Essays and Tales

Complete and unabridged, with 59 full-page plates by Thomas Gibson, Thomas Gainsborough and Nathaniel Dance-Holland. Sir Roger de Coverley, the coffee-house, the club, the ladies' fan drill, and the essays that taught English prose how to be conversational. Addison and Steele put out The Spectator daily in 1711 — a page or two, a penny, no politics, addressed to a nation that had just discovered i...