His very malevolence proceeded from a flaccidity which meanly envied the activities and enthusiasms of other men. As a writer he was superficial; he had not the requisite energy for forming a clear or profound judgment on any question of difficulty; Johnson's comment, "He thinks justly but he thinks faintly" sums up the truth about him. His good qualities were of a slighter kind than Swift's; he was a quiet and accurate observer of manners and fashions in life and conversation, and he had the gift of a style--what Johnson calls "The Middle Style"--very exactly suited to the kind of work on which he was habitually engaged, "always equable, always easy, without glowing words or pointed sentences" but polished, lucid, and urbane. Steele and Addison were conscious moralists as well as literary men. They desired to purge society from Restoration licences; to their efforts we must credit the alteration in morality which _The School for Scandal_ shows over _The Way of the World_. Their professed object as they stated themselves was "to banish vice and ignorance out of the territories of Great Britain, (nothing less!) and to bring philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and coffee-houses." In fact their satires were politically nearer home, and the chief objects of their aversion were the Tory squires whom it was their business as Whigs to deride. On the Coverley papers in the _Spectator_ rests the chief part of their literary fame; these belong rather to the special history of the novel than to that of the periodical essay. CHAPTER VI DR. JOHNSON AND HIS TIME