letters flourished during this period, ¹ but the "periodical," as most of
us know it, really began in the first years of the eighteenth century.

We must not think of these early periodicals as newspapers in our
sense. A closer parallel may be found in the contributions of modern
"columnists," syndicated today in many newspapers. Addison, Steele,
Defoe and others did not offer their contemporaries "news," which
they could learn from many other sources; they offered opinion, com-
mentary, prejudice. The principal feature of most of their issues was a
single essay, which interpreted current news and gossip or commented
upon the passing scene of manners and morals and which frequently
affected readers' opinions as do our columnists and radio commentators
today. But before we consider Defoe's commentaries in his main essays,
we may stop for a moment over other "features" (the word is even
more familiar today than in the eighteenth century) of the Review.

One important "feature" of the eighteenth-century periodical was
the "advertisement." Defoe wrote in 1705, "The principal support of
all the public papers now on foot depends upon the advertisements,"
and indeed advertisements might have kept the Review alive, with or
without patronage, if Defoe had been more interested in them than
he evidently was. At times his advertisements took up as much room
as two of the eight columns; sometimes there were none at all; often
there were only one or two. Modern scholars who have examined hun-
dreds of eighteenth-century periodicals say that the prevailing adver-
tisements of the day were for cures of venereal disease, cosmetics, and
books, approximately in that order. An occasional periodical--Leslie's
Rehearsal, for example--limited its advertising to books, but most of
them, including the Tatler and the Spectator, allowed wide latitude.
In the case of the Review, advertisements of books led the field (there
were 168 among a total of 361 advertisements in the first three vol-

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