of Swift, whose friends were in power (Journal to Stella, 15 Dec. 1710), and with this forbearance of the ministry the termination of the ‘Tatler’ is also supposed to be obscurely connected. ‘What I find is the least excusable part of this work,’ says Steele in the final number quoted above, ‘is that I have in some places in it touched upon matters which concern both the church and state.’ But however this may be, the ‘Tatler’ was not long without a successor. Two months later (1 March) began the ‘Spectator,’ professing in its first number ‘an exact neutrality between the whigs and tories,’ and setting in motion almost from the first that famous club of which Sir Roger de Coverley is the most prominent member. The first sketch (in No. 2) of this immortal friendly gathering was undoubtedly due to Steele's inventive alertness. But Addison, working at leisure upon his friend's rapid and hasty outline, gradually filled in the features of the figure whose fortunes to-day constitute the chief interest of the periodical. Diversified in addition by the critical essays of Addison and the domestic sketches of Steele, the ‘Spectator’ proceeded with unabated vivacity to its five hundred and fifty-fifth number and seventh volume, surviving even that baleful Stamp Act of August 1712 (10 Anne, cap. 19) which nipped so many of its contemporaries. Out of the whole of the papers Addison wrote 274 and Steele 236. As before, no satisfactory explanation is forthcoming for the termination of the enterprise, the success of which is admitted. Towards the end of its