account of the visit to London of Sir Harry Quickset, who, with his
old-world breeding, was the forerunner of Sir Roger de Coverley.[12]

Unlike the members of the Spectator's Club, the _dramatis personæ_
introduced in the _Tatler_ do not occupy a very prominent place in
the development of the work. Isaac Bickerstaff himself, an old man of
sixty-four, "a philosopher, an humourist, an astrologer, and a censor,"
is rather vaguely sketched, and his familiar, Pacolet, is made use of
chiefly in the earlier numbers. The occasional references to Bickerstaff's
half-sister, Jenny Distaff,[13] and her husband, Tanquillus, and to his
three nephews and their conduct in the presence of a "beautiful woman of
honour,"[14] gave Steele a framework for some charming sketches of
domestic life. It is not until No. 132 that we have the amusing account
of the members of Bickerstaff's Club, the Trumpet, in Shire Lane. There
were Sir Geoffrey Notch, a gentleman of an ancient family, who had
wasted his estate in his youth, and called every thriving man a pitiful
upstart; Major Matchlock, with his reminiscences of the Civil War; Dick
Reptile, and the Bencher who was always praising the wit of former days,
and telling stories of Jack Ogle, with whom he pretended to have been
intimate in his youth. Very little use was afterwards made of this
promising material.

The poet John Gay has given an excellent account of the work
accomplished by Steele and Addison in a pamphlet called "The Present
State of Wit" (1711). Speaking of the discontinuance of the _Tatler_, he
says: "His disappearing seemed to be bewailed as some general calamity:
every one wanted so agreeable an amusement; and the coffee-houses began
to be sensible that the Esquire's Lucubrations alone had brought them
more customers than all their other newspapers put together. It must,
indeed, be confessed that never man threw up his pen under stronger