had certain disadvantages. The press censorship had been abolished in
1695, but newspapers were excepted from the general freedom of the
Press. A more important disadvantage lay in the character of Steele, who
did not possess the balance and moderation required to edit such an
organ. Unlike Addison, he was not a true son of his century. He was
enthusiastic and impulsive, fertile in invention and sensitive to
emotion. His tenderness and pathos reach heights and depths that Addison
never touches, but he has not Addison's fine perception of events and
motives on the ordinary level of emotion. He could not repress his keen
interest sufficiently to treat of politics in his paper and yet remain
the impartial censor. So the _Tatler_ was dropped, and the
_Spectator_ took its place. This differed from its predecessors in
appearing every day instead of three times a week, and in excluding all
articles of news.

The machinery of the club had been anticipated in 1690 by John Dunton's
Athenian Society, which replied to all questions submitted by readers in
his paper, the _Athenian Mercury._ This was succeeded by the
Scandal Club of Defoe's _Review_, and the well-known club of the
_Tatler_, which met at the Trumpet; [Footnote: _Tatler_ 132]
but the plan of arranging the whole work round the doings of the club is
a new departure in the _Spectator_.

It is in these periodicals that we first find the familiar essay. Its
only predecessors are such serious essays as those of Bacon, Cowley, and
Temple, the turgid paragraphs of Shaftesbury, the vigorous but crude and
rough papers of Collier, and the 'characters' of Overbury and Earle.
These 'characters' had always been entirely typical; they were treated
rather from the abstract than from the human point of view, and had no
names or other individualization than that of their character and