I have a fear that my readers were not overmuch interested in what I had
to say of that witty Dr. Thomas Fuller who wrote about the _Worthies of
England_, and who pressed his stalwart figure (for he was of the bigness
of our own Phillips Brooks--corporeal and mental) through many a London
crowd that came to his preachments. Yet his worthiness is something larger
than that which comes from his story of the _Worthies_.
Sir William Temple, too, is a name that can hardly have provoked much
enthusiasm, unless among those who love gardens, and who recall with rural
unction his horticultural experiences at Sheen, and at Moor Park in
Surrey. But that kindly, handsome, meditative, eccentric doctor of
Norwich--Sir Thomas Browne--was of a different and more lovable quality,
the memory of which I hope may find lodgement in the reader’s heart. His
_Religio Medici_, if not his _Hydriotaphia_, should surely find place in
every well-appointed library.
As for John Dryden--do what you like with his books; but do not forget
that he left behind him writings that show all the colors and reflect all
the follies and faiths of the days in which he lived--plays with a
portentous pomp of language--lyrics that were most melodious and most
unsavory--satire that flashed and cut like a sword, and odes that had the
roll and swell of martial music in them.
John Locke if less known, was worthier; and we have reason, which I tried
to show, for thinking of him as a pure-hearted, level-headed, high-minded
man--an abiding honor to his race.
_Kings Charles, James, and William._
It may help the reader to keep in memory the sequence of these English
sovereigns if I tell him somewhat of their relationship. James
II.--previously and longer known as that Duke of York, in honor of whom
our metropolitan city (in those days conquered from the Dutch) was called
New York--we know as only brother to Charles II., who died without
legitimate children. This James was as bigoted and obstinate as Charles
was profligate and suave. We think of him as having lost his throne in
that revolution of 1688, by reason of his popish tendencies; but it is
doubtful if Protestantism would have saved him, or made a better man of
him. He had married--and it was a marriage he tried hard to abjure and
escape from--a daughter of that Earl of Clarendon whose _History of the
Rebellion_ I named to you. There were two daughters by this marriage, Mary
and Anne; both of them, through the influence of their Clarendon
grandfather, brought up as Protestants. The elder of these, Mary, was a
fine woman, tall, dignified, graceful, cultivated--as times went--whose
greatest foible was a love for cards, at which she played for heavy
stakes, and--often. Her sister Anne shared the same foible, and gave it
cherishment all her life; but was not reckoned the equal of her elder
sister; had none of her grace; was short, dumpy, overfond of good dinners,
and with such limited culture as made her notelets (even when she came to
be Queen) full of blunders that would put a school-mistress of our day
into spasms. We shall meet her, and more pleasantly, again.
But Mary--heir next after James to the throne--had married William of
Orange, who was a fighting Dutch general; keen, cool, selfish, brave,
calculating, with an excellent head for business; cruel at times,
unscrupulous, too, but a good Protestant. He was great-grandson to that
famous William the Silent, whose story everyone has read, or should read,
in the pages of Motley.
But how came he, a Dutchman, and speaking English brokenly, to share the
British throne with Mary? There were two very excellent reasons: First, he
was own cousin to Mary, his mother having been a daughter of Charles I.;
and next, he had kingly notions of husbandship, and refused to go to
England on any throne-seeking errand, which might involve hard fighting,
without sharing to the full the sovereignty of his wife Mary.
So he did go as conqueror and king; there being most easy march to London;
the political scene changing like the turn of a kaleidoscope; but there
came fighting in Ireland, as at Londonderry and the battle of the Boyne;
and a brooding unrest in Scotland, of which, whenever you come to read or
study, you should mate your reading with that charming story of _Old
Mortality_--one of the best of Scott’s. Its scene reaches over from the
days of Charles II. to the early years of the Dutch King William, and sets
before one more vividly than any history all those elements of unrest with
which the new sovereign had to contend on his northern borders--the crazy
fanaticism of fierce Cameronians--the sturdy, cantankerous zeal of
Presbyterians--the workings of the old, hot, obstinate leaven of Prelacy,
and the romantic, lingering loyalty to a Stuart king.
But William ended by having all his kingdom well in hand, and all his
household too. There was strong affection between William and Mary; he
relishing her discretion, her reserves, and her culture; and she loving
enough to forget the harsh gauntleted hand which he put upon those who
were nearest and dearest to him. He was more military than diplomatic, and
I think believed in no Scripture more devoutly than in that which sets
forth the mandate, “Wives, obey your husbands.”
