Thus L'Estrange's Characters, together with the fanciful anecdotes, self-satire, parodies, and _personae_, provide the satire and humor in the _Observator_, the whole being couched in familiar, pungent language. As L'Estrange counters the faction, propagandizes, and exhorts to rational behavior, he also amuses and delights, always hoping that the laughter provoked by his satiric treatment will cure what he saw as follies of his age, always appealing to the common reader whose sense of humor, he believed, was probably more developed than his sense. California State College, Dominguez Hills NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION 1: The translations before 1681 are _The Visions of Dom Francisco de Quevedo_ (1667); _A Guide to Eternity_ (1672); _Five Love-letters from a Nun_ (1677); _The Gentleman-Apothecary_ (1678); _Seneca's Morals_ (1678); _Twenty Select Colloquies of Erasmus_ (1679); and _Tully's Offices_ (1680). 2: Various perspectives on L'Estrange's life and works can be found in the following: George Kitchin, _Sir Roger L'Estrange_ (London, 1913) for L'Estrange's life and impact on the Restoration press; J. G. Muddiman, _The King's Journalist_ (London, 1923) for L'Estrange's rivalry with Henry Muddiman, editor of the _Oxford [London] Gazette_; David J. Littlefield, "The Polemic Art of Sir Roger L'Estrange: A Study of His Political Writings, 1659-1688" (Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, Yale University, 1961) for an overview of L'Estrange as a political pamphleteer. 3: In 1679 L'Estrange wrote six new pamphlets and reprinted three old ones; in 1680 eleven new and seventeen old; at the start of 1681, ten new and seventeen old. A probable norm of 1000-1500 copies per pamphlet edition has been estimated by Joseph Frank, _The Beginnings of the English Newspaper, 1620-1660_ (Cambridge, Mass., 1961), p. 314; two orders of 1500 pamphlets each were given to the Restoration printer Nathaniel Thompson, as noted by Leona Rostenberg, "Nathaniel Thompson, Catholic Printer and Publisher of the Restoration," _The Library_, 3rd ser., X (1955), 195. 4: _Heraclitus Ridens_ was considered by generations of historians as the first newspaper in dialogue; most recently, James Sutherland (_English Literature of the Late Seventeenth Century_, Oxford, 1969, p. 241) has given precedence to _The City and Country Mercury_. 5: _Studies in the Early English Periodical_ (Chapel Hill, 1957), p. 38. 6: Ibid., pp. 38-39. 7: Walter Graham, _English Literary Periodicals_ (New York, 1930), pp. 38, 63, 168. 8: _On English Prose_ (Toronto, 1965), pp. 72-74. 9: _The Spectator_, No. 10, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford, 1965), I, 44. 10: _The Review_, ed. Arthur Wellesley Secord (Facsimile Text Society, New York, 1938), I, 4.