Addison's occasional over-indulgence, in contrast with the
excesses of others, seems like temperance itself.

The harmony and symmetry of this winning personality has, in a sense,
told against it; for men are prone to call the well-balanced nature cold
and the well-regulated life Pharisaic. Addison did not escape charges of
this kind from the wild livers of his own time, who could not dissociate
genius from profligacy nor generosity of nature from prodigality. It was
one of the great services of Addison to his generation and to all
generations, that in an age of violent passions, he showed how a strong
man could govern himself. In a time of reckless living, he illustrated
the power which flows from subordination of pleasure to duty. In a day
when wit was identified with malice, he brought out its power to
entertain, surprise, and delight, without taking on the irreverent
levity of Voltaire, the bitterness of Swift, or the malice of Pope.

It was during Addison's stay in Ireland that Richard Steele projected
the Tatler, and brought out the first number in 1709. His friendship
for Addison amounted almost to a passion; their intimacy was cemented by
harmony of tastes and diversity of character. Steele was ardent,
impulsive, warm-hearted, mercurial; full of aspiration and beset by
lamentable weaknesses,--preaching the highest morality and constantly
falling into the prevalent vices of his time; a man so lovable of
temper, so generous a spirit, and so frank a nature, that his faults
seem to humanize his character rather than to weaken and stain it.
Steele's gifts were many, and they were always at the service of his
feelings; he had an Irish warmth of sympathy and an Irish readiness of
humor, with great facility of inventiveness, and an inexhaustible
interest in all aspects of human experience. There had been political
journals in England since the time of the Revolution, but Steele
conceived the idea of a journal which should comment on the events and
characteristics of the time in a bright and humorous way; using freedom
with judgment and taste, and attacking the vices and follies of the time
with the light equipment of wit rather than with the heavy armament of
the formal moralist. The time was ripe for such an enterprise. London
was full of men and women of brilliant parts, whose manners, tastes, and
talk presented rich material for humorous report and delineation or for
satiric comment. Society, in the modern sense, wa