The King was not a strong man physically, though a capital soldier; he was
short, awkward, halting in movement, appearing best in the saddle and with
battle flaming in his front; he had asthma, too, fearfully; was
irritable--full of coughs and colds--building a new palace upon the flank
of Hampton Court, to get outside of London smoke and fogs; setting out
trees there, and digging ponds in Dutch style, which you may see now;
building Kensington, too, which was then out of town, and planting and
digging there--of which you may see results over the mouldy brick wall
that still hems in that old abode of royalty. He carried his asthma, and
dyspepsia, and smoking Dutch dragoons to both places. People thought
surely that the Queen, so well made and blessed with wonderful appetite,
would outlive him, and so give to the history of England a Mary II.; but
she did not. An attack of small-pox, not combated in those days by
vaccination, or even inoculation, carried her off on a short illness.
He grieved, as people thought so stern a master could not grieve; but
rallied and built to the Queen’s memory that most magnificent of
monuments, Greenwich Hospital, which shows its domes and its royal façade
stretching along the river bank, to the myriad of strangers who every year
sail up or down the Thames.
He made friends, too, with Princess Anne, the sister of the dead Queen,
and now heir to the throne. This Princess Anne (afterward Queen Anne) was
married to a prince of Denmark, only notable for doing nothing excellently
well; and was mother of a young lad, called Duke of Gloucester, whom all
England looked upon as their future king. And this little Duke, after
Queen Mary’s death, came to be presented at court in a blue velvet
costume, blazing all over with diamonds, of which one may get a good
notion from Sir Godfrey Kneller’s painting of him, now in Hampton Court.
But the velvet and the diamonds and best of care could not save the
weakly, blue-eyed, fair-cheeked, precocious lad; his precocity was a fatal
one, due to a big hydrocephalic head that bent him down and carried him to
the grave while William was yet King.
The Princess mother was in despair; was herself feeble, too; small, heavy,
dropsical, from all which she rallied, however, and at the death of
William, which occurred by a fall from his horse in 1702, came to be that
Queen Anne, who through no special virtues of her own, gave a name to a
great epoch in English history, and in these latter days has given a name
to very much architecture and furniture and crockery, which have as little
to do with her as they have with our King Benjamin of Washington.
I may have more to say of her when we shall have brought the literary
current of our story more nearly abreast of her times.
There was not much of literary patronage flowing out from King William. I
think there was never a time when he would not have counted a good
dictionary the best of books, not excepting the Bible; and I suspect that
he had about the same contempt for “literary fellers” which belongs to our
average Congressman. Yet there were shoals of poets in his time who would
have delighted to burn incense under the nostrils of the asthmatic King.
_Some Literary Fellows._
There was Prior,[96] for instance, who, from having been the son of a
taverner at Whitehall, came to be a polished wit, and at last an
ambassador, through the influence of strong friends about the court. In
his university days he had ventured to ridicule, in rattling verse, the
utterances of the great Dryden. You will know of him best, perhaps, if you
know him at all, by a paraphrase he made of that tender ballad of the
“Nut-brown Maid,” in which the charming naturalness of the old verse is
stuck over with the black patches of Prior’s pretty rhetoric. But I am
tempted to give you a fairer and a more characteristic specimen of his
vivacity and grace. Here it is:
“What I speak, my fair Chloe, and what I write, shows
The difference there is betwixt nature and art;
I court _others_ in verse; but I love _thee_ in prose;
And _they_ have my whimsies, but _thou_ hast my heart.
So when I am wearied with wandering all day,
To thee, my delight, in the evening I come,
No matter what beauties I saw in my way;
They were but my _visits_, and thou art my home.”
Remember, these lines were written by a poet, who on an important occasion
represented the Government of Queen Anne at the great court of Louis XIV.
of France. This Prior--when Queen Mary died--had his consolatory verses
for King William. Indeed that death of Queen Mary set a great deal of
poetry upon the flow. There was William Congreve,[97] who though a young
man, not yet turned of thirty, had won a great rank in those days by his
witty comedies. He wrote a pastoral--cleaner than most of his writing--in
honor of William’s lost Queen:
“No more these woods shall with her sight be blest,
Nor with her feet these flowery plains be prest;
No more the winds shall with her tresses play,
And from her balmy breath steal sweets away.
Oh, she was heavenly fair, in face and mind,
Never in nature were such beauties joined;
Without--all shining, and within--all white;
Pure to the sense, and pleasing to the sight;
Like some rare flower, whose leaves all colors yield,
And--opening--is with sweetest odors filled.”
