The influence of the _Spectator_ was incalculable. Addison succeeded in his principal object. 'I shall be ambitious to have it said of me that I have brought philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and in coffee-houses,' and that I have produced 'such writings as tend to the wearing out of ignorance, passion, and prejudice'. [Footnote: _Spectator_ 10.] A glance at the social and literary history of the next thirty or forty years will reveal how fully this wish was accomplished. It is true that folly and vice have not yet been wiped off the face of the earth, but the _Spectator_ turned the tide of public opinion against them. The fashionable ideal was reversed; virtue became admirable, and though vice could not be destroyed, it was no longer suffered to plume itself in the eyes of the world. The _Spectator_ had delivered virtue from its position of contempt, and 'set up the immoral man as the object of derision'. [Footnote: _Spectator_ 445.] The _Spectator_ has also acquired an incidental value from the passage of time. Addison hints at this in his citations from an imaginary history of Queen Anne's reign, supposed to be written three hundred years later. In 'those little diurnal essays which are still extant'--two-thirds of the time has elapsed, and at present the _Spectator_ is certainly extant--we are enabled 'to see the diversions and characters of the English nation in his time.' [Footnote: _Spectator_ 101.] It is in the literature of a nation that we find the history of its life and the motives of its deeds.