CHAPTER V

ADDISON, THE HUMORIST

There is not a name in the entire range of English literature to which

so full and universal an appreciation has been given by posterity as

that of Addison. He had his critics in his day. He had, indeed, more

than critics, and from one quarter at least has received in his breast

the finest and sharpest sting which a friend estranged could put into

poetic vengeance. But the burden even of contemporary voices was always

overwhelmingly in his favor, and nowadays there is no one in the world,

we believe, that has other than gentle words for the gentle writer--the

finest critic, the finest gentleman, the most tender humorist of his

age. It is not only admiration, but a sort of personal affection with

which we look back, detecting in all the bustling companies of that

witty and depraved period his genial figure, with a delightful

simplicity in the midst of all the formalism, and whole-heartedness

among the conceits and pretensions, of the fops and wits, the intriguing

statesmen and busy conspirators, of an age in which public faith can

scarcely be said to have existed at all. He had his little defects,

which were the defects of the time. And perhaps his age would not have

loved him as it did had he been entirely without a share in its

weaknesses. As it was, no one could call him a milksop then, as no one

would venture to record any offensive name against him now. The smile of

benevolent good nature, of indulgent humor, of observation always as

sweet and merciful as it is acute and refined, is never absent from his

countenance. He treats no man hardly; the ideal beings whom he creates

are the friends of all: we could, indeed, more easily spare dozens of

living acquaintances than we could part with Sir Roger de Coverley.

Addison is the very embodiment of that delightful gift of humor on which

we pride ourselves so much as a specially English quality; his soft

laugh touches all the chords of sympathy and loving comprehension with a

tender ridicule in which the applauses of admiration are conveyed with

double effect. That his style is the perfection, in its way, of English

style is less dear and delightful to us than that what it conveys is the

perfection of feeling. His art is the antipodes of that satirical art

which allows human excellence only to gird at it, and insinuate motives

which diminish or destroy. Addison, on the other hand, allows

imperfections which his interpretation turns into something more sweet

than virtue, and throws a delightful gleam of love and laughter upon the

eccentricities and characteristic follies of individual nature. That he

sees everything is one of the conditions of his genial forgiveness of

everything that is not mean or base or cruel. With these he makes no

terms. They are not within the range of his treatment. _Non ragionam di

lor._ He passes by to the genial rural circle where all is honest,

simple, and true; or to town, where in the coffee-houses themselves a

kind soul will find humors enough to keep him cheerful without harm to

any of his fellow-creatures--even the post-writers whom he jocularly

recommends to a supplementary Chelsea as having killed more men in the

wars than any general ever did, or the “needy persons” hungry for news,

whom he promises to keep supplied with good and wholesome sentiments. He

was at the same time the first of his kind. Thackeray associates

Congreve--one does not exactly know why--with this nobler name: but at

once makes it clear that there could be no comparison between them,

since the world of the comedy-writer was an entirely fictitious world,

altogether unlike the human nature of the essayist. Of the humorists we

may venture to say that Addison is the first, as well as the most

refined and complete. Swift draws a heavier shaft, which lacerates and

kills, and Pope sends his needle-pointed arrows, all touched with

poisonous venom, to the most vulnerable points; but Addison has no heart

to slay. He transfixes the veil of folly with light, shining,

irresistible darts, and pins it aloft in triumph, but he lets the fool

go free--perhaps lets you see even, by some reflection from his

swift-flying polished spear, a gleam of human meaning in the poor

wretch’s face which touches your heart. Even when he diverts himself

with Tom Folio or Ned Softly, instead of plunging these bores into a

bottomless gulf of contempt, he plays with them as one might with a

child, a twinkle of soft fun in his eye, drawing out their simple

absurdities. That habit of his which Swift describes to Stella, as one

which she herself shared, of seeming to consent to follies which it is

not worth while contradicting, and which Pope venomously characterizes

as “assents with evil leer,” lures him, and us along with him, into

byways of human nature which the impatient critic closes with a kick,

and in which there is much amusement and little harm. Molière’s

_Trissotin_ is a social conspirator meaning to build advancement upon

his bad verses; but Addison’s poetaster is only an exposition of

harmless vanity, humored by the gently malicious, but kind and patient,

listener, who amid his laughter finds a certain pleasure in pleasing the

victim too. There is sympathy even in the dissection, a conjunction of

feelings which is of the very nature of the true humorist. These, no

doubt, are of a very different caliber from that creation which still

charms the reader--the delightful figure of Sir Roger, and all the

simple folks full of follies and of virtues who surround him; but they

are scarcely less remarkable. The lesser pictures, taken at a sitting in

which the author has had no time to elaborate those features of human

character which always draw forth his tenderness, are yet full of this

instinctive sweetness, as well as of insight, keen, though always

tempered, as the touch of Ithuriel’s spear. The angel, indeed, was far

more severe, disclosing the demon under his innocent disguise; but

Addison has nothing to do with demons, he has no deep-laid plan of

mischief to unveil. The worst he does is to smile and banter the little

absurdities out of us--those curious little delusions which deceive

ourselves as well as the world.

This most loved of English writers was the son of one of those English

parsons who confuse our belief in the extremely unfavorable account,

given by both the graver and the lighter historians of the time, of the

condition of country clergymen. Neither Parson Adams in his virtue, nor

Parson Trulliber in his grossness, nor Macaulay’s keen and clear

picture, nor Thackeray’s fine disrespectful studies of the chaplain who

marries the waiting-maid, seem to afford us any guidance to the nature

of the household which the Rev. Launcelot Addison, after many wanderings

and experiences, set up in the little parish of Milston in Wiltshire

somewhere about the year 1670. Steele’s description of it has, no doubt,

the artificial form affected by the age, and sets it forth as one of

those models of perfection and examples to the world which nowadays we

are more disposed to distrust and laugh at than to follow. “I remember

among all my acquaintances,” he says, “but one man whom I have thought

to live with his children with equanimity and a good grace”; and he goes

on to describe the “three sons and one daughter whom he bred with all

the care imaginable in a liberal and ingenious way--their thoughts

turned into an emulation for the superiority in kind and generous

affection toward each other,” the boys behaving themselves with a manly

friendship, their sister treated by them with as much complaisance as

any other young lady of their acquaintance. “It was an unspeakable

pleasure to visit or sit at a meal in this family,” he adds. “I have

often seen the old man’s heart flow at his eyes with joy upon occasions

which would appear indifferent to such as were strangers to the turn of

his mind; but a very slight accident wherein he saw his children’s good

will to one another created in him the Godlike pleasure of loving them

because they loved one another.” The family tenderness thus inculcated

no doubt came from a mind full of the milk of human kindness, and

happily transmitting that possession to the gentle soul of the eldest

son, who probably was the one whom the father “had the weakness to love

much better than the others”--a weakness which “he took as much pains to

correct as any other criminal passion that could arise in his mind.”

Such a paternity and training does something to account for the

prevailing gentleness of Addison’s temper and judgments.

Dr. Addison had seen the world not in a very brilliant or luxurious way.

He had been chaplain at Dunkirk, and afterward at Tangier among the

Moors, upon which latter strange experience he wrote a book: and he rose

afterward to be Dean of Lichfield, a dignified clergyman. One of the

brothers went to India, and attained to some eminence; the other was

eventually, like Joseph, a fellow of Magdalen. They dispersed themselves

in the world as the children of a clergyman might very well do at the

present day, and it is evident belonged distinctly to the caste of

gentlemen. The sons, or at least the son with whom we have specially to

do, after sundry local schoolings went to Charterhouse, which he left at

fifteen for Oxford, perhaps because of his unusual advancement, more

probably because the custom of the time sent boys earlier to the

university, as is still the practice in Scotland. Addison was much

distinguished in that elegant branch of learning, the writing of Latin

verse, a kind of distinction which remains dear to the finest minds, in

spite of all the remarks concerning its inutility and the time wasted

in acquiring the art, which the rest of the world has so largely

indulged in. A copy of verses upon the accession of King William,

written while he was still a very youthful scholar at Queen’s College,

no more than seventeen, got him his first promotion. The boy’s verses

came--perhaps from some proud tutor at Queen’s, boasting what could be

done under the cupola in the High street, finer than anything attempted

in more distinguished seats of learning--into the hands of the Provost

of Magdalen, to the amazement and envy of that more learned corporation.

