1672. Birth of Addison and Steele. 1697. Addison elected Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. 1701, 3, 5, 22. Steele's Plays. 1702. Accession of Queen Anne. 1704. Addison's _Campaign_ (poem celebrating Blenheim). 1706. Addison's _Rosamond_ (opera). 1709-11. Steele's _Tatler_. 1711-12-14. The _Spectator_. 1713. Addison's _Cato_ (play). 1714. Accession of George I. 1717. Addison appointed Secretary of State. 1719. Death of Addison. 1729. Death of Steele.
_Non fumum ex fulgore, sed ex fumo dart lucem Cogitat, ut speciosa dehinc miracula promat._
One with a flash begins, and ends in smoke; The other out of smoke brings glorious light, And (without raising expectation high) Surprises us with dazzling miracles.
I have observed, that a reader seldom peruses a book with pleasure, until he knows whether the writer of it be a black[1] or a fair man, of a mild or choleric[2] disposition, married or a bachelor, with other particulars of the like nature, that conduce very much to the right understanding of an author. To gratify this curiosity, which is so natural to a reader, I design this paper and my next as prefatory discourses to my following writings, and shall give some account in them of the several persons that are engaged in this work. As the chief trouble of compiling, digesting[3], and correcting will fall to my share, I must do myself the justice to open the work with my own history.
I was born to a small hereditary estate, which, according to the tradition of the village where it lies, was bounded by the same hedges and ditches in William the Conqueror's time that it is at present, and has been delivered down from father to son whole and entire, without the loss or acquisition of a single field or meadow, during the space of six hundred years. There runs a story in the family, that before my birth my mother dreamt that she was brought to bed of a judge: whether this might proceed from a lawsuit which was then depending[4] in the family, or my father's being a justice of the peace, I cannot determine; for I am not so vain as to think it presaged any dignity that I should arrive at in my future life, though that was the interpretation which the neighbourhood put upon it. The gravity of my behaviour at my very first appearance in the world, and all the time that I sucked, seemed to favour my mother's dream: for, as she has often told me, I threw away my rattle before I was two months old, and would not make use of my coral until they had taken away the bells from it.