in the sparkling antitheses of Sir Roger's description of his ancestors.
[Footnote: _Spectator_ 109.] Yet Steele's claim on our admiration
rests not on the quality of his style, but, as Mr. John Forster has
said, on 'the soul of a sincere man shining through it all'.

The influence of the _Spectator_ was incalculable. Addison
succeeded in his principal object. 'I shall be ambitious to have it said
of me that I have brought philosophy out of closets and libraries,
schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables
and in coffee-houses,' and that I have produced 'such writings as tend
to the wearing out of ignorance, passion, and prejudice'. [Footnote:
_Spectator_ 10.] A glance at the social and literary history of the
next thirty or forty years will reveal how fully this wish was
accomplished. It is true that folly and vice have not yet been wiped off
the face of the earth, but the _Spectator_ turned the tide of
public opinion against them. The fashionable ideal was reversed; virtue
became admirable, and though vice could not be destroyed, it was no
longer suffered to plume itself in the eyes of the world. The
_Spectator_ had delivered virtue from its position of contempt, and
'set up the immoral man as the object of derision'. [Footnote:
_Spectator_ 445.]

The _Spectator_ has also acquired an incidental value from the
passage of time. Addison hints at this in his citations from an
imaginary history of Queen Anne's reign, supposed to be written three
hundred years later. In 'those little diurnal essays which are still
extant'--two-thirds of the time has elapsed, and at present the
_Spectator_ is certainly extant--we are enabled 'to see the
diversions and characters of the English nation in his time.' [Footnote:
_Spectator_ 101.] It is in the literature of a nation that we find