there has not been sufficient pains taken to find out proper employments and diversions for the fair ones. Their amusements seem contrived for them rather as they are women than as they are reasonable creatures. The toilet is their great scene of business, and the right adjusting of their hair the principal employment of their lives. This, I say, is the state of ordinary women, though I know there are multitudes of those that move in an exalted sphere of knowledge and virtue, and that join all the beauties of mind to the ornaments of dress. I hope to increase the number of those by publishing this daily paper, which I shall always endeavour to make an innocent entertainment, and by that means at least divert the minds of my female readers from far greater trifles." Faithfully and yet very pleasantly did Addison carry out his scheme. His humour was always kindly, his good sense was unvarying, his thoughts were always generous and true, and his easy unaffected language completed the charm. Instead of dropping to the level of his readers, he raised them to the much higher level on which he himself stood, and this without dull lecturing or violent denunciations. Religion, duty, love, honour, purity, truth, kindliness, and public-spiritedness were all real things to him, and he sought to make them everywhere realities too, gilding his little moral pills so cleverly, that until they were swallowed no one knew they were pills, and then they left nothing but a sweet taste behind. "About an age ago," he writes, "it was the fashion in England for every one who would be thought religious to throw as much sanctity as possible into his face. The saint was of a sorrowful countenance, and generally was eaten up with melancholy. I do not presume to tax such characters with hypocrisy, as is done too frequently, that being a vice which, I think, none but He who knows the secrets of men’s hearts should pretend to discover in another. But I think they would do well to consider whether such a behaviour does not deter men from religion.... In short, those who represent religion in so unamiable a light are like the spies sent out by Moses to make a discovery in the Land of Promise, when by their reports they discouraged the people from entering upon it. Those that show us the joys, the cheerfulness, the good-humour that naturally spring up in this happy state are like the spies bringing along with them clusters of grapes and delicious fruits that so invited their companions into the pleasant country which produced them."