=Motto.= "Out of breath for naught; doing many things, yet
accomplishing nothing."--Phaedrus, _Fables_, II. v. 3.
=85=: 6. =Wimble.= A wimble is a gimlet--the two words are probably
from the same root. Possibly, as some of his editors have suggested,
Addison meant to indicate that Will Wimble was a small bore. Quite as
possibly he meant that the fellow was always turning about, yet making
a very small hole.
=86=: 1. =Eton.= The most famous of English schools; in sight of
Windsor Castle.
=86=: 8. =Younger brother.= By English law the eldest son succeeds to
the family estate and titles.
=86=: 21. =A tulip-root.= About the middle of the seventeenth century
there was a craze for tulips in England. The bulbs were grown in
Holland, and were sold for fabulous prices. Dealing in them became
a kind of speculation, and tulip bulbs were bought and sold on the
exchange, as stocks are now, without changing hands at all. As much as
a thousand pounds has been paid, it is said, for a single bulb. The
Dutch government finally passed a law that no more than two hundred
francs should be charged for one bulb. By the time this paper was
written the mania had mostly passed, yet tulips were still highly
prized. In _The Tatler_, Addison has a pleasant paper (No. 218) telling
of a cook maid who mistook a "handful of tulip-roots for a heap of
onions and by that means made a dish of pottage that cost above a
thousand pounds sterling." Forty years later, young Oliver Goldsmith,
when a medical student in Leyden, almost beggared himself by the
purchase of a parcel of tulip-roots to send to his good uncle Contarine
in Ireland.
=89=: 1. =Trading nation, like ours.= In such passages as this Addison
betrays his Whig sympathies. The trading and moneyed classes, it will
be remembered, were all in the Whig party; the landed aristocracy, in
the Tory party. In _Spectator_, No. 21,--referred to in the closing
lines of this paper,--he dwells at length on the opportunities and
advantages of the business life as compared with the overcrowded
professions.