humor, both with yourself and everybody else. I have never mentioned the subject to a reader of The Spectator who did not admit this to be the invariable process; and in such a world of misfortune, of cares and sorrows and guilt, as this is, what a prize would this collection be if it were rightly estimated!
Were I the sovereign of a nation which spoke the English language, and wished my subjects cheerful, virtuous, and enlightened, I would furnish every poor family in my dominions (and see that the rich furnished themselves) with a copy of The Spectator, and ordain that the parents or children should read four or five numbers aloud every night in the year. For one of the peculiar perfections of the work is, that while it contains such a mass of ancient and modern learning, so much of profound wisdom and of beautiful composition, yet there is scarcely a number throughout the eight volumes which is not level to the meanest capacity. Another perfection is, that The Spectator will never become tiresome to anyone whose taste and whose heart remain uncorrupted.
I do not mean that this author should be read to the exclusion of others; much less that he should stand in the way of the generous pursuit of science, or interrupt the discharge of social or private duties. All the counsels of the work have a directly reverse tendency. It furnishes a store of the clearest argument and of the most amiable and captivating exhortations, "to raise the genius, and to mend the heart." I regret only that such a book should be thrown by, and almost entirely forgotten, while the gilded blasphemies of infidels, and the "noontide trances" of pernicious theorists, are hailed with rapture and echoed around the world. For such, I should be pleased to see The Spectator universally substituted; and, throwing out the question of its morality, its literary information, its sweetly contagious serenity, and pure and chaste beauties of its style, and considering it merely as a curiosity,
