Recall the time when it was founded. It was in the days of Queen Anne, the Augustan age of the essay. There were no newspapers then, no magazines or reviews, no Parliamentary reports, nothing corresponding to the so-called "light literature" of later days. The only centres of society that existed were the court, with the aristocracy that revolved about it, and the clubs and coffee-houses, in which the commercial and professional classes met to discuss matters of general interest, to crack their jokes, and to exchange small talk about this, that and the other person, man or woman, who might happen to figure, publicly or privately, at the time. "The Spectator" was one of the first organs to give form and consistency to the opinion, the humour and the gossip engendered by this social contact. One of the first, but not quite the first; for the less famous, though still remembered, "Tatler" preceded it. And these two, "The Tatler" and "The Spectator," have an intimate connection from the circumstance that Richard Steele, who started "The Tatler" in April, 1709, got Addison to write for it, and then joined with Addison in "The Spectator" when his own paper stopped in January, 1711. Addison and Steele had been friends since boyhood. They were contemporaries at the Charterhouse, and Steele often spent his holidays in the parsonage of Addison's father. The two friends were a little under forty years of age when "The Spectator" began in March, 1711. It was a penny paper, and was published daily, its predecessor having been published three times a week. It began with a circulation of 3,000 copies, and ran up to about 10,000 before it stopped its daily issue in December, 1712. Macaulay, writing in 1843, insists upon the sale as "indicating a popularity quite as great as that of the most successful works of Scott and Dickens in our time." The 555 numbers of the daily issue formed seven volumes; and then there was a final eighth volume, made up of triweekly issues: a total of 635 numbers, of which Addison wrote 274, and Steele 236. To summarise the contents of these 635 numbers would require a volume. They are so versatile and so varied. As one of Addison's biographers puts it, to-day you have a beautiful meditation, brilliant in imagery and serious as a sermon, or a pious discourse on death, or perhaps an eloquent and scathing protest against the duel; while to-morrow the whole number is perhaps concerned with the wigs, ruffles, and shoe-buckles of the _macaroni_, or the hoops, patches, farthingales and tuckers of the ladies. If you wish to see the plays and actors of the time, "The Spectator" will always show them to you; and, moreover, point out the dress, manners, and mannerisms, affectations, indecorums, plaudits, or otherwise of the frequenters of the theatre. For here is no newspaper, as we understand the term. "The Spectator" from the first indulged his humours at the expense of the quidnuncs. Says he: