which appear, however, in the edition of 1744.  Notes were first added by Dr. Percy, the editor of the ‘Reliques of Ancient Poetry’, and Dr. Calder.  Dr. John Calder, a native of Aberdeen, bred to the dissenting ministry, was for some time keeper of Dr. Williams’s Library in Redcross Street.  He was a candidate for the office given to Dr. Abraham Rees, of editor and general super-intendent of the new issue of Chambers’s Cyclopaedia, undertaken by the booksellers in 1776, and he supplied to it some new articles.  The Duke of Northumberland warmly patronized Dr. Calder, and made him his companion in London and at Alnwick Castle as Private Literary Secretary.  Dr. Thomas Percy, who had constituted himself cousin and retainer to the Percy of Northumberland, obtained his bishopric of Dromore in 1782, in the following year lost his only son, and suffered from that failure in eyesight, which resulted in a total blindness.

Having become intimately acquainted with Dr. Calder when at Northumberland House and Alnwick, Percy intrusted to him the notes he had collected for illustrating the ‘Tatler’, ‘Spectator’, and ‘Guardian’.  These were after-wards used, with additions by Dr. Calder, in the various editions of those works, especially in the six-volume edition of the ‘Tatler’, published by John Nichols in 1786, where Percy’s notes have a P. attached to them, and Dr. Calder’s are signed ‘Annotator.’  The ‘Tatler’ was annotated fully, and the annotated ‘Tatler’ has supplied some pieces of information given in the present edition of the ‘Spectator’.  Percy actually edited two volumes for R. Tonson in 1764, but the work was stopped by the death of the bookseller, and the other six were added to them in 1789.  They were slightly annotated, both as regards the number and the value of the notes; but Percy and Calder lived when ‘Spectator’ traditions were yet fresh, and oral information was accessible as to points of personal allusion or as to the authorship of a few papers or letters which but for them might have remained anonymous.  Their notes are those of which the substance has run through all subsequent editions.  Little, if anything, was added to them by Bisset or Chalmers; the energies of those editors having been chiefly directed to the preserving or multiplying of corruptions of the text.  Percy, when telling Tonson that he had completed two volumes of the ‘Spectator’, said that he had corrected ‘innumerable corruptions’ which had then crept in, and could have come only by misprint.  Since that time not only have misprints been preserved and multiplied, but punctuation has been deliberately modernized, to the destruction of the freshness of the original style, and editors of another ’understanding age’ have also taken upon themselves by many a little touch to correct Addison’s style or grammar.