trying to instruct the 'Fair Sex' as he likes to
call them, apparently regarded its members as an inferior order of
beings. He delights to dwell upon their foibles, on their dress, and on
the thousand little artifices practised by the flirt and the coquette.
Here is the view the Queen Anne moralist takes of the 'female world' he
was so eager to improve:

'I have often thought there has not been sufficient pains in finding out
proper employments and diversions for the fair ones. Their amusements
seem contrived for them, rather as they are women, than as they are
reasonable creatures; and are more adapted to the sex than to the
species. The toilet is their great scene of business, and the right
adjustment of their hair the principal employment of their lives. The
sorting of a suit of ribands is considered a very good morning's work;
and if they make an excursion to a mercer's or a toy-shop, so great a
fatigue makes them unfit for anything else all the day after. Their more
serious occupations are sewing and embroidery, and their greatest
drudgery the preparations of jellies and sweetmeats. This I say is the
state of ordinary women; though I know there are multitudes of those
that move in an exalted sphere of knowledge and virtue, that join all
the beauties of the mind to the ornaments of dress, and inspire a kind
of awe and respect as well as of love into their male beholders.'

The qualification made at the end of this description does not greatly
lessen the significance of the earlier portion, which is Addison's
picture, as he is careful to tell us of 'ordinary women.' Much must be
allowed for the exaggeration of a humourist, but the frivolity of women
is a theme upon which Addison harps continually. Indeed, were it not for
this weakness in the 'feminine world' half his vocation as a moralist in
the _Spectator_ would be gone, and if the general estimate in his Essays
of the women with whom he was acquainted be to any extent a correct one,
the derogatory language used by men of letters, and especially by
Swift, Prior, Pope, and Chesterfield may be almost forgiven.

It was the aim of Addison and Steele to represent, and in some degree to
caricature, the follies of fashionable life in the Town. That life had
also its vices, which, if less unblushingly displayed than under the
'merry Monarch,' were visible enough. 'In the eighteenth century,' says
Victor Hugo, in his epigrammatic way, 'the wife bolts out her husband.
She