Sir,
Your most humble servants,

J.S. 
M.P. 
N.R.

[Footnote 1:  This letter appeared originally under the heading:  “From my own Apartment, December I.” [T.S.]]

[Footnote 2:  In his “Journal to Stella” (December 2, 1710) Swift writes:  “Steele, the rogue, has done the impudentest thing in the world.  He said something in a ‘Tatler,’ that we ought to use the word Great Britain, and not England, in common conversation, as, the finest lady in Great Britain, &c.  Upon this Rowe, Prior, and I, sent him a letter, turning this into ridicule.  He has to-day printed the letter, and signed it J.S., M.P. and N.R. the first letters of our names.  Congreve told me to-day, he smoked it immediately.”  The passage referred to by Swift, was a letter, signed Scoto-Britannus, printed in No. 241 of “The Tatler,” in which it was objected that a gentleman ended every sentence with the words, “the best of any man in England,” and called upon him to “mend his phrase, and be hereafter the wisest of any man in Great Britain.”  Writing to Alderman Barber, under date August 8, 1738, Swift remarks:  “The modern phrase ‘Great Britain’ is only to distinguish it from Little Britain where old clothes and old books are to be bought and sold.” [T.S.]]

[Footnote 3:  We paid our scot; i.e., our share of the reckoning. [T.S.]]

NOTE.

With No. 271 Steele brought his venture to a close.  It was issued on January 2nd, 1710.  “I am now,” he wrote, “come to the end of my ambition in this matter, and have nothing further to say to the world under the character of Isaac Bickerstaff.”  His ostensible reason for thus terminating so successful an undertaking he put down to the fact that Bickerstaff was no longer a disguise, and that he could not hope to have the same influence when it was known who it was that led the movement.  Another reason, however, suggests itself in Steele’s recognition of Harley’s kindness in not depriving him of his Commissionership of Stamps, as well as of his Gazetteership for the satires Steele permitted to appear against Harley in “The Tatler.”  That Steele did have something further to say to the world may be gathered from the fact that two months after “The Tatler’s” decease he started “The Spectator.”

But “The Tatler” was too good a thing for the publishers to permit to die.  Two days after the issue of No. 271, appeared a No. 272, with the imprint of John Baker, of “the Black Boy at Paternoster Row.”  It extolled the “Character of Richard Steele, alias Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq.,” and promised to continue in his footsteps, and be delivered regularly to its subscribers “at 5 in the morning.”  On January 6th, 1710, No. 273 was published by “Isaac Bickerstaff, Jr.”  John Baker, however, was not to have it all his own way, for on January 6th, 1710, Morphew brought out a number—­not a double number, although called “Numbers 272, 273”—­and