Yet all this would have comforted the King not half so much as a whiff of
smoke from the pipe of one of his Dutch dragoons. He never went to see one
of Mr. Congreve’s plays, though the whole town was talking of their
neatness, and their skill, and their wit. That clever gentleman’s
conquests on the stage, and in the social world--lording it as he did
among duchesses and countesses--would have weighed with King William not
so much as the buzzing of a blue-bottle fly.
Yet Congreve was in his way an important man--immensely admired; Voltaire
said he was the best comedy writer England had ever known; and when he
came to London this keen-witted Frenchman (who rarely visited) went to see
Mr. Congreve at his rooms in the Strand. Nothing was too good for Mr.
Congreve; he had patronage and great gifts; it seemed always to be raining
roses on his head. The work he did was not great work, but it was
exquisitely done; though, it must be said, there was no preserving savor
in it but the art of it. The talk in his comedies, by its pliancy, grace,
neat turns, swiftness of repartee, compares with the talk in most comedies
as goldsmith’s work compares with the heavy forgings of a blacksmith. It
matches exquisitely part to part, and runs as delicately as a hair-spring
on jewelled pinions.
I gave my readers a bit of the “Pandora Lament,” which Sir Richard Steele
thought one of the most perfect of all pastoral compositions. And the
little whimsey about Amoret, everybody knows; certainly it is best known
of all he did:
“Coquet and coy at once her air,
Both studied, tho’ both seemed neglected;
Careless she is with artful care,
Affecting to seem unaffected.
With skill her eyes dart every glance,
Yet change so soon, you’d ne’er suspect ’em,
For she’d persuade they wound by chance,
Tho’ certain aim and art direct them.”
They are very pretty; yet are you not sure that our wheezing, phlegmatic,
business-loving, Dutch King William would have sniffed contemptuously at
the reading of any such verselets?
_A Pamphleteer._
A writer, however, of that time, of about the same age with Congreve, whom
King William did favor, and did take at one period into his
confidence,--and one of whose books, at least, you all have liked at some
epoch of your life, and thought quite wonderful and charming--I must tell
you more about. His presence counted for nothing; he was short, wiry,
hook-nosed--not anyway elegant; Mr. Congreve would have scorned
association with him. He was the son of a small butcher in London, and had
never much schooling; but he was quick of apprehension, always eager to
inform himself; bustling, shrewd, inquisitive, with abundance of what we
call “cheek.” He never lacked simple, strong language to tell just what he
thought, or what he knew; and he never lacked the courage to put his
language into print or into speech, as the case might be.
By dint of his dogged perseverance and much natural aptitude he came to
know Latin and Spanish and Italian, and could speak French, such as it
was, very fluently. He was well up in geography and history, and such
science as went into the books of those days. He wrote sharp, stinging
pamphlets about whatever struck him as wrong, or as wanting a good slap,
whether in morals, manners, or politics.
He was in trade, which took him sometimes into France, Spain, or Flanders.
He could tell everyone how to make money and how to conduct business
better than he could do either himself. He had his bankruptcies, his
hidings, his compoundings with creditors, and his times in prison; but he
came out of all these experiences with just as much animation and pluck
and assurance as he carried into them.
There was a time when he was advertised as a fugitive, and a reward
offered for his apprehension--all due to his sharp pamphlet-writing; and
he was apprehended and had his fines to pay, and stood in the pillory; but
the street-folk, with a love for his pluck and for his trenchant, homely,
outspokenness, garnished the pillory with flowers and garlands. It was
this power of incisive speech, and his capacity to win audience of the
street-people, that made King William value his gifts and put them to
service.
But I cannot tell of the half he wrote. Now it was upon management of
families; again an _Essay on Projects_--from which Dr. Franklin used to
say he derived a great many valuable hints--then upon a standing army;
then upon the villainies of stock-jobbery. What he called poems, too, he
wrote, with a harsh jingle of rhymes; one specially, showing that--
“as the world goes, and is like to go, the best way for Ladies is to
keep unmarried, for I will ever expose,” he says, “these infamous,
impertinent, cowardly, censorious, sauntering _Idle wretches_,
called _Wits_ and _Beaux_, the _Plague_ of the nation and the
_Scandal_ of mankind.” But, he continues, “if Lesbia is sure she has
found a man of _Honor_, _Religion_ and _Virtue_, I will never forbid
the _Banns_: Let her love him as much as she pleases, and value him
as an _Angel_, and be married to-morrow if she will.”
Again, he has a whole volume of _Advice to English Tradesmen_, as to how
to manage their shops and bargainings; and it gives one a curious notion
of what was counted idle extravagance in that day to read his description
of the extraordinary and absurd expenditure of a certain insane
pastry-cook:
“It will hardly be believed,” he says, “in ages to come, that the
fitting of his shop has cost 300 pounds! I have good authority for
saying that this spendthrift has sash-windows all of looking-glass
plate twelve inches by sixteen--two large pier looking-glasses, and
one very large pier-glass seven feet high; and all the walls of the
shop are lined up with galley tiles.”
