Defoe, it is hardly necessary to say, began it; it was his nature to be first with any new thing: but its establishment as a prevailing literary mode is due to two authors, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele.

Of the two famous series--the _Tatler_ and the _Spectator_--for which they were both responsible, Steele must take the first credit; he began them, and though Addison came in and by the deftness and lightness of his writing took the lion's share of their popularity, both the plan and the characters round whom the bulk of the essays in the _Spectator_ came to revolve was the creation of his collaborator.

Steele we know very intimately from his own writings and from Thackeray's portrait of him.
He was an emotional, full-blooded kind of man, reckless and dissipated but fundamentally honest and good-hearted--a type very common in his day as the novels show, but not otherwise to be found in the ranks of its writers.

What there is of pathos and sentiment, and most of what there is of humour in the _Tatler_ and the _Spectator_ are his.

And he created the _dramatis personae_ out of whose adventures the slender thread of continuity which binds the essays together is woven.