hope they express that he will yet give the preference to our eldest daughter, Mrs. Mary, now sixteen; and the father's laughing disbeliefs, founded on Mr. B's love affairs of old, and the verses he wrote on Teraminta. But after dinner the friends are alone, and then fears for his wife's health break from the husband, which the other tries to turn. aside; and so arise genial memories of the past, Mr. Bickerstaff talking over all his friend's courting days again, how they first saw her at the playhouse, and it was himself who followed her from the playhouse to ascertain her name, and who carried his friend's first love-letter to her, and who carried it back to him unopened, and how foolishly wretched he then was to think her angry in earnest. But the pleasant memory of sorrow that was unreal, and had passed away, cannot abate the abiding and still recurring fear. "That fading in her countenance," he says, " is "is "chiefly caused by her watching with me in my fever." But handsomer than ever to him is the pale face; and nothing in all the boisterous passions of their youth, he tells his friend, can compare in depth and intensity with the love he feels in manhood. The poor bachelor thinks, as the other speaks, that now he shall never know it. "Her face," continues the husband more calmly, "is to me much more beautiful than when I first saw it; there "is no decay in any feature which I cannot trace from 66 the very instant it was occasioned by some anxious con"cern for my welfare and interests." With which thought, the tide of his sorrow comes again upon him; and he describes his sinking heart as he hears the children play in the next room, and thinks what the poor things shall do when she is gone. Whereupon she re-enters; and he brightens again at her cheerful face; and she knows what he has been talking of, and rallies him, and means to have Mr. Bickerstaff for her second husband unless this first will take greater care of himself; and finally gets Mr. Bickerstaff to promise to take her again to the playhouse, in memory of his having followed her one night from the playhouse.

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The children then reappear to complete a domestic interior, which, at a time when wit had no higher employment than to laugh at the affections and moralities of home, could have arisen only to a fancy as pure as the heart that prompted it was loving and true. The noisiest among them is Mr. Bickerstaff's godson, Dick, in whose conversation, however, though his drum is a little in the way, this nice gradation of incredulity appears, that, having got into the lives and adventures of Guy of Warwick, the Seven Champions, and other historians of that age, he shakes his head at the improbability of Æsop's Fables. But the mother becomes a little jealous of the godson carrying off too much attention; and she will have her friend admire little Mrs. Betty's accomplishments, which accordingly are described; and so the conversation goes on till late, when Mr. Bickerstaff leaves the cordial fireside, considering the different conditions of a married life and that of a bachelor, and goes home in a pensive mood to his maid, his dog, and his cat, who only can be the better or the worse for what happens to him.

But the little story is only half told. Having for its design to show that the pleasures of married life are too little regarded, that thousands have them and do not enjoy them, and that it is therefore a kind and good office to acquaint such people with their own happiness, he with it connects the solemn warning to be drawn from its fleeting tenure, and the limited duration of all enjoyment on earth.

Two months have elapsed, it is the last day of the year, and Mr. Bickerstaff is walking about his room very cheerfully, when a coach stops at his door, a lad of fifteen alights, and he perceives the eldest son of his schoolfellow. The pleasant thought has occurred to him that the father was just such a stripling at the time of their first knowledge of each other, when the boy enters, takes his hand, and bursts into tears. His thought at the moment is with his friend, and with sudden concern he inquires for him. The reply, "My mother " and

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the tears that choke further utterance, tell Mr. Bickerstaff all. His friend's worst forebodings have come suddenly true. He hurries to the house; meets the celebrated divine, Dr. Smallridge, just quitting it; and, by the suppressed grief of the mourners as he enters, knows what hope and consolation that sacred teaching has left. But the husband, at sight of him, cannot but turn away his face and weep again; and the little family of children. renew the expressions of their sorrow, according to their several ages and degrees of understanding. The eldest daughter, in tears, is busied in attendance upon her mother; others are kneeling about the bedside; and "what troubled me most was to see a little boy, who was "too young to know the reason, weeping only because his "sisters did." In the room there is only one person unmoved; and as he approaches the bed she says in a low broken voice, "This is kindly done. Take care of your friend-do not go from him!" She has taken leave of them all, and the end is come. 'My heart was "torn in pieces to see the husband on one side suppressing and keeping down the swellings of his grief, for "fear of disturbing her in her last moments; and the "wife, even at that time, concealing the pains she "endured, for fear of increasing his affliction. She kept 66 her eyes upon him for some moments after she grew speechless, and soon after closed them for ever. In the "moment of her departure, my friend, who had thus far "commanded himself, gave a deep groan, and fell into a swoon by her bedside." The few calm grave sentences that follow this description are known to have been written by Addison. It would seem as though Steele felt himself unable to proceed, and his friend had taken the pen from his trembling hand.