He advises a young apothecary who has not large acquaintance to hire a
stout man to pound in a big mortar (though he may have nothing to pound)
all the early hours of the morning, and all the evening, as if he were a
man of great practice. Then, in his _Family Instructor_, he advises
against untruth and all hypocrisies; and he compresses sharp pamphlets
into the shape of a leading article--is, in fact, the first man to design
“leading articles,” which he puts into his _Review_ or _Indicator_, in
which periodicals he saves a corner for well-spiced gossip and scandal, to
make--he says--the “paper relished by housewives.” He interviews all the
cut-throats and thieves encountered in prison, and tells stories of their
lives. I think he was the first and best of all interviewers; but not the
last! Fifty of these pages of mine would scarce take in the mere titles
of the books and pamphlets he wrote. His career stretched far down
throughout Queen Anne’s days, and was parallel with that of many worthy
men of letters, I shall have to mention; yet he knew familiarly none of
them. Swift, who knew everybody he thought worth knowing, speaks of him as
an illiterate fellow, whose name he has forgotten; and our pamphleteer
dies at last--in hiding--poor, embroiled with his family, and sought by
very few--unless his creditors.
I do not suppose you have read much that he wrote except one book; that, I
know you have read; and this bustling, bouncing, inconsistent,
indefatigable, unsuccessful, earnest scold of a man was named Daniel
Defoe;[98] and the book you have read is _Robinson Crusoe_--loved by all
boys better than any other book; and loved by all girls, I think, better
than any other book--that has no love in it.
You will wonder, perhaps, that a man without academic graces of speech
should have made a book that wears so and that wins so. But it wears and
wins, because--for one thing--it is free from any extraneous graces of
rhetoric; because he was not trying to write a fine book, but only to tell
in clearest way a plain story. And if you should ever have any story of
your own to tell, and want to tell it well, I advise you to take _Robinson
Crusoe_ for a model; if you ever want to make a good record of any
adventures of your own by sea, or by land, I advise you to take _Robinson
Crusoe_ for a model; and if you do, you will not waste words in painting
sunsets, or in decorating storms and sea-waves; but, without your
straining, and by the simple colorless truth of your language, the sunsets
will show their glow, and the storms rise and roar, and the waves dash and
die along the beach as they do in nature.
_Of Queen Anne._
Though not in great favor with the courtiers of Queen Anne, Defoe did
serve her government effectively upon the Commission in Edinburgh, which
brought about in this Queen’s time (and to her great honor) the
legislative union of England and Scotland. She came, you know, to be
called the “Good Queen Anne;” and we must try and get a better glimpse of
her before we push on with our literary story. Royal duties brought more
ripeness of character than her young days promised. I have said that she
was not so attractive personally as her sister Mary; not tall, but heavy
in figure--not unlike the present good Queen of England, but less active
by far; sometimes dropsical--gouty, too, and never getting over a strong
love for the table. She had great waves of brown hair--ringleted and
flowing over her shoulders; and she had an arm and hand which Sir Godfrey
Kneller--who painted her--declared to be the finest in all England; and
whoso is curious in such matters can still see that wonderful hand and arm
in her portrait at Windsor. Another charm she possessed was a singularly
sweet and sympathetic voice; and she read the royal messages to the high
court of Parliament with a music that has never been put in them since. If
she had written them herself, I am afraid music would not have saved them;
for she was not strong-minded, and was a shallow student; she _would_
spell phonetically, and played havoc with the tenses. Nor was she rich in
conversation, or full. Swift--somewhere in his journal--makes merry with
her disposition to help out--as so many of us do--by talk about the
weather; and there is a story that when, after King William’s death, the
great Marquis of Normanby came on a visit of sympathy and gratulation to
the new sovereign, the Queen, at an awkward pause, piped out, in her sweet
voice: “It’s a fine day, Marquis!” Whereat the courtier, who was more full
of dainty speech, said--in pretty recognition of its being the first day
of her reign--“Your Majesty must allow me to say that it’s the finest day
I ever saw in my life!” But this good Queen was full of charities, always
beloved, and never failed to show that best mark of real ladyhood--the
utmost courtesy and kindliness of manner to dependants and to her
servants.
