Daily Inspiration Quote by Richard Steele

Steele’s sly warning is a preemptive wink to the reader: if you’re bored, don’t blame the writer - blame the plan. The line is a defensive joke, but it’s also a quiet flex. In an age when periodical essays were supposed to polish manners, coach taste, and smuggle moral instruction into the coffeehouse, “dullness” could be part of the medicine. Steele frames tedium as intentional craftsmanship, not failure: a deliberate slowing of pace to make an argument land, a bland surface that keeps the censor calm, a sober patch that earns credibility before the next satirical jab.

The subtext is transactional. Steele knows his audience is browsing as much as reading; attention is scarce even in the early 1700s. So he negotiates with impatience by turning it into complicity. If you catch the “design,” you’re in on the joke and, by implication, the kind of discerning reader his project flatters into existence. If you don’t, well, your boredom becomes evidence of your own lack of refinement.

There’s also a proto-editorial ethos here: the paper is not pure entertainment but a curated instrument. Steele, as dramatist turned essayist, understands pacing like stagecraft. A quiet scene isn’t dead air; it sets contrast, builds authority, and makes the punchline or principle hit harder. The best part is the audacity: he asks for trust while teasing you for needing it.