While Swift went about hanging and ruthless, a literary Jeffreys, in Addison's kind court only minor cases were tried;--only peccadilloes and small sins against society, only a dangerous libertinism in tuckers and hoops, or a nuisance in the abuse of beaux canes and snuffboxes." Steele set _The Tatler_ a going.
"But with his friend's discovery of _The Tatler_, Addison's calling was found, and the most delightful Tattler in the world began to speak.

He does not go very deep.

Let gentlemen of a profound genius, critics accustomed to the plunge of the bathos, console themselves by thinking that he couldn't go very deep.

There is no trace of suffering in his writing.

He was so good, so honest, so healthy, so cheerfully selfish,--if I must use the word!" Such was Addison as a humorist; and when the hearer shall have heard also,--or the reader read,--that this most charming Tattler also wrote _Cato_, became a Secretary of State, and married a countess, he will have learned all that Thackeray had to tell of him.
Steele was one who stood much less high in the world's esteem, and who left behind him a much smaller name,--but was quite Addison's equal as a humorist and a wit.