brought them together.
Our English proverb says:

''Tis merry in the hall
When beards wag all.'

"It proved so in the assembly I am now speaking of, who seeing so
many peaks of faces agitated with eating, drinking and discourse,
and observing all the chins that were present meeting together very
often over the centre of the table, every one grew sensible of the
jest, and came into it with so much good humour that they lived in
strict friendship and alliance from that day forward."

In August, 1712, a tax of a halfpenny was placed upon newspapers, and
led to several leading journals being discontinued, a failure
facetiously termed "the fall of the leaf." "The Spectator" survived the
loss, but not unshaken, and the price was raised to twopence. It seems
strange that such an addition should affect a periodical of this
character, but a penny was a larger sum then than it is now. Steele
says, "the ingenious J. W. (Dr. Walker, Head-Master of the Charterhouse)
tells me that I have deprived him of the best part of his breakfast, for
that since the rise of my paper, he is forced every morning to drink his
dish of coffee by itself, without the addition of 'The Spectator,' that
used to be better than lace (_i.e._, brandy) to it."

After "The Spectator" had run through six hundred and thirty-five
numbers, Steele, with his usual restlessness, discontinued it, or
rather, changed its name, and called it "The Guardian." He commenced
writing this new periodical by himself, but soon obtained the assistance
of Addison. The only feature worth notice in which it differed from its
predecessor, was the prominent appearance of Pope as an essayist,
although from political reasons he would have preferred to have been an
anonymous contributor. Among his articles we may notice a powerful one
against cruelty to animals and field sports in general. Another was an
ironical attack upon the Pastorals of Ambrose Philips comparing them
with his own, and affords an illustration of what we observed in
another place, that such modes of warfare are easily misunderstood--for
the essay having been sent to Steele anonymously, he hesitated to
publish it lest Pope should be offended! But his best article in this
periodical is directed against poetasters in general--whom he never
treated with much mercy. He says that poetry is now composed upon
mechanical principles, in the same way that house-wives make
plum-p