Sir, I shall not compliment you upon your birth, person, or fortune; nor any other the like perfections, which you possess whether you will or no; but shall only touch upon those which are of your own acquiring, and in which every one must allow you have a real merit.

Your jaunty air and easy motion, the volubility of your discourse, the suddenness of your laugh, the management of your snuff-box, with the whiteness of your hands and teeth (which have justly gained you the envy of the most polite part of the male world, and the love of the greatest beauties in the female,) are entirely to be ascribed to your own personal genius and application.

You are formed for these accomplishments by a happy turn of nature, and have finished yourself in them by the utmost improvements of art. A man that is defective in either of these qualifications (whatever may be the secret ambition of his heart) must never hope to make the figure you have done among the fashionable part of his species. It is therefore no wonder, we see such multitudes of aspiring

young men fall short of you in all these beauties of your character, notwithstanding the study and practice of them is the whole business of their lives. But I need not tell you that the free and disengaged behavior of a fine gentleman makes as many aukward beaux, as the easiness of your favorite Waller hath made insipid poets.

At present you are content to aim all your charms at your own spouse, without further thought of mischief to any others of the sex. I know you had formerly a very great contempt for that pedantic race of mortals who call themselves philosophers: and yet, to your honor be it spoken, there is not a sage of them all could have better. acted up to their precepts in one of the most important points of life: I mean in that generous disregard of popular opinion, which you showed some years ago, when you chose for your wife an obscure young woman, who doth not indeed pretend to an ancient family, but has certainly as many forefathers as any Lady in the land, if she could but reckon up their names.

I must own I conceived very extraordinary hopes of you from the moment that

you confessed your age, and from eightand-forty (where you had stuck so many years) very ingeniously stept into your grand climacteric. Your deportment has since been very venerable and becoming. If I am rightly informed, you make a regular appearance every quarter-sessions among your brothers of the quorum; and, if things go on as they do, stand fair for being a colonel of the militia. I am told that your time passes away as agreeably in the amusements of a country life, as it ever did in the gallantries of the town and that you now take as much pleasure in the planting of young trees, as you did formerly in the cutting down of your old ones. In short, we hear from all hands that you are thoroughly reconciled to your dirty acres, and have not too much wit to look into your own estate.

After having spoken thus much of my patron, I must take the privilege of an author in saying something of myself. I shall therefore beg leave to add, that I have purposely omitted setting those marks to the end of every paper, which appeared in my former volumes, that you may have an opportunity of showing Mrs. Honeycomb the

shrewdness of your conjectures, by ascribing every speculation to its proper author: though you know how often many profound critics in style and sentiments have very judiciously erred in this particular, be fore they were let into the secret.

I am, Sir,t

Your most faithful

Most humble servant,

THE SPECTATOR.

† Will. Honeycomb is thought to mean Col. Cleland.—This dedication is supposed to have been written by Mr. E. Budgell.

THE

BOOKSELLER

TO THE

READER.

IN the six hundred and thirty-second Spec

tator, the reader will find and account of the rise of this tenth and last volume.†

I have not been able to prevail upon the several gentlemen who were concerned in this work to let me acquaint the world with their names.

Perhaps it will be unnecessary to inform the reader, that no other papers, which have appeared under the title of Spectator since the closing of this tenth volume, were written by any of those gentlemen who had a hand in this or the former volumes.

After the Spectator had been laid down about a year and an half, in which interval The Guardian, and its sequel, The Englishman, were published, "an attempt was made to revive it; a time by no means favorable to literature, when the succession of a new family to the throne filled the nation with anxiety, discord, and confusion. Either the turbulence of the times, or the satiety of the readers, put a stop to the publication after an experiment of eighty numbers, which were afterwards collected into this volume, perhaps more valuable than any one of those that went before it.

"Addison produced more than a fourth part, and the other contributors are by no means unworthy of appearing as his associates.

"The time that had passed during the suspension of the Spectator, though it had not lessened Addison's power of humor, seems to have increased his disposition to seriousness; the proportion of his religious to his comic papers is greater than in the former series. The Spectator, from its recommencement, was published only three times a week, and no discriminating marks were added to the papers Johnson's Lives.