The essayistic, narrative treatment of various aspects of daily life in the spectatorial periodicals is one of the major inventions of this genre. In using this literary form the weeklies resemble the newly emerging genre of the novel. At the same time, older literary forms like allegory are also present in the moral weeklies, although they are retooled for a contemporary audience. The present case study on the temple allegories in Sneedorff's Danish Den patriotiske Tilskuer will show, that allegory has its proper semantics with a distinct tendency toward abstraction and generalization in contrast to a mimesis based on empirical investment in the concrete and demonstrable.