Mr. Bickerstaff was in himself a contribution to character-study in fiction; the daily talks that were put into his mouth by Steele and his friends, supplied others no less valuable. The Character, the neat driven team of short sentences, became in his hands something like a story. It became an anecdote with no other point than to bring alive the person described. And the portraits became less general. Types turned into individuals. Ned Softly, for example, is not called 'a very Poet,' and hit off with, 'He will ever into Company with a Copy of Verses in his Pocket; and these will be read to all that suffer him. Every Opinion he taketh for Praise, and Ridicule in his Ears soundeth like Flattery.' He is given the name by which he is known in private life. We see him walk into the room, hear his preliminaries, watch his battery unmasked as he opens his pocket, listen to his verses, hear them again, line by ridiculous line, observe him batten on the opinions he extracts, and see him hide his darlings at the approach of sterner-featured critics. The Character is become a little scene. The moth has no pin through his middle, but flaps his way where we may see him best. Here is the very art that Fanny Burney, that charming show-woman, was to use for the exhibition of Madame Duval; here the alchemy that was to turn puppets into people. It is the same that gave Pygmalion his mistress. The essayists owed much to their own hearts, or to the heart they set in 'our' Mr. Bickerstaff, for if you love a man as well as you laugh at him, it is great odds that he will come alive. [Mr. Bickerstaff's letter-box.] Steele probably got a few letters from unknown correspondents, dull and stupid as such things are. Perhaps in laughingly parodying them at the coffee-house tables he caught the idea of inventing better ones for Mr. Bickerstaff's assistance. Perhaps, when hard pressed for time, thrown to the last minute for his work by some merry expedition with the Kit Kats to talk and drink wine under the mulberry-tree on Hampstead Heath, he found he could get quicker into a subject through the letter of a servant girl than through Mr. Bickerstaff's first-personal lucubrations. However that may be, much of the best reading in both _Tatler_ and _Spectator_ is held in the letters supposed to be written to the man who was supposed to write the whole. These letters are not mere statements of fact, to serve instead of Latin quotations as texts for essays. They are imitations, 'liker than life itself,' of the letters of reality. Each one of them is written by some individual person whose impress on its writing is so clear that the letter makes a portrait of himself. Even the cock in Clare Market has a personality quite his own when he sends Mr. Bickerstaff a petition. And as for the Quaker; remember how he would have been described in the old manner, and read this:-- 'TO THE MAN CALLED THE SPECTATOR