great-grandmothers had good cause to know. The essays were lay sermons, whose authors condescended, it was supposed, to turn from grave studies of philosophy or politics to topics at once edifying and intelligible to the weaker sex. Many of these series implied joint-stock authorship, and therefore some kind of editing. We know, for example, how Steele was ill-advised enough to insert in The Guardian a paper by his young admirer Pope, which ostensibly puffed their common friend Philips's Pastorals, but under a thin cover of irony contrived to compare them very unfavourably with his own rival performances. Pope and Philips lived afterwards, as Johnson puts it, in a perpetual 'reciprocation of malevolence'; and the editor no doubt had already discovered that there might be thorns in his pillow. In those happy days, too, when the 'Rev. Mr, Grove' could win immortality on the strength of three or four papers in The Spectator, Steele must no doubt have had to deal in some of the diplomacy which is a modern editor's defence against unwelcome volunteers. But he held no recognised office. When he got Addison to help him in The Tatler, he resembled, according to his familiar phrase, the 'distressed prince who calls in