There had been no election of scholars in the previous year, during the

melancholy time when the college was embroiled with King James, and the

courtly Quaker Penn had all the disturbed and troubled fellows under his

heel; but now that freedom had returned with the revolution and the

heaven-sent William, there was room for a double number of distinguished

poor demies. Dr. Lancaster of Magdalen decided at once that to leave

such Latinity as that of the young author of these verses to a college

never very great in such gifts would be a sin against his own: and young

Addison was accordingly elected to all the privileges of a Magdalen

demyship. It is with this beautiful college that his name is connected

in Oxford. There could be no more fit association. The noble trees and

velvet lawns of Magdalen speckled with deer, shy yet friendly creatures

that embellish the retired and silent glades--the long-winding walk by

the Cherwell round the meadows where the fritillaries grow, the

time-worn dignity of the place with its graceful old-world architecture

and associations, are all in the finest keeping with the shy and silent

student who talked so little and thought so much, living among his books

in his college rooms, keeping his lamp alight half through the night, or

musing under the elms, where the little stream joins the greater. It is

dreadful to think that in all probability Addison thought the imposing

classicism of Queen’s, at which the cultivated scholar of to-day

shudders, much finer than Magdalen: for he had no opinion of Gothic, and

lamented the weakness, if not wickedness, of those mistaken ages which

wasted ornament upon such antiquated forms; but at least he loved his

retired promenade under the trees, with all its sweetness of primrose

and thrush in spring, and the wonderful yellow sunsets over the floods

in winter, and the pleasant illusions of the winding way. There the

stranger may realize still in the quiet of the cloistered shades how the

shy young student wandered in Addison’s Walk and pondered his verses,

and formed the delicate wealth of speech which was to distinguish him

from all his fellows. He spent about ten years in his college, first as

a student and then as a fellow, in the position which, perhaps, is more

ideal for a scholar than any other in Christendom. But the young man was

not much more enlightened than the other young men of his age,

notwithstanding his genius at Latin verses, and that still finer genius

which had not as yet come to utterance. He wrote an “Account of the

Greatest English Poets,” not much wiser than the school-boy essays of

our own day which set Lord Tennyson and Mr. Browning down in their right

places. Addison went further. He leaves out all mention of Shakspere,

and speaks of Cowley as a “mighty genius.” He describes “the spacious

times of great Elizabeth” as “a barbarous age,” amused by “Old Spenser”

with “long-spun allegories” and “dull morals,” which have lost all power

to charm an age of understanding. The youth, indeed, ran amuck among all

the greatest names till we shiver at his temerity. But he knew better

afterward; and, if he still condescended a little to his elders and

betters, learned to love and comprehend them too.

It would seem that he wavered for a time whether he should not take

orders, a step necessary to retain his fellowship, and dedicate himself

to the church, as was the wish of his father. It would have been

entirely suitable to him one cannot but think; to his meditative mood,

and shy temper, and high moral tone. He would have missed the humors of

town, the coffee-houses, and the wits, and the vagaries of the beaus and

belles; but with still a tenderer and more genial humor might have made

his villagers live before us, and found out all the amusing follies of

the knights and squires, which even in London town did not escape his

smiling observation. The manner in which the question was decided is

curiously characteristic of the age. That he was not himself inclined

that way seems probable, since he bids his muse farewell after the

fashion of the time, when this ending seemed imminent, with something

like regret, and it is said that he distrusted his own fitness for the

sacred office. At all events, the matter came to the ears of Charles

Montague, afterward Lord Halifax, himself an elegant scholar, and at

that time in office. Young Addison had addressed to him, on the occasion

of the Peace of Ryswick in 1697, one of those pieces of Latin verse for

which the young man was known among the scholars of his time. He

accompanied the gift with a letter couched in the hyperbole of the age,

deprecating his patron’s possible disapproval of “the noble subject

debased by my numbers,” and justifying himself by the poverty of the

verses already published on the same theme. “For my part,” he says, “I

never could prevail on myself to offer you a poem written in our native

tongue, since you yourself deter all others by your own Compositions

from such an Attempt, as much as you excite them by your Favour and

Humanity.” Montague returned this compliment by interfering in the young

poet’s concerns as soon as he heard of the danger that so promising a

youth might fall into the gulf of the church, and be lost to the other

kinds of work more useful to statesmen. He wrote to the authorities of

Magdalen begging that Addison might not be urged into holy orders, and

in the mean time took more active measures to secure him for the state.

Lord Somers had also received the dedication of some of Addison’s

verses, and was equally interested in the young man’s career. Between

them the two statesmen secured for him a pension of three hundred a

year, on no pretense of work to be done or duty fulfilled, but merely

that he might be able to prepare himself the better for the public

service, and be thus at hand and ready when his work was wanted. Public

opinion has risen up nowadays against any such arrangement, and much

slighter efforts at patronage would be denounced now over all England as

a job. And yet one wonders whether it was so profitless a proceeding as

we think it. Addison was worth more than the money to England. To be

sure, without the money he would still have been Addison; yet something,

no doubt, of the mellow sweetness of humanity in him was due to this

fostering of his youth.

He went abroad in 1699, and addressed himself in the first place to the

learning of French, which he did slowly at Blois, without apparently

gaining much enlightenment as to the state of France or the other

countries which he visited in his prolonged tour. No doubt, with his

pension and the income of his fellowship, Addison traveled like a young

man of fortune and fashion in those times of leisure, with excellent

introductions everywhere, seeing the best society, and the greatest men

both in rank and letters. Boileau admired his Latin verses as much as

the English statesmen did, and the young man went upon his way more and

more convinced that Latin verses were the highroad to fame. From France

he went to Italy, making a classical pilgrimage. “Throughout,” says Mr.

Leslie Stephen, quaintly, “if we are to judge by his narrative, he seems

to have considered the scenery as designed to illustrate his beloved

poets.” The much-debated uses of travel receive a new question from the

records of such a journey, pursued with the fullest leisure and under

the best auspices; and one wonders whether the man who hurries across a

continent in a few weeks, catching flying impressions, and forming crude

judgments, is, after all, much less advantaged than he who, oblivious of

all the human interests around him, discusses Rome, for instance, as if

it had no interest later than Martial or Silius Italicus--as if neither

Church, nor Pope, nor all the convulsions of the Middle Ages, nor

Crusader, nor Jesuit, had ever been. This extraordinary impoverishment

of the imagination was the fashion of the time, just as it has been the

fashion in other days to fix upon the vile records of the Renaissance as

the one thing interesting in the history of a noble country. According

to that fashion, however, Addison did everything that a young man of the

highest culture could be expected to do. He traced the footsteps of

Æneas, and remembered every spot on which a classical battle had been

fought, or an ode sung. He wrote an eloquent essay upon medals, and

lingered among the sculptures of the museums; and he picked up a subject

for a heroic tragedy from the suggestion of a foolish play which he saw

at a Venetian theater. With his head full of such themes, he had gone

out from Oxford, and with a deepened sense of their importance he came

back again. Though in after days he touches lightly with his satiric

dart the young man who can talk of nothing better on his return than how

“he had like to have been drowned at such a place; how he fell out of a

chaise at another”; yet in the hymn of praise with which he celebrates

his own return from all the dangers of foreign travel something like the

same record is made, though in a more imposing manner:

In foreign Realms and Lands remote,

Supported by thy care,

Thro’ burning Climes I passed unhurt,

And breath’d in Tainted Air.

Thy mercy sweetened every Soil,

Made every Region please,

The hoary Alpine Hills it warmed,

And smooth’d the Tyrrhene Seas.

[Illustration: JOSEPH ADDISON.

ENGRAVED BY T. JOHNSON, FROM MEZZOTINT BY JEAN SIMON, AFTER PAINTING

BY SIR GODFREY KNELLER.]

It is only the vulgarity of our modern imagination that makes us think

of hot water-pipes when the idea of warming the Alps is presented to our

profane minds. The burrowing of the railway that climbs the St. Gothard

may be taken as a large contribution to the carrying out of this

suggestion.

