The design was excellent, the immediate execution cleverly adapted to seize the interest of the public, which had been already amused and mystified under that name. Mr. Isaac Bickerstaff presented his readers with the first number of his journal without charge. “I earnestly desire,” he says, “all persons, without distinction, to take it in for the present _gratis_, and hereafter at the price of one penny, forbidding all hawkers to take more for it at their peril.” The idea took the town. No doubt there would be many an allusion to this and that which the wits would guess at, and which would to them have a double meaning; but, to do the “Tatler” justice, the kind of gossip which fills the so-called society newspapers in our day was unknown to the witty gentlemen who sometimes satirize a ruffle or a shoe-tie, but never personally a woman. The types of fine ladies who flutter through his pages could never raise a pang in any individual bosom; and when he addressed himself to the reform of the theater, to the difficult duty of checking play and discouraging duels, he had all the well-thinking on his side. Steele had gone on for some numbers before his new venture attracted the attention of Addison. He recognized whose the hand was from a classical criticism in the sixth number which he had himself made to Steele; and he must have been pleased with the idea, since he soon after appears as a coadjutor, sending his contributions from the Secretary’s office in Dublin. There has been a great and prolonged controversy upon the respective merits of these two friends: some, and first among them Macaulay, will have it that Addison had all the merit of the publication. “Almost everything good in the ‘Tatler’ was his,” says the historian. But there are many who, despite Macaulay’s great authority, find a certain difficulty in distinguishing Addison from Steele and Steele from Addison, and are inclined to find the latter writer as entertaining and as gifted as the former. No question could be more difficult to settle. As we glance over the little gray volumes which bring back to us dimly the effect which the little broadsheet must have had when it appeared day by day, there is no doubt that the eye is oftenest caught by something which, when we look again, proves to be from Addison’s hand. We open, it is by chance, and yet not altogether by chance, upon Tom Folio and his humors; upon the poor poet and his verses; upon some group of shabby heroes, or stumbling procession of country gentlemen which there is no mistaking. But on the other hand it is Steele who gives us that family picture, which reads like the Vicar of Wakefield, yet with a more tender touch (for Mrs. Primrose was never her husband’s equal), showing us the good woman among her family, the husband half distracted with the fear of losing her, the wife for his sake smiling her paleness away. Indeed, we think, in these early essays