A retrospect of the Eighteenth-Century Essayists subsequent to the ',' ',' and ',' only serves to confirm the supremacy of Addison and Steele. Some o… - Austin Dobson

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A retrospect of the Eighteenth-Century Essayists subsequent to the ',' ',' and ',' only serves to confirm the supremacy of Addison and Steele. Some of their successors approached them in serious writing; others carried the lighter kinds to considerable perfection; but none (Goldsmith alone excepted) really rivaled them in that happily mingling of the lively and severe, which Johnson envied but could not emulate.