Now it was to this quickened social sense that _The Tatler_ and _The Spectator_ made appeal. They pictured the life of the town from day to day, especially in its lighter, more humorous phases. And this was always done with some underlying moral purpose. As the months go past, we have in these papers an exhaustless flow of kindly satire upon the manners and minor morals of society,--on behaviour at church, on ogling the ladies, on snuff-taking, on the folly of enormous petticoats and low tuckers, on the brainless fops that display themselves in club windows and the brainless flirts that display themselves in stage boxes. We have bits of keen character-painting too--the small poet who assures you that poets are born, not made; the beau who is caught practising before the mirror to catch a careless air; the man who is so ambitious to be thought wise that he sets up for a free-thinker and talks atheism all day at the club, though he says his prayers very carefully every night at home. One can imagine with what pleasure the town must have seen its follies taken off so smartly. Occasionally, too, there are short stories--usually written by Steele--bits of domestic narrative showing the peace and purity of home. In _The Spectator_, the papers are somewhat longer and more ambitious than those of _The Tatler_, and here are many essays on graver themes, and carefully elaborated critical studies, like the famous series by Addison on Milton's _Paradise Lost_. Yet, from first to last, the most interesting papers, both of _The Tatler_ and _The Spectator_, are those which depict with kindly irony the daily life of the town. There is not to be found in English literature up to that time any satire so wholesome, any pictures of contemporary society so vivid and so entertaining. Indeed, it may perhaps be said that, of the sort, we have had nothing better in English literature since.