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From Swift the scene changes to Addison and Steele. Steele is of less importance; for, though a man of greater intellectual activity [4] than Addison, he had far less of genius. So I turn him out, as one would turn out upon a heath a ram that had missed his way into one’s tulip preserve; requesting him to fight for himself against Schlosser, or others that may molest him. But, so far as concerns Addison, I am happy to support the character of Schlosser for consistency, by assuring the reader that, of all the monstrosities uttered by any man upon Addison, and of all the monstrosities uttered by Schlosser upon any man, a thing which he says about Addison is the worst. But this I reserve for a climax at the end. Schlosser really puts his best leg foremost at starting, and one thinks he’s going to mend; for he catches a truth, viz., the following–that all the brilliances of the Queen Anne period (which so many inconsiderate people have called the Augustan age of our literature) ‘point to this– that the reading public wished to be entertained, not roused to think; to be gently moved, not deeply excited.’ Undoubtedly what strikes a man in Addison, or will strike him when indicated, is the coyness and timidity, almost the girlish shame, which he betrays in the presence of all the elementary majesties belonging to impassioned or idealized nature. Like one bred in crowded cities, when first left alone in forests or amongst mountains, he is frightened at their silence, their solitude, their magnitude of form, or their frowning glooms. It has been remarked by others that Addison and his companions never rise to the idea of addressing the ‘nation’ or the ‘people;’ it is always the ‘town.’ Even their audience was conceived of by them under a limited form. Yet for this they had some excuse in the state of facts. A man would like at this moment to assume that Europe and Asia were listening to him; and as some few copies of his book do really go to Paris and Naples, some to Calcutta, there is a sort of legal fiction that such an assumption is steadily taking root. Yet, unhappily, that ugly barrier of languages interferes. Schamyl, the Circassian chief, though much of a savage, is not so wanting in taste and discernment as to be backward in reading any book of yours or mine. Doubtless he yearns to read it. But then, you see, that infernal Tchirkass language steps between our book, the darling, and him, the discerning reader. Now, just such a barrier existed for the Spectator in the travelling arrangements of England. The very few old heavies that had begun to creep along three or four main roads, depended so much on wind and weather, their chances of foundering were so uncalculated, their periods of revolution were so cometary and uncertain, that no body of scientific observations had yet been collected to warrant a prudent man in risking a heavy bale of goods; and, on the whole, even for York, Norwich, or Winchester, a consignment of ‘Specs‘ was not quite a safe spec. Still, I could have told the Spectator who was anxious to make money, where he might have been sure of a distant sale, though returns would have been slow, viz., at Oxford and Cambridge. We know from Milton that old Hobson delivered his parcels pretty regularly eighty years before 1710. And, one generation before that, it is plain, by the interesting (though somewhat Jacobinical) letters [5] of Joseph Mede, the commenter on the Apocalypse, that news and politics of one kind or other (and scandal of every kind) found out for themselves a sort of contraband lungs to breathe through between London and Cambridge; not quite so regular in their systole and diastole as the tides of ebb and flood, but better than nothing. If you consigned a packet into the proper hands on the 1st of May, ‘as sure as death’ to speak Scottice, it would be delivered within sixty miles of the capital before mid-summer. Still there were delays; and these forced a man into carving his world out of London. That excuses the word town.