When Addison returned home after these four years of classical

wanderings, it was to prospects sadly overcast. King William had died a

year before, which had stopped his pension; Halifax was out of office,

and all the hopes of public life, for which he had been training

himself, seemed to drop as he came back. It is said that during the last

year he had charge of a pupil; but there is no proof of the statement,

nor has any pupil ever been identified by name. An offer was made to him

to accompany upon his travels a son of the Duke of Somerset, his

services to be paid by the present of a hundred guineas at the year’s

end, which did not seem to Addison an advantageous offer: but this,

which came to nothing, is the only authentic reference to any possible

“bear-leading” such as Thackeray refers to in “Esmond”; and fine as is

the sketch made by that kindred humorist, he seems to exaggerate at once

the poverty and the neglect into which for the moment Addison fell.

He returned to England in 1703, being then thirty-one, full of every

accomplishment, but with only his fellowship to depend upon, and the

uncertain chances of Jacob Tonson’s favor instead of the king’s. He is

said to have sunk, or rather risen, to a poor lodging in London, in the

Haymarket, up three pairs of stairs, which was indeed a sad change from

the importance of his position as a rich young Englishman making the

grand tour. But if he carried a disappointed or despondent heart to

those elevated quarters, he never made any moan on the subject, and it

is very likely enjoyed his freedom and the happy sense of being at home

like other young men; and he seems to have been at once advanced to the

membership of the Kit-Cat Club, which would supply him with the finest

of company, and a center for the life which otherwise must have appeared

as if it had come to a broken end. It was not long, however, that this

period of neglect was suffered to last, and once more the transaction

which elevated Addison to the sphere in which he passed the rest of his

life is admirably characteristic of the period, and alas! profoundly

unlike anything that could happen to a young man of genius now.

We will not return again to any bewildering discussion of the Whigs and

Tories of Queen Anne, but only say that Godolphin and Marlborough, those

“great twin brethren” of the state, had come into possession of England

at this great crisis, and that every means by which they could secure

the suffrages of both parties were doubly necessary, considering the

disappointment on one side that the policy of the country remained

unchanged, and on the other that it had to be carried out by Whig, not

Tory, hands. Nothing could be better adapted than the great victory of

Blenheim to arouse an outburst of national feeling, and sweep, for a

time at least, the punctilios of party away. The lord treasurer, who had

everything in his hands at home, while his great partner fought and

conquered abroad, was almost comically at a loss how to sound the

trumpet of warlike success so as to excite the country, and, if

possible, turn the head of the discontented. In one of Leopardi’s fables

there is an account of the tremendous catastrophe with which the world

was threatened when his illustrious excellency the Sun declined one

morning to rise and tread his old-world course around the earth for the

comfort of mankind. “Let her in her turn go round me if she wants my

warmth and light,” says the potentate--with great reason, it must be

allowed, since Copernicus was born, and everything in the celestial

spheres was about to be set right. But how to persuade the earth that

she must now undertake this circuit? Let a poet be found to do it is

the first suggestion. “La via più spedita è la più sicura è di trovare

un poeta ovvero un filosofo che persuada alla Terra di muoversi.”

Godolphin found himself in the same position as that in which the

luckless agencies of the Universe were left when the Sun struck work. A

poet!--but where to find a poet he knew not, being himself addicted to

other modes of exercise and entertainment. He went to Halifax to ask

where he should find what was wanted--a poet. But that statesman was coy

and held back. He could, indeed, produce the very man; but why should he

interfere to betray neglected merit and induce a man of genius to labor

for those who would leave him to perish in obscurity? Godolphin,

however, was ready to promise anything in the great necessity of the

case; and Halifax permitted himself to be persuaded to mention the name

which no doubt was bursting from his lips. He would not, however,

undertake to be the ambassador, but insisted that the real possessors of

power should ask in their own persons, and with immediate and

substantial proofs of their readiness to recompense the service they

demanded. That day, all blazing in gold lace and splendor, the coach of

the chancellor of the exchequer stopped before the little shop in the

Haymarket over which the young scholar had his airy abode: and that

great personage clambered up the long flights of stairs carrying with

him, very possibly, the patent of the appointment which was an earnest

of what the powers that were could do for Addison. This was how the

great poem of the “Campaign,” that illustrious composition, was brought

into being. Poems made to order seldom fulfil expectation, but in this

case there was no disappointment. Godolphin and England alike were

delighted, and Addison’s life and success were at once secured.

No one now, save as an illustration of history, would think of reading

the “Campaign,” though most readers are familiar with the famous simile

which dazzled a whole generation:

’T was there great Marlborough’s mighty soul was proved,

That in the shock of charging hosts unmoved,

Amidst confusion, horror, and despair

Examined all the dreadful scenes of war,

In powerful thought the field of death surveyed,

To fainting squadrons sent the timely aid,

Inspired repulsed battalions to engage,

And taught the doubtful battle where to rage.

So when an angel by Divine command

With rising tempest shakes a guilty land,

Such as of late o’er pale Britannia past,

Calm and serene he drives the furious blast;

And, pleased the Almighty’s orders to perform,

Rides in the whirlwind, and directs the storm.

Macaulay points out with much felicity how the fact of the Great

Storm--so called in English history--which had passed over England in

the previous year, and was yet full in the memory of all, gave strength

and meaning to this famous simile, which at once opened to Addison the

gates of fortune and of fame. Two years after he was promoted to be one

of the undersecretaries of state, and from that time languished no more

in the cold shade of obscurity where Halifax had upbraided the

Government for leaving him. He was not a man born to linger there. Shy

though he was, and little apt to put himself forward, this favorite of

the muses--to use the phraseology of his time--was also the favorite of

fortune. Everything that he touched throve with him. The gifts he

possessed were all especially adapted to the requirements of his time.

At no other period, perhaps, in history did the rulers of the country

bethink themselves of a poet as the auxiliary most necessary: and his

age was the only one that relished poetry of Addison’s kind.

This event brought more than mere prosperity to the fortunate young man.

If he had been already of note enough to belong to the Kit-Cat Club,

with what a blaze of modest glory would he now appear--not swelling in

self-conceit, like so many of the wits; not full of silent passion, like

the strange big Irish clergyman who pushed into the chattering company

in the coffee-house and astounded them with his masterful and arrogant

ways: but always modest--never heard at all in a large company, opening

out a little when the group dispersed, and an audience fit but few

gathered around him--but with one companion _half_ divine. The one

companion by and by became often that very same Irishman whose silent

prowl about the room in which he knew nobody had amused all the luckier

members. Swift found himself in a kind of coffee-house paradise when he

got Addison alone, and the two took their wine together, spending their

half-crowns according to the stranger’s thrifty record, and wishing for

no third. They were as unlike as could be conceived in every particular,

and yet what company they must have been, as they sat together, the wine

going a little too freely--though Swift was always temperate, and

Addison, notwithstanding that common peccadillo, the most irreproachable

of men! It was then that the “Travels in Italy” were published, while

still the fame of the “Campaign” was warm; and Addison gave his new

friend a copy inscribed to “Jonathan Swift, the most Agreeable

Companion, the Truest Friend, and the Greatest Genius of his Age.” What

quick understanding, what recognition as of two who had been born to

know each other! They were both in their prime--Swift thirty-eight,

Addison five years younger, still young enough to hope for everything

that can befall a man; the one fully entered upon the path of fortune,

the other surely so much nearer it for being thus received and welcomed.

Addison gave “his little senate laws” for many years in these convivial

meetings, and all who surrounded him adored him. But Swift was never

again so close a member of the little company. Politics, and the curious

part which the Irish parson took in them, separated him from the

consistent and moderate politician, who acted faithfully with his party,

and who was always true whoever might be false. But Swift held fast to

Addison so far at least as feeling was concerned. Over and over he

repeated the sentiment, that “if he had a mind to be king he would

hardly be refused.” Their meetings ceased, and all those outflowings of

wit and wisdom, and the talk long into the night which was the most

delightful thing in life; but for years after Swift still continued to

say that there was nothing his friend might not be if he would: that his

election was carried without a word of opposition when every other

member had to fight for his life, and that he might be king in Ireland,

or anywhere else, had he the mind. They were used to terms of large

applause in those days, but to no one else did it take this particular

form.

