Sir Roger explains why he makes Christmas such a special time for all his neighbours.
Sir Roger de Coverley, a Worcestershire baronet, was created by Richard Steele in The Spectator for March 2nd, 1711. Sir Roger was the quintessence of the English rural squire, hearty, sometimes buffoonish, but lovable. Here, he speaks about Christmas on his estates. Steele’s friend Joseph Addison wrote this piece, which began with a line from Ovid: Most rare is now our old simplicity.
Joseph Addison tells the legend of the great Greek poetess Sappho and the Lover’s Leap.
Sappho was born in about 612 BC on the island of Mytilene (Lesbos), and became one of the great love poets of ancient Greece. She belonged to an intimate sorority dedicated to Aphrodite and the Muses; she had a daughter named Clëis; and she had three brothers. Few other facts are known. Even the tale of her death is a melodramatic legend; but it has furnished us with the ‘lover’s leap’.
Advice is a dangerous gift, and for centuries our greatest writers have wondered how to dispense it safely.
‘It is always a silly thing to give advice,’ says Erskine in Oscar Wilde’s The Portrait of Mr W. H., ‘but to give good advice is absolutely fatal.’ Back in 1750 the Spectator, founded by Joseph Addison (1672-1719) and Sir Richard Steele (1672-1729), suggested a way to sugar the pill.
Joseph Addison complains that the famous Cries of London are a lot of fuss about nothing.
‘The Cries of London’, the various musical and not-so-musical calls of street vendors in Queen Anne’s capital, were widely regarded with affection and pride. But the endless drumming of tins and kettles left Joseph Addison’s nerves raw, and the medley of slogans and doggerel verses was if anything worse.