found the "Scandalous Club" an intrusion upon space which might be
better used for serious essays, a drain too upon his time and energy.
"I am letter-baited by querists," he wrote impatiently, "and think my
trouble to write civil, private answers to teasing and querulous epistles
has been equal, if not more troublesome than all the rest of the
work." The historical importance of the "Mercure Scandale" lies less
in itself than in its posterity. It was from this feature that Steele and
Addison probably picked up the idea of a club of commentators on
vice and folly, which they handled with the lightness and literary
skill lacking in Defoe, who bequeathed his creation to his successors
with relief for the cessation of his own uncongenial labors, and with
bitter invective against the level of a popular audience that demanded
a frivolity against which his own sense of decency revolted. "Tired
with the mass of filth, the stench of which was hardly to be endured,"
he wrote savagely, "I laid aside the Herculean labour for a while, and
am glad to see the Society honoured by the succession (in those just
endeavours) of the venerable Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq., who, vouchsafing
to rake in your beloved lay-stall may, perhaps, contrary to nature,
bring you to smell your own stink, and have a just notion of your
follies."

Defoe's attitude toward the "Mercure Scandale" gives us a clue to
the Review as a whole. From the first, he intended his periodical to be
a "star that scatters light." His purpose was "to open the eyes of the
deluded people, and set them to rights in the things in which they
are imposed upon." To this aim he remained faithful during his nine
years of editorship. His interest was not in the "social scene," in the
sense in which Addison and Steele described it to the delighted eyes of
men and women who would have liked to be a part of it, as well as to
those who already were. Defoe had no entrée to the high places of
society, nor did he desire one. His interest in "society" was much more
akin to our own: he was concerned (in more modern parlance) not with
the Four Hundred but with the Four Million; his approach was what
we today would call "sociological." Actually, however, he was less
interested in sociological problems than in political and economic ques-
tions of the day. The appeal of the Review was not to the dandy, the
fop, the "gentleman" or the "ladies." On more than one occasion Defoe
made clear to the aristocracy that he, a mere Grub Street scribbler, was

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