Addison and Steele

 Joseph Addison and Richard Steele are the first pairs of collaborators I have read from their century.  These friends since childhood, seemed like an odd couple, seemingly polar opposites.  Addison was charming, reserved, calculated, prudent, political, wealthy, and was good at Latin verse.  Steele was impulsive, rakish, imprudent, greedy, in debt, and wrote under the pseudonym Isaac Bickerstaff.  Their goal together, was to establish “a new social literary ethos transcending the narrowness of Puritan morality and the exorbitance of the fashionable court culture of the last century.”  They were innovative in the essays and the fact that Addison was wealthy and a former politician, probably brough them a large audience.