It is an idea that has occurred to a great many heads since with less success. In these latter days there have been many literary adventurers, to whom the starting of a new paper has seemed an opening into El Dorado. But the opening in the majority of cases does not prove a practicable one--for, in fact, there is no longer any need of news; and the concise little essays and elegant banterings of those critics of the time have fallen out of date. News means in our day an elaborate system, and instantaneous reports from all the world; and one London newspaper--far more one of the gigantic journals proper to America--contains as much matter as half a hundred “Tatlers.” One wonders, if Addison’s genius, and the light hand of Steele, and Swift’s tremendous and scathing humor could be conjured up again, whether such a production, with its mingled thread of the finest sentiments and the pettiest subjects, metaphysics and morals, and the “Eneid” and “Paradise Lost,” and periwigs and petticoats, would find sufficient acceptance with “the fair” and the wise to keep it afloat, or would still go up to sages and fine ladies with their breakfast trays.
It was on the immediate foundation of one of Swift’s savage _jeux d’esprits_ that the new undertaking was begun, a mystification which greatly amused the wits then, but which does not, perhaps, appear particularly delightful now. Swift had been seized by a freak of mischief in respect to a certain Partridge, an astrologer, who made an income out of the public by pretended revelations of the future, as is still done, we believe, among those masses, beneath the ascertained audience of literature, who spend their sixpences at Christmas upon almanacs and year-books containing predictions of what is to happen. It occurred to Swift in some merry moment to emulate and to doom the Merlin of the day: and with the prodigious gravity which characterizes his greatest jests he wrote “Predictions for the year 1708,” in which, among many other things, he announced that he had consulted the stars on behalf of Partridge, and had ascertained that the wizard would certainly die on March 29, at eleven o’clock at night, of a raging fever. The reader will probably remember that the jest was kept up, and that, notwithstanding Partridge’s protest that he was not dead at all, Isaac Bickerstaff insisted on asserting that his prophecy had been fulfilled, to the grave confusion of various serious affairs, and the inextinguishable laughter of the wits. It was not a pretty jest, but it brought into being a visionary critic of public matters, a new personage in the literary world, in whom other wits saw capabilities. Steele in particular perceived that Isaac Bickerstaff was just the personality he wanted, and therewith proceeded to make of that shadowy being the Mentor of the time. The design was excellent, the immediate execution cleverly adapted to seize the interest of the public, which had been already amused and mystified under that name. Mr. Isaac Bickerstaff presented his readers with the first number of his journal without charge. “I earnestly desire,” he says, “all persons, without distinction, to take it in for the present _gratis_, and hereafter at the price of one penny, forbidding all hawkers to take more for it at their peril.” The idea took the town. No doubt there would be many an allusion to this and that which the wits would guess at, and which would to them have a double meaning; but, to do the “Tatler” justice, the kind of gossip which fills the so-called society newspapers in our day was unknown to the witty gentlemen who sometimes satirize a ruffle or a shoe-tie, but never personally a woman. The types of fine ladies who flutter through his pages could never raise a pang in any individual bosom; and when he addressed himself to the reform of the theater, to the difficult duty of checking play and discouraging duels, he had all the well-thinking on his side.