DIGITISED MANUSCRIPTS

father’s parsonage at Milstone, in Wiltshire, to occupy a seat in the Council Chamber of Great Britain. In conjunction with another literary man, Richard Steele, Addison edited two periodicals, the Tatler and the Spectator, the daily sale of which soon amounted to the then enormous number of 14,000 copies. Addison’s articles not only formed the modern Eng- lish language, but established a national standard of conduct in manners and morals, in art and literature, and created an organized public opinion. Ags Addison and Steele are to be looked upon as the progenitors of the modern newspaper and maga- zine, Swift and Defoe are to be considered, the one the father of the political pamphlet, and the other the creator of the modern novel. Both, even more than Addison, owed their rise to the patronage of party leaders, to the interest they took in party struggles, and to their own personal influence in consequence. The chequered career of Defoe might be taken for a work of fiction. ‘No man had tasted different fortunes more, For thirteen times have I been rich and poor ;’ he says of himself. The son of a butcher, he began life as a hosier; failing soon afterwards, he started as a tile- manufacturer, and having failed again he suffered im- prisonment. Being a Dissenter, his sympathies were with the Whigs, of whom the Dissenters formed a group. By them he was driven into politics and litera-