Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 18.djvu/49

Rh perhaps might entirely write those few papers which are so much better than the rest.

Before I proceed farther in the account of our weekly papers, it will be necessary to inform you, that, at the beginning of the winter, to the infinite surprise of all men, Mr. Steele flung up his Tatler; and, instead of Isaac Bickerstaff, esq., subscribed himself Richard Steele to the last of those papers, after a handsome compliment to the town, for their kind acceptance of his endeavours to divert them. The chief reason he thought fit to give, for his leaving off writing, was, that, having been so long looked on in all publick places and companies as the author of those papers, he found that his most intimate friends and acquaintance were in pain to act or speak before him. The town was very far from being satisfied with this reason; and most people judged the true cause to be, either that he was quite spent, and wanted matter to continue his undertaking any longer, or that he laid it down as a sort of submission to, or composition with, the government, for some past offences; or, lastly, that he had a mind to vary his shape, and appear again in some new light.

However that were, his disappearing seemed to be bewailed as some general calamity: every one wanted so agreeable an amusement: and the coffeehouses began to be sensible, that the esquire's lucubrations alone had brought them more customers than all their other newspapers put together.

It must indeed be confessed, that never man threw Rh