In 1708 Addison lost his post as under-secretary by a change of the

ministry, or rather of the minister, it being the habit in those days to

form a government piecemeal, a Whig here, a Tory there, as favor or

circumstances required, so that it was by no means needful that all

should go out or come in together. In fact, no sooner was the

under-secretary deprived of one place than he obtained another, that of

secretary to the lord lieutenant of Ireland, the same office, we

presume, as that which is now called chief secretary for Ireland, though

its seriousness and power are now so much greater. In those days there

was no Irish people to deal with, but only a very lively, contentious,

pushing, and place-hunting community--the Protestant English-Irish,

which, so far as literature and public knowledge go, has been accepted

as the type of the much darker and less simple character of the Celt.

The wild, mystic, morose, and often cruel nature of the native race,

with its gleams of poetry and dreams of fortune, has turned out a very

different thing to reckon with. No such problem was presented to the

statesmen of that time. The admixture of Irish blood would seem to go to

the head of the Saxon and endow him with a gaiety and sparkle which does

not exist either in one race or the other unmixed; and it was with the

society formed on this basis, the ascendant minority, contemptuous of

every possible power of the people so-called, yet far less unsympathetic

than the anxious politicians of to-day, that Addison had to deal. His

post was “very lucrative,” we are told--in fees and pieces of patronage,

no doubt, for the income was but £2000 a year--and he soon acquired an

even greater popularity on the one side of the channel than on the

other. Something amiable and conciliatory must have rayed out of the

man: otherwise it is curious to understand the popularity in brilliant

and talkative Dublin of a stranger whose chief efforts in conversation

were only to be accomplished _tête-a-tête_. But he had the foil of a

detestable and detested chief--Wharton, whose corrupt and brutal

character gave double acceptance to the secretary’s charm and goodness,

and the Tories contended with the Whigs, says Swift, which should speak

best of this favorite of fortune. “How can you think so meanly of a

kingdom,” he exclaims, “as not to be pleased that every creature in it

who hath one grain of worth has a veneration for you?” It is not often

that even in hyperbole such a thing can be said.

It was while Addison was in Ireland thus gathering golden opinions that

an event occurred which was of the utmost importance to his reputation,

so far especially as posterity was concerned. Among the little band of

friends over whom he held a kind of genial sway, and who acknowledged

his superiority with boundless devotion, was one who was more nearly his

equal than any other of the band; a friend of youth, one of those

erratic but generous natures whose love of excellence is almost

rapturous, though they are unable themselves to keep up to the high

level they approve. Steele can never be forgotten where Addison is

honored. He had been at Charterhouse and at Oxford along with his

friend, and no doubt it was a wonder among the reading men in their

earlier days how it was that the correct, the polished, the

irreproachable scholar of Magdalen, with his quiet ways, could put up

with that gay scapegrace who was perpetually in trouble. Such alliances,

however, have not been rare. The cheerful, careless Dick, full of

expedients, full of animal spirits, always amusing, friendly, generous

in his impulses, if unintentionally selfish in the constant breaches of

his better meaning, must have had a charm for the steadier and purer

nature which was formed with pulses more orderly. No doubt Steele’s

perpetual self-revelation, his unfolding of a hundred quips and cranks

of human nature, and unsuspicious rendering up of all his natural

anomalies and contradictions to the instinctive spectatorship of his

amused companion, helped to endear him to the humorist, who must have

laughed till he cried on many an occasion over poor Dick’s amazing

wisdoms and follies, without any breach of that indulgent affection

which between two men who have grown up together can rarely be said to

be mingled with anything so keen as contempt. Steele, it is evident,

must have known Addison “at home,” as school-boys say, or he could not

have made that little sketch of the household where brothers and sisters

were taught to be so loving to each other. While the young hero who had,

as in the favorite allegories of the time, chosen the right path, and

taken the steady hand of Minerva, instead of that more lovely one of

fatal Venus to guide him, was reaching the heights of applause and good

fortune, the unlucky youth who chose pleasure for his pursuit had gone

disastrously the other way, and fallen into all sorts of adventures,

extremely amusing for his friend to hear of, though he disapproved, and

no doubt very amusing to the actual actor in them, though he suffered.

But Addison was not a mere “spectator” so far as the friend of his youth

was concerned. When he began to rise there seems little reason to doubt

that he pulled Steele up with him, introducing him to the notice of the

fine people, who in those days might make the fortune of a gentlemanly

and clever adventurer, and that either by his own interest or that of

one of his powerful friends he procured him a place and started him in

public life. Steele had already floated into literature, and, whether it

is true or not that Addison helped him in the concoction of one play at

least, it is clear that he kept his purse and his heart well open to his

friend, now a man about town ruffling at the coffee-houses with the

best, and full of that energy and readiness which so often strike out

new ways of working, though it may require steadier heads to carry them

out.

It was, however, while Addison was in Ireland that Steele was moved by

the most important of these original impulses, an idea full, as it

proved, of merit and practical use. Journalism was then in its infancy.

A little “News Letter,” or “Flying Post”--a shabby broadsheet containing

the bulletin of a battle, a formal and brief notice of parliamentary

proceedings, an account of some monstrous birth, a child with two heads,

or that perennial gooseberry which has survived into our own time--and

an elaborate list of births, deaths, and marriages, was almost all that

existed in the way of public record. The post to which Steele had been

appointed was that of Gazetteer, which naturally led him to the

consideration of such matters: and among the crowd of projects which

worked together in his “barmy noddle,” there suddenly surged uppermost

the idea of a paper which should come out on the post days, the

Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays which were, up to that time, the only

days of communication with the country; a paper written after the fancy

of the time, in itself a letter from the wits and the knowing persons

in town, revealing not only the existing state of public affairs, but

all those exquisite particulars of society which have always been the

delight of country circles, and which were doubly sure to please at a

time when society was governed by talk, when all public criticism was

verbal, and the echoes of the wits in the coffee-houses were blown about

on all the breezes. Happy the Sir Harry who, sitting mum over his wine

in a corner, could hear these gentlemen discussing what Sunderland or

Somers had said, what my Lord Treasurer intended, or, more delightful,

the newest incident in the tragedy-comedy of the great duchess--how the

queen looked glumly at her over the card-table, or let her stand

unnoticed at a drawing-room; and still more deeply blest the parson who

had Mr. Addison pointed out to him, and heard the young Templars and

scholars pressing him with questions as to when his “Cato” was coming

out, or asking his opinion on a set of verses. Such worthies would go

back to the country full of these reflections from the world, and tell

how the gallants laughed at the mantua which was going out of fashion,

and made fun of the red heels which, perhaps, were just then appearing

at the Manor or the Moated Grange. Steele saw at once what a thing it

would be to convey these impressions at first hand in a privileged

“Tatler” direct to the houses of the gentry all over the country.

Perhaps he did not perceive at first what a still finer thing to have

them served up with the foaming chocolate or fragrant tea at every

breakfast in Mayfair.

It is an idea that has occurred to a great many heads since with less

success. In these latter days there have been many literary adventurers,

to whom the starting of a new paper has seemed an opening into El

Dorado. But the opening in the majority of cases does not prove a

practicable one--for, in fact, there is no longer any need of news; and

the concise little essays and elegant banterings of those critics of the

time have fallen out of date. News means in our day an elaborate

system, and instantaneous reports from all the world; and one London

newspaper--far more one of the gigantic journals proper to

America--contains as much matter as half a hundred “Tatlers.” One

wonders, if Addison’s genius, and the light hand of Steele, and Swift’s

tremendous and scathing humor could be conjured up again, whether such a

production, with its mingled thread of the finest sentiments and the

pettiest subjects, metaphysics and morals, and the “Eneid” and “Paradise

Lost,” and periwigs and petticoats, would find sufficient acceptance

with “the fair” and the wise to keep it afloat, or would still go up to

sages and fine ladies with their breakfast trays.

