What ruled writer and reader alike was the new-found pleasure of talk. The use of coffee had only come in at the close of the civil wars; but already London and the bigger towns were crowded with coffee-houses. The popularity of the coffee-house sprang not from its coffee, but from the new pleasure which men found in their chat over the coffee-cup. And from the coffee-house sprang the Essay. The talk of Addison and Steele is the brightest and easiest talk that was ever put in print: but its literary charm lies in this, that it is strictly talk. The essayist is a gentleman who chats to a world of gentlemen, and whose chat is shaped and coloured by a sense of what he owes to his company. He must interest and entertain, he may not bore them; and so his form must be short; essay or sketch, or tale or letter. So too his style must be simple, the sentences clear and quotable, good sense ready packed for carriage. Strength of phrase, intricacy of structure, height of tone were all necessarily banished from such prose as we banish them from ordinary conversation. There was no room for pedantry, for the ostentatious display of learning, for pompousness, for affectation. The essayist had to think, as a talker should think, more of good taste than of imaginative excellence, of propriety of expression than of grandeur of phrase. The deeper themes of the world or man were denied to him; if he touches them it is superficially, with a decorous dulness, or on their more humorous side with a gentle irony that shows how faint their hold is on him. In Addison's chat the war of churches shrinks into a puppet-show, and the strife of politics loses something of its fictitious earnestness as the humourist views it from the standpoint of a lady's patches. It was equally impossible to deal with the fiercer passions and subtler emotions of man. Shakspere's humour and sublimity, his fitful transitions from mood to mood, his wild bursts of laughter, his passion of tears, Hamlet or Hamlet's gravedigger, Lear or Lear's fool, would have startled the readers of the "Spectator" as they would startle the group in a modern drawing-room. [Sidenote: The urbanity of Literature.]