on his death-bed; but there appears to be no ground for Johnson’s imputation on the young man’s morals or principles, or for supposing that it was a last effort on Addison’s part to reclaim him. Young mentions his lordship as a youth finely accomplished, without a hint of looseness either in opinions or conduct. Addison died June 17, 1719: his only child, a daughter, died at Bilton, in Warwickshire, at an advanced age, in 1797. Not many days before his death he commissioned Mr. Tickell to collect his writings; a gentleman of whom Swift said that Addison was a whig, but Tickell, _whigissimus_. To ascertain the claim of short periodical papers to originality of design, we must look to the state of newspapers at an earlier date. As vehicles of information they are often mentioned in plays in the time of James and Charles the First. Carew, in his ‘Survey of Cornwall,’ first published in 1602, quotes ‘Mercurius Gallo-Belgicus.’ Till the beginning of the eighteenth century, the periodical press had been exclusively political; no class of writers but divines and theoretical reasoners had administered to the moral wants of society: certain gentlemen, therefore, of liberal education, and men of the world, combined to furnish practical instruction in an amusing form, by fictions running parallel with the political newspaper. Addison announces the design “to bring philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and in coffee-houses.” In the character of his fictitious friend the clergyman, he speaks of “the great use this paper might be of to the public, by reprehending those vices which are too trivial for the chastisement of the law, and too fantastical for the cognizance of the pulpit.” Another object was to allay party-violence by promoting literary taste; in Steele’s figurative language, to substitute the lute for the trumpet. On this subject Addison says, “I am amazed that the press should be only made use of in this way by news-writers, and the zealots of parties; as if it were not more advantageous to mankind to be instructed in wisdom and virtue than in politics, and to be made good fathers, husbands, and sons, than counsellors and statesmen.”