It was on the immediate foundation of one of Swift’s savage _jeux

d’esprits_ that the new undertaking was begun, a mystification which

greatly amused the wits then, but which does not, perhaps, appear

particularly delightful now. Swift had been seized by a freak of

mischief in respect to a certain Partridge, an astrologer, who made an

income out of the public by pretended revelations of the future, as is

still done, we believe, among those masses, beneath the ascertained

audience of literature, who spend their sixpences at Christmas upon

almanacs and year-books containing predictions of what is to happen. It

occurred to Swift in some merry moment to emulate and to doom the Merlin

of the day: and with the prodigious gravity which characterizes his

greatest jests he wrote “Predictions for the year 1708,” in which, among

many other things, he announced that he had consulted the stars on

behalf of Partridge, and had ascertained that the wizard would certainly

die on March 29, at eleven o’clock at night, of a raging fever. The

reader will probably remember that the jest was kept up, and that,

notwithstanding Partridge’s protest that he was not dead at all, Isaac

Bickerstaff insisted on asserting that his prophecy had been fulfilled,

to the grave confusion of various serious affairs, and the

inextinguishable laughter of the wits. It was not a pretty jest, but it

brought into being a visionary critic of public matters, a new personage

in the literary world, in whom other wits saw capabilities. Steele in

particular perceived that Isaac Bickerstaff was just the personality he

wanted, and therewith proceeded to make of that shadowy being the Mentor

of the time. The design was excellent, the immediate execution cleverly

adapted to seize the interest of the public, which had been already

amused and mystified under that name. Mr. Isaac Bickerstaff presented

his readers with the first number of his journal without charge. “I

earnestly desire,” he says, “all persons, without distinction, to take

it in for the present _gratis_, and hereafter at the price of one penny,

forbidding all hawkers to take more for it at their peril.” The idea

took the town. No doubt there would be many an allusion to this and that

which the wits would guess at, and which would to them have a double

meaning; but, to do the “Tatler” justice, the kind of gossip which fills

the so-called society newspapers in our day was unknown to the witty

gentlemen who sometimes satirize a ruffle or a shoe-tie, but never

personally a woman. The types of fine ladies who flutter through his

pages could never raise a pang in any individual bosom; and when he

addressed himself to the reform of the theater, to the difficult duty of

checking play and discouraging duels, he had all the well-thinking on

his side.

Steele had gone on for some numbers before his new venture attracted the

attention of Addison. He recognized whose the hand was from a classical

criticism in the sixth number which he had himself made to Steele; and

he must have been pleased with the idea, since he soon after appears as

a coadjutor, sending his contributions from the Secretary’s office in

Dublin. There has been a great and prolonged controversy upon the

respective merits of these two friends: some, and first among them

Macaulay, will have it that Addison had all the merit of the

publication. “Almost everything good in the ‘Tatler’ was his,” says the

historian. But there are many who, despite Macaulay’s great authority,

find a certain difficulty in distinguishing Addison from Steele and

Steele from Addison, and are inclined to find the latter writer as

entertaining and as gifted as the former. No question could be more

difficult to settle. As we glance over the little gray volumes which

bring back to us dimly the effect which the little broadsheet must have

had when it appeared day by day, there is no doubt that the eye is

oftenest caught by something which, when we look again, proves to be

from Addison’s hand. We open, it is by chance, and yet not altogether by

chance, upon Tom Folio and his humors; upon the poor poet and his

verses; upon some group of shabby heroes, or stumbling procession of

country gentlemen which there is no mistaking. But on the other hand it

is Steele who gives us that family picture, which reads like the Vicar

of Wakefield, yet with a more tender touch (for Mrs. Primrose was never

her husband’s equal), showing us the good woman among her family, the

husband half distracted with the fear of losing her, the wife for his

sake smiling her paleness away. Indeed, we think, in these early essays

at least, it would be a mistake for the critic to risk his reputation on

the superiority of Addison. He set up no higher standard than that which

his friend had raised, but fell into the same humor, adding his

contribution of social pictures with less force of moral generally, and

more delicacy of workmanship, but no remarkable preëminence. The

character of the publication changed gradually as the great new pen came

into it; but whether by Addison’s influence or by the mere action of

time, and a sense of what suited the audience he had obtained--which a

soul so sympathetic as Steele’s would naturally divine with

readiness--no one can tell. Gradually the news which at first had

regularly filled a column dropped away. It had been, no doubt, well

authenticated news, the freshest and best, as it came from the

authorized hand of the Gazetteer; but either Steele got tired of

supplying it, or a sense of the inexpediency of publishing anything

which might displease his patrons and the government, convinced him that

it was unnecessary. It is scarcely possible, either, to tell why the

“Tatler” came to an end. Mr. Austin Dobson, in his recent life of

Steele, gives sundry reasons which do not seem, however, of any

particular weight. Steele’s own account is that he had become known, and

his warnings and lessons were thus made of no avail:

I considered [he says] that severity of manners was absolutely

necessary to him who would censure others, and for that reason and

that only chose to talk in a mask. I shall not carry my humility so

far as to call myself a vicious man, but at the same time confess

my life is at best but pardonable. And with no greater character

than this a man could make an indifferent progress in attacking

prevailing and fashionable vices, which Mr. Bickerstaff has done

with a freedom of spirit that would have lost both its beauty and

efficacy had it been pretended to by Mr. Steele.

This reason is, however,--though pretty and just enough had its writer

renounced the trade,--a somewhat fantastic one when we reflect that

though the “Tatler” ended in January, 1711, the “Spectator” began in

March of the same year. The one died only to be replaced by the other.

It is said that Addison did not know of his friend’s intention to cut

the “Tatler” short, and it was he who was the chief agent in beginning

the “Spectator.” Therefore it may have been that the breach was but an

impatience of Steele’s, which his slow and less impulsive and more

constant comrade could not permanently consent to. No doubt Addison had

by this time learned the advantage of such a mode of utterance, and felt

how entirely it suited his own manner of work and constitution of mind.

The fictitious person of Isaac Bickerstaff was relinquished in the new

series: it no longer assumed to give any news. Its contents were less

varied, consisting generally of a single essay, and, notwithstanding the

impression which the casual reader often has, and which some critics

have largely dwelt upon, that the comments of this critic are upon the

merest vanities of the time, the hoops, the gold-lace, the snuff-boxes,

and patches of the period, it is astonishing how little space is

actually taken up with these lighter details, and how many graver

questions, how many fine sentiments and delicate situations, afford the

moralist occasion for those remarks which he makes in the most beautiful

and picturesque English to the edification of all the generations. There

is, perhaps, no book which is so characteristic of an epoch in history,

and none which gives so clear a conception of the English world of the

time. We sit and look on, always amused, often instructed, while the

delicate panorama unfolds before us--and see everything pass, the fine

coaches, the gentlemen on foot, the parsons in their gowns, the young

Templars jesting in the doorways: but always with the little monologue

going on, which accompanies the movement, and runs off into a hundred

byways of thought, sometimes serious, sometimes gay, often with no

particular connection with the many-colored streams of passers-by, yet

never obscuring our sight of them as they come and go. There is,

perhaps, a noisy group at the door while Mr. Spectator talks, with their

wigs in the last fashion, and their clouded canes hung to a button,

while they discourse. In one corner there are some two or three grave

gentlemen putting their heads together over the latest news; and in

another the young fellows over their wine eager in discussion of Mrs.

Oldfield and Mrs. Bracegirdle at the theater, or of Chloe and Clarissa,

the reigning beauties of society; or perhaps it is a poet, poor Ned

Softly, as the case may be, who is reading his last sonnet to his

mistress’s eyebrow, amid the laughing commentaries or the ridicule of

his companions. What is Mr. Spectator talking of all the while? His

discourse does not prevent us hearing the impertinences of the others.

Perhaps he is talking of honest love, a favorite theme of his, at which

the wits do not dare to laugh in his presence,--or he is telling one of

his fables, to which everybody in the midst of his levity or his

business gives half an ear at least; or by a caprice he has turned aside

to metaphysics, and is discussing the processes of the mind, and how “no

thought can be beautiful that is not just”; how “’t is a property of

the heart of man to be diffusive, its kind wishes spread abroad over the

face of the creation,” and such like; not to speak of graver subjects

still to which he will direct our minds on Saturdays, perhaps to prepare

us for Sunday, when he is silent. Or he will read aloud a letter from

some whimsical correspondent, which the wits will pause to hear, for

gossip is ever sweet, but which before they know lands them in a case of

hardship or trouble which touches their consciences and rouses their

pity. Sometimes the hum of life will stop altogether and even Softly put

his verses in his pocket to listen: and on the brink of tears the fine

gentlemen, and we too along with them, incontinently burst out

a-laughing at some touch that no one expected. But whether we laugh or

cry, or are shamed in our levity, or diverted in our seriousness,

outside the windows the crowd is always streaming on. There is no

separating the “Spectator” from the lively, crowded, troublous, and

perplexing scenes upon which all his reflections are made. The young

lady looking out of her coach--at sight of whom all the young fellows

doff their hats and make their comments, how much her fortune is, who is

in pursuit of her, or if any mud has yet been flung upon her--shows to

the philosopher a face disturbed with all the puzzles of an existence

which nobody will allow her to take seriously. The poor wit who

endeavors so wistfully to amuse my lord in

[Illustration: SIDNEY, EARL OF GODOLPHIN.