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Need we indicate other stories, told yet more briefly, more in the manner of direct relations, and all of them pathetic in the extreme? Inkle and Yarico, which has filled with tears so many eyes, and the story of Alexander Selkirk, which suggested De Foe's wonderful romance,

belong to Steele's writings in the Spectator; but in the Tatler we have Valentine and Unnion (No. 5), the Fire at the Theatre (No. 94), the domestic tragedy of Eustace (No. 172), the Shipwreck and the Wedding Day (both contained in No. 82), and the Dream (No. 117). All these tales have an artless, unpretending simplicity, and a charm quite unpremeditated, but which is yet combined with a reality and intensity of pathos, affecting to a degree that the equally brief narrations of any other writer have never, in our judgment, equalled. Of the Dream in especial the contrivance is so inimitable, and the moral so impressive, that within the same compass we know of nothing at all approaching to its effect. A lover and his mistress are toying and trifling together in a summer evening on Dovercliff; she snatches a copy of verses from his hand and runs before him; he is eagerly following, when he beholds on a sudden the ground sink under her, and she is dashed down the height. "I said to myself, it is not in the power of "Heaven to relieve me! when I awaked, equally trans

ported and astonished to see myself drawn out of an “affliction which, the very moment before, appeared to me "altogether inextricable." This has been given to Addison, but it is certainly Steele's.

It will be consonant with the emotion suggested by it to pass, for our next example, to what is said of untimely deaths in No. 181, one of the most tender and beautiful essays that the Tatler contains. Such deaths, says Steele, we are most apt to lament, so little are we able to make it indifferent when a thing happens, though we know it must happen. "Thus we groan under life, and bewail "those who are relieved from it." And especially he applies this to his recollection of the many gallant, gay, and agreeable spirits lost in war, where yet, he finely adds, "We gather relief enough from their own contempt of death, to make that no evil which was approached with so much cheerfulness, and attended with so much "honour." He then relates his saddest experience; recalling, in a few short sentences of great delicacy, the

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beauty, innocence, and untimely death of the girl he had first loved. "The beauteous virgin! how ignorantly did "she charm, how carelessly excel! O Death! thou hast "right to the bold, to the ambitious, to the high, and to "the haughty; but why this cruelty to the humble, to "the meek, to the undiscerning, to the thoughtless? "Nor age, nor business, nor distress, can erase the dear "image from my imagination. In the same week I saw "her dressed for a ball, and in the shroud. How ill did "the habit of death become the pretty trifler. I still "behold the smiling earth-————”

Another treatment of the same grave theme is in the noble character he draws of Addison, under the name of Ignotus. What chiefly makes his friend become this life so perfectly, he says, is his firm and unshaken expectation of another; and he lays it down as the only solid reason for doing all things well, that a man should consider his present being as an uncertain one, and think to reap an advantage by its discontinuance. Such a one, Steele continues, does not behold his existence as a short, transient, perplexing state, made up of trifling pleasures, and great anxieties; but sees it in quite another light: his griefs are momentary and his joys immortal. Reflection upon death is not a gloomy and sad thought of resigning everything that he delights in, but it is a short night followed by an endless day. From all which, and from his friend's ever easy and delightful manners, he draws the conclusion that "to be

a fine gentleman is to be a generous and a brave man." To the same conclusion, too, he brings another thoroughly characteristic paper in No. 246. It is a wise essay on the toleration of one another's faults, pointing out how faintly any excellence is received, and how unmercifully every imperfection is exposed: from which it occurs to him to suggest, that we should all be more considerate to each other, and society a thousand times more easy, if we could better familiarize ourselves to the idea of mortality; if we could bring ourselves to the habit of seeing that we are strangers here, and that it is unreasonable to expect