_An Irish Dragoon._
Among the writers specially identified with this Queen’s reign was Sir
Richard Steele;[99] not a grand man, or one of large influence; and yet
one so kindly by nature, and so gracious in his speech and writing, that
the world is not yet done with pardoning, and loving, and pitying that
elegant author of the _Tatler_--though he was an awful spendthrift, and a
fashionable tippler, and a creature of always splendid, and always broken,
promises.
He was Irish born; was schooled at the Charter-house in London, where he
met with that other master of delicate English, Joseph Addison--they being
not far from the same age--and knitting a boy friendship there which
withstood a great many shocks of manhood. They were together at Oxford,
too, but not long; for Steele, somehow, slipped College early and became a
trooper, and learned all the ways of the fast fellows of the town. With
such a training--on the road to which his Irish blood led him with great
jollity--one would hardly have looked to him for any early talk about the
life of a true _Christian Hero_. But he did write a book so entitled, in
those wild young days, as a sort of kedge anchor, he says, whereby he
might haul out from the shoals of the wicked town, and indulge in a sort
of contemplative piety. It was and is a very good little book;[100] but it
did not hold a bit, as an anchor. And when he came to be joked about his
Christian Heroship, he wrote plays (perhaps to make averages good) more
moral and cleanly than those of Etherege or Wycherley--with bright things
in them; but not enough of such, or of orderly proprieties, to keep them
popular. Of course, this fun-loving, dusky, good-hearted, broad-shouldered
Irish trooper falls in love easily; marries, too, of a sudden, some West
Indian lady, who dies within a year, leaving him a Barbadoes estate--said
to be large--does look large to Captain Steele through his cups--but
which gives greater anxieties than profits, and is a sort of castle in
Spain all through his life. With almost incredible despatch--after this
affliction--he is in love again; this time with the only daughter of a
rich Welsh lady. This is his famous Prue, who plays the coquette with him
for a while; but writes privily to her anxious mamma that she “can _never,
never_ love another;” that “he is not high--nor rich--but so dutiful; and
for his morals and understanding [she says] I refer you to his _Christian
Hero_.”
Steele’s marriage comes of it--a marriage whose ups and downs, and lights
and shadows have curious and very graphic illustration in the storm of
notelets which he wrote to his wife--on bill-heads, perfumed paper, tavern
reckonings--all, singularly enough, in existence now, and carefully kept
in the Library of the British Museum.
Here is a part of one, written just before his marriage:
“Madam, it is the hardest thing in the World to be in Love, and yet
attend Business. As for me all that speak to me find me out.… A
gentleman ask’d me this morning what news from Lisbon, and I
answered, ‘She’s exquisitely handsome.’” Here’s another--after
marriage: “Dear Prue, I enclose two guineas, and will come home
exactly at seven. Yrs tenderly.” And again: “Dear Prue, I enclose
five guineas, but cannot come home to dinner. Dear little woman,
take care of thyself, and eat and drink cheerfully.” Yet again:
“Dear Prue, if you do not hear of me before three to-morrow, believe
that I am too [tipsy] to obey your orders; but, however, know me to
be your most affectionate, faithful husband.”
It is more promising for a man to speak of his own tippling than to have
others speak of it; nor was this writer’s sinning in that way probably
beyond the average in his time. But he was of that mercurial temperament
which took wine straight to the brain; and so was always at bad odds with
those men of better digestion (such as Swift and Addison) who were only
tickled effusively with such bouts as lifted the hilarious Captain Steele
into a noisy effervescence.
There are better and worse letters than those I have read; but never any
lack of averment that he enjoys most of anything in life his wife’s
delightful presence--but can’t get home, really cannot; some excellent
fellows have come in, or he is at the tavern--business is important; and
she is always his charming Prue; and always he twists a little wordy
aureole of praise about her head or her curls. I suppose she took a deal
of comfort out of his tender adjectives; but I think she learned early not
to sit up for him, and got over that married woe with great alacrity.
There is evidence that she loved him throughout; and other evidence that
she gave him some moral fisticuffs--when he did get home--which made his
next stay at the tavern easier and more defensible.
But he loved his Prue, in his way, all her life through, and showed a
beautiful fondness for his children. In that budget of notelets I spoke of
(and which the wife so carefully cherished), are some charming ones to his
children: thus he writes to his daughter Elizabeth, whose younger sister,
Mary, has just begun to put her initials, M. S., to messages of love to
him:
“Tell her I am delighted: tell her how many fine things those two
letters stand for when she writes them: _M. S._ is _milk and sugar_;
_mirth and safety_; _musick and songs_; _meat and sauce_, as well as
_Molly and Spot_, and _Mary and Steele_. You see I take pleasure in
conversing with you by prattling anything to divert you.