ENGRAVED BY PETER AITKEN, FROM MEZZOTINT BY JOHN SMITH, IN BRITISH

MUSEUM. PAINTED BY SIR GODFREY KNELLER.]

his dullness betrays to that critic not so much the soul of a toady, as

that of the anxious father with children that starve at home. His young

fellows, though they look so careless, have their troubles too. Wherever

that keen eye turns another group shows through the crowd, or a lonely

whimsical figure as distinct as if there was no one but he. Save perhaps

on those Saturdays when he plays his soft accompaniment to Milton’s

grand, sonorous organ he is never abstracted or retired from men: on all

other occasions, though he is thinking of a great deal else, and has his

mind absorbed in other themes, this busy world of which he forms a part

is always with him. Sometimes he permits us to see him over their heads

only, seated on his familiar bench at his table, from whence he delivers

his homilies, with all these figures moving and re-moving on the busy

pavement in the foreground; sometimes we are admitted inside, and watch

them through open door and window by his side: but he is never to be

parted from the society in which he finds his models, his subjects, his

audience. Like other men he takes it for granted that the fashion of his

contemporaries is to go on forever. For posterity that smiling, keen

observer takes no thought.

But of all things else that Addison has done there remains one

preëminent figure which is his chief claim to immortality. The

“Campaign” has disappeared out of literature; “Cato” is known only by a

few well-known lines; the “Spectator” itself, though a work which no

gentleman’s library can be without, dwells generally in dignified

retirement there, and is seldom seen on any table but the student’s,

though we are all supposed to be familiar with it: but Sir Roger de

Coverley is the familiar friend of most people who have read anything at

all, and the acquaintance by sight, if we may so speak, of everybody.

There is no form better known in all literature. His simple rustic

state, his modest sense of his own importance, his kind and genial

patronage of the younger world, which would laugh at him if it were not

overawed by his modesty and goodness, and which still sniggers in its

sleeve at all those kind, ridiculous ways of his as he walks about in

London, taken in on all sides, with his hand always in his purse and his

heart in its right place, are always familiar and delightful. We learn

with a kind of shock that it was Steele who first introduced this

perfect gentleman to the world, and can only hope that it was Addison’s

idea from the first, and that he did not merely snatch out of his

friend’s hands and appropriate a conception so entirely according to his

own heart. To Steele, too, we are indebted for some pretty scenes in the

brief history: for Will the Huntsman’s wooing, which is the most

delicate little enamel, and for the knight’s own love-making, which,

however, is pushed a little too near absurdity. But it is Addison who

leads him forth among his country neighbors, and to the assizes, and

meets the gipsies with him, and brings him up to town, carrying him to

Westminster and to Spring Gardens, in the wherry with the one-legged

waterman, and to the play. The delightful gentleman is never finer than

in this latter scene. He has to be conveyed in his coach, attended by

all his servants, armed with “good oaken plants,” and Captain Sentry in

the sword he had worn at Steinkirk, for fear of the Mohocks, those

brutal disturbers of the public peace whom Addison justly feels it would

be unbecoming to bring within sight of his noble old knight.

As soon as the house was full and the candles lighted my old friend

stood up and looked about him with that pleasure which a mind

seasoned with humanity naturally feels in itself at the sight of a

multitude of people who seem pleased with one another, and partake

of the same common entertainment. I could not but fancy to myself

as the old man stood up in the middle of the pit that he made a

very proper centre to a tragick Audience. Upon the entering of

Pyrrhus the Knight told me that he did not believe the King of

France had a better strut. I was indeed very attentive to my old

friend’s remarks because I looked upon them as a piece of natural

criticism and was well pleased to hear him, at the conclusion of

almost every scene, telling me that he could not imagine how the

play would end; one while he appeared much concerned for

Andromache, and a little while after as much for Hermione; and was

extremely puzzled to know what would become of Pyrrhus. When Sir

Roger saw Andromache’s obstinate refusal to her lover’s

importunities, he whispered me in the ear that he was sure she

would never have him; to which he added with a more than ordinary

vehemence, “You can’t imagine, sir, what ’t is to have to do with a

widow.” Upon Pyrrhus, his threatening afterwards to leave her, the

Knight shook his head and murmured, “Ay! do it if you can.” This

part dwelt so much upon my friend’s imagination that at the close

of the third act, as I was thinking of something else, he whispered

in my ear, “These widows, sir, are the most perverse creatures in

the world. But pray,” says he, “you that are a critick, is this

play according to your dramatick rules, as you call them? Should

your People in Tragedy always talk to be understood? Why, there is

not a single sentence in this play that I do not know the meaning

of!”

The fourth act very luckily began before I had time to give the old

gentleman an answer. “Well,” says the Knight, sitting down with

great satisfaction, “I suppose we are now to see Hector’s Ghost?”

He then renewed his attention, and from time to time fell

a-praising the widow. He made, indeed, a little mistake as to one

of her pages, whom, at his first entering, he took for Astyanax;

but we quickly set him right in that particular, though at the same

time he owned he should have been very glad to see the little boy,

who, says he, must needs be a very fine child by the account that

is given of him.

Could anything be more delightful than this genial picture? We have all

met in later years a certain Colonel Newcome, who is very like Sir

Roger, one of his descendants, though he died a bachelor. But the

Worcestershire knight was the first of his lineage, and few are the

gifted hands who have succeeded in framing men after his model. Those

little follies which are so dear to us, the good faith which makes the

young men laugh, yet feel ashamed of themselves for laughing, and all

the circumstances of that stately simple life which are so different

from anything we know, yet so lifelike and genuine, have grown into the

imagination of the after-generations. We seem to know Sir Roger from

our cradle, though we may never even have read the few chapters of his

history. This is the one infallible distinction of genius above all

commoner endowments. Of all the actors in that stirring time Sir Roger

remains the most living and real. The queen and her court are no more

than shadows moving across the historic stage. Halifax, and Somers, and

Harley, and even the great Bolingbroke, what are they to us? Figures

confused and uncertain, that appear and disappear in one combination or

another, so that our head aches in the effort to follow, to identify, to

make sure what the intrigues and the complications mean. But we have no

difficulty in recollecting all about Sir Roger. We would not have the

old man mocked at any more than Mr. Addison would, but kiss his kind old

hand as we smile at those little foibles which are all ingratiating and

delightful. In that generation, with all its wars and successes, there

was, perhaps, no such gain as Sir Roger. Marlborough’s victories made

England feared and respected, but cost the country countless treasure,

and gave her little advantage; the good knight cost nobody anything, and

made all the world the richer. He is one of those inhabitants who never

grow old or pass away, and he gives us proof undeniable that when we

speak of a corrupt and depraved age, as we have reason to do, we have

still nobler reason for believing--as the despairing prophet was taught

by God himself in far older times: that however dark might be the

prospect there were still seven thousand men in Israel who had never

bowed the knee to Baal--what we learn over again, thank Heaven! from

shining example everywhere, that there are always surviving the seed of

the just, the salt of the earth, by whose silent agency, and pure love,

and honest truth, life is made practicable and the world rolls on.

Sir Roger is the great point of the “Spectator,” as the “Spectator” is

the truest history of the time. It contains, however, beside, much that

is admirable and entertaining, as well as a good deal that was

temporary, and is now beyond the fashion of our understanding, or, at

least, of our appreciation. Addison’s criticism, or rather exposition,

of Milton, which no doubt taught his age a far more general regard for

that great poet, is well enough known, but yet not nearly so well known

as Sir Roger, and not necessary now as it was then. When these

criticisms began it is evident that Addison, as well as his friend

Steele, had made a great advance from the time when the young Oxford

scholar left Shakspere out of his reckoning altogether, and considered

“Old Spenser” only fit to amuse a barbarous age. Though the balance of

things had not been redressed throughout the English world, yet these

scholars had come to perceive that the greatness of their predecessors

had been, perhaps, a little mixed up; that Cowley was not so mighty a

genius as their boyhood believed, and that there were figures as of gods

behind which it was shame to have misconceived. Throughout all, the

meaning was wholesome, and tended toward the elevation of the time.

