It shows how quickly the _Spectator_ took its place among the classics, that the writer of the prospectus considered it necessary to deprecate a charge of presumption in seeming to challenge comparison.
"Let no man envy us the celebrated title we have assumed, or charge us with arrogance, as if we bid the world expect great things from us.

Must we have no power to please, unless we come up to the full height of those inimitable performances?
Is there no wit or humour left because they are gone?
Is the spirit of the _Spectators_ all lost, and their mantle fallen upon nobody?
Have they said all that can be said?
Has the world offered no variety, and presented no new scenes, since they retired from us?
Or did they leave off, because they were quite exhausted, and had no more to say ?" Defoe did not always speak so respectfully of the authors of the _Spectator_.

If he had been asked why they left off, he would probably have given the reason contained in the last sentence, and backed his opinion by contemptuous remarks about the want of fertility in the scholarly brain.

He himself could have gone on producing for ever; he was never gravelled for lack of matter, had no nice ideas about manner, and was sometimes sore about the superior respectability of those who had.

But here he was on business, addressing people who looked back regretfully from the vulgarity of _Mist's_ and _Applebee's_ to the refinement of earlier periodicals, and making a bid for their custom.