Yr aff. father.”
But you must not think Steele was a man of no importance save in his own
family. His friends counted by scores and hundreds; he had warm patrons
among the chiefest men of the time; had political preferment and places of
trust and profit, far better than his old captaincy; could have lived in
handsome style and without anxieties, if his reckless kindnesses and
convivialities had not made him improvident.
_Steele’s Literary Qualities._
Nor must we forget the work by which he is chiefly known, I mean his
establishment of the _Tatler_--the forerunner of all those delightful
essays which went to the making of the _Spectator_ and the _Guardian_;
these latter having the more credit for their dignity and wise reticence,
but the _Tatler_ being more vivacious, and quite as witty. Addison came to
the help of Steele in the _Tatler_, and Steele, afterward joined forces
with Addison in the _Spectator_. I happen to be the owner of a very old
edition of these latter essays, in whose “Table of Contents” some staid
critic of the last generation has written his (or her) comments on the
various topics discussed; and I find against the papers of Addison, such
notes as--“_instructive_, _sound_, _judicious_;” and against those of
Steele, I am sorry to say, such words as “_flighty_, _light_, _witty_,
_graceful_, _worthless_;” and I am inclined to think the criticisms are
pretty well borne out by the papers; but if _flighty_ and _light_, he was
not unwholesome; and he did not always carry the rollicking ways of the
tavern into the little piquant journalism, where the grave and excellent
Mr. Addison presided with him. Nay, there are better things yet to be said
of him. He argued against the sin and folly of duelling with a force and
pungency that went largely to stay that evil; and he never touches a
religious topic that his manner does not take on an awe and a respect
which belongs to the early pages of the _Christian Hero_. There are
touches of pathos, too, in his writing, quite unmatchable; but straight
and quick upon these you are apt to catch sound of the jingling spurs of
the captain of dragoons. Thus, in that often quoted allusion to his
father’s death (which happened in his boyhood), he says:
“I went into the room where his body lay, and my mother sat weeping
alone by it. I had my battledore in my hand, and fell a beating the
coffin, and calling ‘Papa.’… My mother catched me in her arms, and
almost smothered me in her embraces, and told me, in a flood of
tears, ‘Papa could not hear me, and would play with me no more.’”
This is on page 364 of the _Tatler_, and on page 365 he says: “A large
train of disasters were coming into my memory, when my servant knocked at
my closet door, and interrupted me with a letter, attended with a hamper
of wine, of the same sort with that which is to be put to sale on Thursday
next, at Garraway’s coffee-house.” And he sends for three of his
friends--which was so like him!
So he goes through life--a kindly, good-hearted, tender, intractable,
winning fellow; talking, odd-whiles, piously--spending freely--drinking
fearlessly--loving widely--writing archly, wittily, charmingly.
We have a characteristic glimpse of him in his later years--for he lived
far down into the days of the Georges (one of whom gave him his knighthood
and title)--when he is palsied, at his charming country home in Wales, and
totters out to see the village girls dance upon the green, and insists
upon sending off to buy a new gown for the best dancer; this was so like
him! And it would have been like him to carry his palsied steps straight
thereafter to the grave where his Prue and the memory of all his married
joys and hopes lay sleeping.
_Joseph Addison._
Addison’s character was, in a measure, the complement of Steele’s. He was
coy, dignified, reticent--not given to easy familiarities at sight--nor
greatly prone to over-fondling. He was the son of an English rector down
in Wiltshire; was born in a cottage still standing in Milston--a few miles
north of Salisbury. He was a Charter-house boy and Oxford man; had great
repute there as scholar--specially as Latinist--became a Fellow--had great
Whig friends, who, somehow, secured him a pension, with which he set out
upon European travel; and he wrote about what he saw in Italy, and other
parts, in a way that is fresh and readable now. He was a year or two
younger than Congreve, and a few weeks[101] only younger than Steele;
nine years younger than De Foe, of whom it is probable he never knew or
cared to know.
Very early in his career Addison had the aid of Government friends: his
dignity of carriage gave them assurance; his reticence forbade fear of
babbling; his elegant pen gave hope of good service; and he came to high
political task-work--first, in those famous verses where he likens the
fighting hero, Marlborough--then fresh from Blenheim--to the angel, who,
“----by Divine command,
With rising tempests shakes a guilty land,
…
And pleased th’ Almighty’s orders to perform,
Rides in the whirlwind and directs the storm.”
That poem took him out from scholarly obscurity, and set him well afoot in
the waiting-rooms of statesmen. Poetry, however, was not to be his office;
though, some years after, he did win the town by the academic beauties of
his tragedy of “Cato”--the memory of which has come bobbing down over
school-benches, by the “Speech of Sempronius,” to days some of us
remember--
“----My voice is still for war!