Steele had it specially at heart to discourage gambling, and to put down

the hateful tyranny of the duel. And both writers used all their powers

to improve and raise the character of theatrical representations,

keeping a watch not only over the plays that were performed, but also

over the manners of the audience, who crowded the stage so that the

players could scarcely be seen, and played cards in their boxes, and

used the public entertainment for their own private quarrels and

assignations. It is curious, too, to note how these authorities regarded

the opera, the new form of amusement which had pushed its way, against

all the prejudices of the English, into fashion. Addison himself,

indeed, wrote an opera which was not successful; but he did not love

that new-fangled entertainment. He devotes two or three numbers to the

description of it, for, says he, “There is no question our grandchildren

will be very anxious to know the reason why their forefathers used to

sit together like an audience of foreigners in their own country, and to

hear whole plays acted before them in a tongue which they did not

understand.” It is evident by this that his age had not reached to the

further sublimity of believing that when the utterance is musical there

is no need of understanding at all. “One scarce knows how to be

serious,” he adds, “in the confutation of an absurdity that shows itself

at the first sight. It does not want any great measure of sense to see

the ridicule of this monstrous practice. If the Italians have a genius

for music above the English, the English have a genius for other

performances of a much higher nature, and capable of giving the mind a

much nobler entertainment.” We wonder if our “Spectator” would be less

affronted now by the constant adaptation of equivocal French plays to

the English stage, than by the anomaly of a representation given in

language which nobody understood? He would, perhaps, feel it to be an

advantage often not to understand, and doubt whether the English after

all “have a genius for other performances of a much higher nature.”

We are not informed that the “Tatler” and “Spectator,” the real

foundation of his fame, gave Addison any help in his career. That was

assured by the “Campaign.” He received his first post, that of “a

commissionership with £200 a year,” at once, in the end of 1704: his

pension having ceased at King William’s death in 1702: the interval is

not a very long one, and during this time he had retained his college

fellowship. In 1706 he became under-secretary. In 1708, his chief, Lord

Sunderland, was dismissed, and Addison along with him; but the latter

stepped immediately into the Irish secretaryship, which was worth £2000

a year. Two years afterward occurred the political convulsions brought

about by the trial of Sacheverell and the intrigues of the back stairs,

which brought Harley into power, and Addison with his leaders was once

more out of office; but in 1714 they came triumphantly back, and he rose

to the height of political elevation as secretary of state with a seat

in the Cabinet. Though he did not retain this position long on account

of his failing health, he retired on a pension of £1500 a year. In 1711,

at a period when he was supposed to be at a low ebb of fortune, in the

cold shade of political opposition, he was able to buy the estate of

Bilton, near Rugby, for which he paid £10,000--which is not bad for a

moment of misfortune. Altogether Addison was provided for as the

deserving and honorable hero--the wise youth of one of his own

allegories, the good apprentice--should be, by poetic justice, but is

not always in the experience of the world. The success of the

“Spectator,” however, which was more his than Steele’s (as the “Tatler”

had been much more Steele’s than Addison’s), was apparently very

considerable; Addison himself says, in an early number, that it had

reached the circulation of three thousand copies a day. On a special

occasion fourteen thousand copies are spoken of; and the passing of the

Stamp Act, which destroyed many of the weaker publications of the time,

did comparatively little harm to the “Spectator,” which doubled its

price without much diminishing its popularity. It had also what no other

daily, and very few periodicals of any time, ever reach, the advantage

of a permanent issue afterward, in a succession of volumes, of which the

first edition seems to have reached an issue of ten thousand copies.

Fortunate writers! pleasant public! The “Times,” and the rest of our

great newspapers, boast a circulation beyond that which the eighteenth

century could have dreamed of; and thirty years ago it was the fashion

among public orators more indebted to genius than education--Mr. Cobden

for one, and, we think, Mr. John Bright--to say that the leading

articles of that day were more than equal to Thucydides and all the

other writers of whom classical scholars made their boast. But we

wonder how the “Times” leaders would read collected into a volume,

against those little dingy books (tobacco paper, as a contemporary says)

with all their wisdom and their wit. “I will not meddle with the

‘Spectator,’” says Swift to Stella, “let him _fair sex_ it to the

world’s end.” And so he has, at least so far as the world has yet

advanced toward that undesirable conclusion.

The “Spectator” ended with the year 1712, having existed less than two

years. Whether the authors had found their audience beginning to fail,

or their inspiration, or had considered it wise (as is most likely) to

forestall the possibility of either catastrophe, we are not informed.

Almost immediately after the conclusion of this greatest undertaking of

his life, Addison plunged into what probably appeared to the weakness of

contemporary vision a much greater undertaking, the production of his

tragedy “Cato,” which made a commotion in town such as few plays did

even at that period. It was partly as a political movement, to stir up

the patriotism and love of liberty which were supposed to be failing

under the dominion of the Tories, suspected of all manner of evil

designs, that his Whig friends urged Addison to bring out the great play

which had been simmering in his brain since his travels, and which had

no doubt been read in detached acts and pieces of declamation to all his

literary friends. These friends had received several additions in the

mean time, especially in the person of Pope, who was still young enough

to be proud of Addison’s notice, yet remarkable enough to be intrusted

with the composition of a prologue to the great man’s work. Swift,

notwithstanding the coldness which had ensued between them on his change

of politics, was still sufficiently in Addison’s friendship to be

present at a rehearsal, and the whole town on both sides was moved with

excitement and expectation. On the first night, “our house,” says

Cibber, “was in a manner invested and entrance demanded by twelve

o’clock at noon; and before one it was not wide enough for many who came

too late for their places.” The following account of its reception is

given in a letter by Pope:

The numerous and violent claps of the Whig party on the one side of

the theatre were echoed back by the Tories on the other; while the

author sweated behind the scenes with concern to find their

applause proceeding more from the hand than the head. This was the

case, too, with the Prologue-writer, who was clapped into a sound

Whig at the end of every two lines. I believe you have heard that,

after all the applause of the opposite faction, my lord Bolingbroke

sent for Booth, who played _Cato_, into the box between one of the

acts, and presented him with fifty guineas, in acknowledgment, as

he expressed it, for defending the cause of liberty so well against

a perpetual dictator. The Whigs are unwilling to be distanced this

way, and therefore design a present to the same _Cato_ very

speedily.

Bolingbroke’s speech about a perpetual dictator was a gibe which

everybody understood, directed against the devotion of the Whigs to

Marlborough, and was quite honest warfare; but what, we wonder, would

Mr. Irving think if Mr. Gladstone sent for him to his box, and

“presented him with fifty guineas”? The actor who considers himself one

of the most distinguished members of good society had not been thought

of in those days. One wonders, too, in passing, where a fine gentleman

kept his money, and whether the purse of the stage, which is always

ready to be flung to a deserving object, was a reality in the days of

Queen Anne? Fifty guineas is a somewhat heavy charge for the pocket;

however, perhaps, Lord Bolingbroke had come specially provided, or he

had a secretary handy who did not mind the bulging of his coat.

Of this great tragedy, which turned the head of London, and which the

two great political parties vied with each other in applauding, there

are but a few lines virtually existing nowadays. To be sure, it is in

print with the rest of Addison’s works, to be read by whosoever will;

but very few avail themselves of that privilege.

’T is not in mortals to command success.

But we ’ll do more, Sempronius; we ’ll deserve it

is the chief relic, and that of a very prosaic common sense and familiar

kind, which the great tragedy has left us. “Plato, thou reasonest well!”

is another quotation, which is, perhaps, more frequently used in a

jocular than serious sense. But for these scraps _Cato_ is as dead as

most of his contemporaries; and we do not even remember the great

tragedy when we hear the name of its author. We think, indeed, only of

the “Spectator” if we have read a little in the literature of the

period; but if we have no special tastes and studies that way, of Sir

Roger de Coverley alone; for Sir Roger is Addison’s gift to his country

and the world, the creation by which his name will always be known.

