which he told me was the only book in the house, for "he never troubled his head about reading"; and by way of conclusive proof, he further informed me that this fragment, the only book in the house, had been sleeping unmolested on the dust of his mantelpiece for ten or fifteen years. I could not meet my venerable countryman, in a foreign land, and in this humiliating plight, nor hear of the inhuman and gothic contempt with which he had been treated, without the liveliest emotion. So I read my host a lecture on the subject, to which he appeared to pay as little attention as he had before done to The Spectator; and, with the sang froid of a Dutchman, answered me in the cant of the country, that he "had other fish to fry," and left me.
It had been so long since I had had an opportunity of opening an agreeable collection, that the few numbers which were now before me appeared almost entirely new; and I cannot describe to you the avidity and delight with which I devoured those beautiful and interesting speculations.
Is it not strange, my dear S——, that such a work should have ever lost an inch of ground? A style so sweet and simple, and yet so ornamented! a temper so benevolent, so cheerful, so exhilarating! a body of knowledge, and of original thought, so immense and various, so strikingly just, so universally useful! What person, of any age, sex, temper, calling, or pursuit, can possibly converse with The Spectator without being conscious of immediate improvement?
To the spleen he is as perpetual and never-failing an antidote as he is to ignorance and immorality. No matter for the disposition of mind in which you take him up; you catch, as you go along, the happy tone of spirits which prevails through out the work; you smile at the wit, laugh at the drollery, feel your mind enlightened, your heart opened, softened, and refined; and when you lay him down, you are sure to be in a better
