In the fens of Lincolnshire the antiquary Maurice Johnson collected his neighbours of Spalding.
'Taking care,' it is said, 'not to alarm the country gentlemen by any premature mention of antiquities, he endeavoured at first to allure them into the more flowery paths of literature. In 1709 a few of them were brought together every post-day at the coffee-house in the Abbey Yard; and after one of the party had read aloud the last published number of the 'Tatler', they proceeded to talk over the subject among themselves.'
'the gentlemen met after church on Sunday to discuss the news of the week; the 'Spectators' were read as regularly as the 'Journal'.'
So the political draught of bitterness came sweetened with the wisdom of good-humour. The good-humour of the essayists touched with a light and kindly hand every form of affectation, and placed every-day life in the light in which it would be seen by a natural and honest man. A sense of the essentials of life was assumed everywhere for the reader, who was asked only to smile charitably at its vanities. Steele looked through all shams to the natural heart of the Englishman, appealed to that, and found it easily enough, even under the disguise of the young gentleman cited in the 77th 'Tatler',
'so ambitious to be thought worse than he is that in his degree of understanding he sets up for a free-thinker, and talks atheistically in coffee-houses all day, though every morning and evening, it can be proved upon him, he regularly at home says his prayers.'
But as public events led nearer to the prospect of a Jacobite triumph that would have again brought Englishmen against each other sword to sword, there was no voice of warning more fearless than Richard Steele's. He changed the 'Spectator' for the 'Guardian', that was to be, in its plan, more free to guard the people's rights, and, standing forward more distinctly as a politician, he became member for Stockbridge. In place of the 'Guardian', which he had dropped when he felt the plan of that journal unequal to the right and full expression of his mind, Steele took for a periodical the name of 'Englishman', and under that name fought, with then unexampled abstinence from personality, against the principles upheld by Swift in his 'Examiner'. Then, when the Peace of Utrecht alarmed English patriots, Steele in a bold pamphlet on 'The Crisis' expressed his dread of arbitrary power and a Jacobite succession with a boldness that cost him his seat in Parliament, as he had before sacrificed to plain speaking his place of Gazetteer.