Gods, can a Roman Senate long debate
Which of the two to choose--slavery or death!”
I suppose that speech may have slipped out of modern reader-books; but it
used to make one of the stock declamations, on which ambitious school-boys
of my time spent great floods of fervid elocution.
Addison wrote somewhat, as I have said, for Steele’s first periodic
venture in the _Tatler_, attracted by its opportunities and the graces of
it; and they together plotted and carried into execution the publication
of the _Spectator_. I trust that its quiet elegance has not altogether
fallen away from the knowledge of this generation of young people. Dr.
Johnson, you know, said of its Addison papers, that whoever would write
English well should give his days and nights to their perusal. Yet such a
journal could and would never succeed now: it does not deal with questions
of large and vital interest; its sentences do not crackle and blaze with
the heat we look for in the preachments of our time. Its leisurely
discourse--placid as summer brooks--would beguile us to sleep. A ream of
old _Spectators_ discussing proprieties and modesties would not put one of
our daring ball-room belles to the blush. The talk of these old gentlemen
about the minor morals were too mild, perhaps too merciful; yet it is well
to know of them; and one can go to a great many worse quarters than the
_Spectator_, even now, for proper hints about etiquette, manners, and
social proprieties.
_Sir Roger De Coverley._
Whatever other writings of these gallant gentlemen and teachers of Queen
Anne’s time the reader may have upon his shelves, he cannot do better than
equip them with that little story (excerpted from the _Spectator_) of “Sir
Roger De Coverley.” No truer or more winning picture of worthy old English
knighthood can you find anywhere in literature; nowhere such a tender
twilight color falling through books upon old English country homes. Those
papers made the scaffolding by which our own Irving built up his best
stories about English country homesteads, and English revels of Christmas;
and the De Coverley echoes sound sweetly and surely all up and down the
pages of _Bracebridge Hall_.
The character of Sir Roger will live forever--so gracious--so
courteous--so dignified--so gentle: his servants love him, and his dogs,
and his white gelding.
“It being a cold day,” says his old butler, “when he made his will,
he left for mourning to every man in the parish a great frieze coat,
and to every woman a black riding-hood. Captain Sentry showed great
kindnesses to the old house-dog my master was so fond of. It would
have gone to your heart to have heard the moans the dumb creature
made on the day of my master’s death. He has never joyed himself
since--no more has any of us.”
Yet there were plenty of folks who sneered at these papers even then--as
small--not worthy of notice. That great, bustling, slashing, literary
giant, Dean Swift, says to Mistress Hester Johnson, “Do you read the
_Spectators_? I never do; they never come in my way. They say abundance of
them are very pretty.” “Very pretty!” a vast many satiric shots have been
fired off to that tune. And yet Swift and Addison had been as friendly as
two men so utterly unlike could be.
To complete the De Coverley picture, and give it relish in the boudoirs of
the time, the authors paint the old knight in love--delicately, but deeply
and wofully in love--with a certain unnamed widow living near him, and
whose country house overlooks the park of the De Coverley estate.
“Oh, the many moonlight nights that I have walked by myself, and
thought on the widow, by the music of the nightingales!”
This sounds like Steele. And the old knight leaves to her
“Whom he has loved for forty years, a pearl necklace that was his
mother’s, and a couple of silver bracelets set with jewels.”
This episode has an added interest, because about those times the
dignified and coy Mr. Addison was very much bent upon marrying the elegant
Lady Warwick, whose son had been correspondent--perhaps pupil of his. He
did not bounce into marriage--like Steele--with his whole heart in his
eyes and his speech; it was a long pursuit, and had its doubtful stages;
six years before the affair really came about, he used to write to the
Warwick lad about the tom-tits, and the robin-redbreasts, and their pretty
nests, and the nightingales. But Addison, more or less fortunate than Sir
Roger, does win the widow’s hand, and has a sorry time of it with her. She
never forgets to look a little down upon him, and he never forgets a keen
knowledge of it.
He has the liberty, however, after his marriage--with certain
limitations--of a great fine home at Holland House, which is one of the
few old country houses still standing in London, in the midst of the
gardens, where Addison used to walk, in preference to my Lady’s chamber.
His habits were to study of a morning--dine at a tavern; then to Button’s
coffee-house, near to Covent Garden, for a meet with his cronies; and
afterward--when the spectre of marriage was real to him--to the tavern
again, and to heavier draughts than he was wont to take in his young days.