The end of a man’s life is seldom so interesting as its beginning. After

he has achieved all of which he is capable, our interest is more usually

a sad than a cheerful one. Addison made in 1716 what seems to have been

an ambitious marriage, though he was not the man, one would think, to

care for the rank which gave his wife always a distinct personality and

another name than his. The Countess of Warwick, however, was, it would

appear, a beautiful woman. She had the charge of a troublesome boy, for

whom, no doubt, she would be eager to have the advice of such a man as

Mr. Addison, whom all the world respected and admired. The little house

at Chelsea (the house was called Sandford Manor House, and was some

years ago figured against its present doleful background of gasometers,

in the _Century_) which that statesman had acquired, and where he

delighted to withdraw from the noise and contention of town, was within

reach through the fields of Holland House, the residence of Lady

Warwick. They had known each other for years, and Addison had written

exquisite little letters to the boy-earl--no doubt with intentions upon

the heart of the mother, to which, as is well known, that method is a

very successful way--long before. It was, Dr. Johnson says, a long and

anxious courtship; and perhaps--who knows?--when Steele performed that

picture of the beloved knight sitting silent before the two fine ladies

and unable to articulate the desires of his honest heart, it was some

similar performance of the shy man of genius who found utterance with

such difficulty, which was in Dick’s mind. But perhaps Addison grew

bolder when he was a secretary of state. The great Mr. Addison, the

delightful “Spectator,” the author of “Cato,” the man whose praises were

in everybody’s mouth, and whom Whig and Tory delighted to honor, was no

insignificant fine gentleman for a lady of rank to stoop to; and finally

those evening walks over the fields, and pleasant rural encounters--for

Chelsea was the country in those days, and Holland House quite retired

among all the songsters of the grove, and out of town--came to a

legitimate conclusion. Addison was forty, and her ladyship had been a

widow for fifteen years; but there is no reason for concluding that

there was no romance in the wedding, which, however, is always a nervous

sort of business under such circumstances. There was the boy, too, to be

taken into account, who evidently was not a nice boy, but a tale-bearer,

who did not love his mother’s faithful lover, and made mischief when he

could. There seems no evidence, however, that the marriage was unhappy,

beyond a malicious note of Pope’s, which all the commentators have

enlarged. The poor women who have the misfortune to be married to men of

genius, fare badly at the hands of the critics. There seems no warrant

whatever for Thackeray’s picture of the vulgar vixen whom he calls Mrs.

Steele. Steele’s letters exist, but not those of poor Prue, who was so

sadly tried in her husband; and so that suffering woman had to suffer

over again in her reputation after her life’s trouble is over. It is

very unfair to the poor women who have left no champions behind.

The end of our “Spectator’s” life was, however, clouded with more than

one unfortunate quarrel, the greatest of which has left its sting behind

to quiver in Addison’s name as long as Pope and he are known. It is

neither necessary nor edifying to enter at length into the bitternesses

of the past. Pope fancied himself aggrieved in various ways by the man

who had warmly acknowledged his youthful merits, and received him

(though so much his senior in years and fame) on a footing of equality,

and who all through never spoke an ill-natured word of the waspish

little poet. He believed, or persuaded himself to believe, in his

malignant little soul that Addison was jealous of his greatness, and had

set up Tickell to rival him in the translation of Homer; and he

believed, or pretended to believe, on the supposed authority of young

Warwick, that Addison had hired a vulgar critic to attack him. There

seems not the slightest reason to believe that either of these

grievances was real. Tickell had written simultaneously a translation,

which Addison had read and corrected, on account of which he courteously

declined to read Pope’s translation of the same, telling him the reason,

but accepting the office of critic to the second part of Pope’s work. He

had himself, according to the poet’s brag, accepted Pope’s corrections

of “Cato,” leaving “not a word unchanged that I objected to”; and he was

not moved to any retaliation by Pope’s attack upon him, but continued

serenely to praise his envious little assailant with a magnanimity which

is wonderful if he had seen the brilliant and pitiless picture so

cunningly drawn within the lines of nature, with every feature

travestied so near the real, that even Addison’s most faithful partizan

has to pause with alarm lest the wicked thing so near the truth might

perhaps be true. We hesitate to add to the serene and gentle story of

our man of letters this embittered utterance of spite and malice and

genius. The lines are sufficiently well known.

Addison did not end his periodical work with the “Spectator.” He took up

that familiar character once again for a short time, long enough to

produce an additional volume,--the eighth,--in which he had no longer

the help of his old vivacious companion. The series is full of fine

things, but we are not sure, though Macaulay thinks otherwise, that we

do not a little miss the light and shade which Steele helped to supply.

And other publications followed. Steele himself set up the “Guardian,”

in which Addison had little share; and various others after that in

which he had no share at all. And Addison himself had a “Freeholder,” in

which he said some notable things; but these are all dead and gone, like

so much of the contemporary furnishings of the age. Students find and

read them in the old, collected editions; but life and recollection have

gone out of them. Perhaps his own time even had by then got as much as

it could enjoy and digest out of Addison. We, at least, have done so

after these hundred and fifty years, and are capable of no more.

He died in 1719, at the early age of forty-seven. The story goes that he

sent for young Warwick when he was on his death-bed, that he might see

how a Christian could die: which we should say was unlike Addison, save

for the reason that he had been drawing morals all his life, and might

at that supreme moment be beyond seeing the ridicule of a last

exhibition. Perhaps it was in reality a message of charity and

forgiveness to the wayward boy, who, there seems reason to believe, was

not fond of his stepfather. And thus the great writer glided gently out

of a life in which he had more honor than falls to the lot of most men,

and, let us hope, a great deal of mild satisfaction and pleasure.

Thackeray has a little scoff at him as a man without passion. “I doubt

until after his marriage whether he ever lost his night’s rest or his

day’s tranquillity about any woman in his life.” Neither, perhaps, did

Sir Roger, whose forty years’ love-making and unrequited affection was a

sentimental luxury of the most delicate kind, as his maker intended it

to be. But Addison’s fine and meditative genius had no need of passion.

He is the “Spectator” of humankind. He had little temptation in his own

calm nature to descend into the arena; the honors of the fight came to

him somehow without any soil of the actual engagement. No smoke of

gunpowder is about his laurels, no spot of blood upon his sword. He

looks on at the others fighting, always with a nod of encouragement for

the man of honor and virtue, of keen scorn for the selfish and

evil-minded, of pity for the fallen. But it is not his part to fight. He

makes no pretense of any inclination that way. He is the looker-on; and,

as such, more valuable than a thousand men-at-arms.

He died at Holland House, that fine historical mansion sacred to the

wits of a later age, but which in Addison’s time contained no tyrannical

tribunal of literary patronage, whatever else there might be there which

was contrary to peace. His life and death there make an association more

touching, and at the same time of sweeter meaning, than the

after-struggles of the Whig men of letters for Lady Holland’s arbitrary

favors. The great humorist died in the middle of summer, in June, 1719,

and was carried from that leafy retirement to the Jerusalem Chamber,

where he lay in state: why, it seems difficult to understand--but his

position had in it a kind of gentle royalty unlike that of other men. He

was buried at Westminster by night, the wonderful solemn arches over the

funeral party, half seen by the wavering lights, going off into vistas

of mysterious gloom, echoing with the hymns of the choir, who sang him

to his rest. Did they sing, one wonders, one of those verses which had

been the most intimate utterance of his life: that great hymn of

creation, scarcely inferior to the angelic murmurings of medieval

Francis in his cell at Assisi?--

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.

Or one of those humble and more fervent human utterances of faith and

humility and thanksgiving?--

Through every period of my life,

Thy goodness I’ll pursue,

And after death, in distant worlds,

The glorious theme renew.

When nature fails, and day and night

Divide thy works no more,

My ever-grateful heart, O Lord,

Thy mercy shall adore.

Through all eternity to thee

A joyful song I’ll raise,

But, oh! eternity’s too short

To utter all thy praise.

With such a soft, yet rapturous, strain the lofty arches and half-seen

aisles, perhaps with a summer moon looking in, taking up the wondrous

tale, might have echoed over Addison--the gentlest soul of all those

noble comrades who lie together awaiting the restitution of all

things--when our great humorist, our mildest kind “Spectator,” all his

comments over, was laid in the best resting-place England can give to

those whom she loves.