Yet there were plenty of folks who sneered at these papers even then--as small--not worthy of notice. That great, bustling, slashing, literary giant, Dean Swift, says to Mistress Hester Johnson, “Do you read the _Spectators_? I never do; they never come in my way. They say abundance of them are very pretty.” “Very pretty!” a vast many satiric shots have been fired off to that tune. And yet Swift and Addison had been as friendly as two men so utterly unlike could be. To complete the De Coverley picture, and give it relish in the boudoirs of the time, the authors paint the old knight in love--delicately, but deeply and wofully in love--with a certain unnamed widow living near him, and whose country house overlooks the park of the De Coverley estate. “Oh, the many moonlight nights that I have walked by myself, and thought on the widow, by the music of the nightingales!” This sounds like Steele. And the old knight leaves to her “Whom he has loved for forty years, a pearl necklace that was his mother’s, and a couple of silver bracelets set with jewels.” This episode has an added interest, because about those times the dignified and coy Mr. Addison was very much bent upon marrying the elegant Lady Warwick, whose son had been correspondent--perhaps pupil of his. He did not bounce into marriage--like Steele--with his whole heart in his eyes and his speech; it was a long pursuit, and had its doubtful stages; six years before the affair really came about, he used to write to the Warwick lad about the tom-tits, and the robin-redbreasts, and their pretty nests, and the nightingales. But Addison, more or less fortunate than Sir Roger, does win the widow’s hand, and has a sorry time of it with her. She never forgets to look a little down upon him, and he never forgets a keen knowledge of it. He has the liberty, however, after his marriage--with certain limitations--of a great fine home at Holland House, which is one of the few old country houses still standing in London, in the midst of the gardens, where Addison used to walk, in preference to my Lady’s chamber. His habits were to study of a morning--dine at a tavern; then to Button’s coffee-house, near to Covent Garden, for a meet with his cronies; and afterward--when the spectre of marriage was real to him--to the tavern again, and to heavier draughts than he was wont to take in his young days. Pope said he was charming in his talk; but never so in mixed company; never when the auditors were so new or so many as to rouse his self-consciousness; this tied his tongue; but with one or two he knew well, the stream of the _Spectator’s_ talk flowed as limpidly as from his pen.