Pope said he was charming in his talk; but never so in mixed company;
never when the auditors were so new or so many as to rouse his
self-consciousness; this tied his tongue; but with one or two he knew
well, the stream of the _Spectator’s_ talk flowed as limpidly as from his
pen.
He was not a great student; Bentley would have laughed at hearing him
called so. But he could use the learning he had with rare deftness, and
make more out of a page of the ancients than Bentley could make out of a
volume. His graces of speech, and aptitude for using a chance nugget of
knowledge, made him subject of sneer from those who studied hard and long.
A man who beats his brains against books everlastingly, without great
conquests, is apt to think lightly of the gifts of one like Addison, who
by mere impact gets a gracious send-off into elegant talk.
If one has read nothing else of Addison’s, I think he may read with profit
the “Vision of Mirza.” That, too, used to be one of the jewels in the
ancient reader-books, and had so many of the graces of a story, that the
book--my book at least--used to fall open of itself on those pages where
began the wonderful vision in the Valley of Bagdad.
Though more years have passed since my reading of it than I dare tell, yet
at the bare mention of the name I seem to see the great clouds of mist
which gather on the hither and the thither sides of the valley: I see the
haunting Genius in the costume of a shepherd, who from his little musical
instrument makes sounds that are exceeding sweet.
Then I seem to see the prodigious tide of water rolling through the
valley, and the long bridge with the crumbling arches stretching athwart
the stream, and the throngs of people crowding over, and falling and
slipping into the angry tide--which is the tide of death; I see that the
larger number fall through into the waters, when they have scarce passed
over a single arch of the bridge. But whatever may befall, always the
throng is pressing on, and always the thousands are dropping away and
disappearing in the gulf that sweeps below. I see that, though some few
hobble along painfully upon the furthermost and half-broken arches that
stand in the flood, not one of all the myriads passes over in safety; and
I behold again (with Mirza) that beyond--far beyond, where the clouds of
mist have lifted--lies a stretch of placid water, with islands covered
with fruits and flowers, and a thousand little shining seas run in and
out among these Islands of the Blessed. And when I look the other way, to
see what may lie under the other and darker clouds of mist, lo! the
shepherd who has conjured the Vision is gone; and instead of the rolling
tide, the arched bridge, the crowding myriads, I see nothing but the long,
hollow Valley of Bagdad, with oxen, sheep, and camels grazing upon the
sides of it. It seemed to me, fifty years ago, that a man who could make
such visions appear, ought to keep on making them appear, all his life
long.
I have said nothing of the political life of Addison; there are no high
lights in it that send their flashes down to us. He held places, indeed,
of much consideration; his aptitudes, his courtesies, his discretion, his
sagacities always won respect; but he was never a force in politics; the
only time he attempted parliamentary speaking he broke down; but with a
pen in his hand he never broke down until failing health and latter-day
anxieties of many sorts shook his power. I have already hinted at the
probable infelicities of his late and distinguished marriage; whatever
else may be true of it (and authorities are conflicting), it certainly
did not bring access of youth or ambition or joyousness.
In his later years, too, there came a quarrel with his old friend
Steele--cutting more deeply into the heart of this reticent man than it
could cut into the much-scarified heart of that impressionist, the author
of the _Tatler_; there were stories, too, pretty well supported, that
Addison in those last weary days of his--feeble and asthmatic--drank
over-freely, to spur his jaded mind up to a level with the talk of
sympathizing friends.
Pope, too, in those times, had possibly aggravated the quiet, calm
essayist, with the sting of his splendid but scorpion pen;[102] and all
accounts assure us that Addison (though under fifty) did give a most
kindly welcome to death. The story told by Young, and repeated by Dr.
Johnson, of his summoning young Warwick to see how a Christian could die,
is very likely apocryphal. It was not like him; this modest philosopher
never made himself an exemplar of the virtues. We know, however, that he
died calmly and tranquilly. Who can hope for more?
Not many legacies have come down to us from those days of Queen Anne which
are worthier than his; and all owe gratitude to him for at least one
shining page in all our hymnals: it will keep the name of Addison among
the stars.
“The spacious firmament on high,
With all the blue ethereal sky,
And spangled heavens, a shining frame,
Their great Original proclaim.
Th’ unwearied sun, from day to day,
Does his Creator’s power display,
And publishes to every land
The work of an Almighty hand.
“Soon as the evening shades prevail,
The moon takes up the wondrous tale;
And, nightly, to the listening earth,
Repeats the story of her birth;
Whilst all the stars that round her burn,
And all the planets in their turn,
Confirm the tidings as they roll,
And spread the truth from pole to pole.”