were weak and laughed over it, while others were weak and serious.
Philosophers congratulated themselves on their new enlightenment; but it
was an enlightenment which gave them insight into things as they are,
not as they are to be. "The proper study of mankind," they held was
"man;" man, however, not in his boundless promise, but in the mean
performance with which they proclaimed themselves satisfied. The poetry
of the time was, at best, merely common-sense with ornamentation. It was
neither lyrical nor tragic, though it may have tried to be both. It
represented man neither as withdrawn into himself, nor as transported
into an ideal world of action, but as observing and reasoning on his
present affairs. The satire and moral essay were its characteristic
forms.

B. CHARACTERISTICS OF THE SPECTATOR

12. The most pleasing expression of this self-satisfaction of the age is
found in the _Spectator_, the first and best representative of that
special style of literature--the only really popular literature of our
time--which consists in talking to the public about itself. Humanity is
taken as reflected in the ordinary life of men; and, as thus reflected,
it is copied with the most minute fidelity. No attempt is made either to
suppress the baser elements of man's nature, or to transfigure them by a
stronger light than that of the common understanding. No deeper laws are
recognised than those which vindicate themselves to the eye of daily
observation, no motives purer than the "mixed" ones which the practical
philosopher delights to analyse, no life higher than that which is
qualified by animal wants. The reader never finds himself carried into a
region where it requires an effort to travel, or which is above the
existing level of opinion and morality. It is from this levelness with
life that the _Spectator_ derives its interest--an interest so nearly
the same, barring the absence of plot, with that of the novel, as to
lead Macaulay to pronounce Addison "the forerunner of the great English
novelists."[11] The elements of the novel, indeed, already existed in
Addison's time, and only required combination. Fictitious biography,
which may be regarded as its raw material, had been written by Defoe
with a life-like reality which has never since been equalled; and the
popular drama furnished plots, in the shape of love stories drawn from
present life. Let the adventures of the fictitious biography, instead of
being merely ex