Joseph Addison, 1672–1719. Born, at Milston, Wilts, 1 May 1672. Educated at private schools at Amesbury and Salisbury; at Lichfield School, 1683; at Charterhouse [1685–87?]; to Queen’s Coll., Oxford, 1687. Demyship at Magdalen Coll., 1689; B.A., 6 May 1691; M.A., 14 Feb. 1693; Fellowship, 1697–1711. Crown Pension of £300 a year, 1697. To France, autumn of 1699; lived in Blois and Paris (1700). Tour in Italy, winter of 1700–01. At Geneva, 1701; Vienna, 1702. In Germany, Holland, and return to England, 1703. Member of Kitcat Club. Commissioned to write poem to celebrate Battle of Blenheim, 1704; appointed to Under-Secretaryship of State, 1706. With Halifax on Mission to Hanover, 1707. M.P. for Lostwithiel, Nov. 1708; election quashed, Dec. 1709. Sec. to Lord Lieut. of Ireland, and Keeper of Records, 1709. Contributed to Steele’s “Tatler,” 1709–10. M.P. for Malmesbury, 1710. Published “Whig Examiner” (5 nos.), Sept.–Oct. 1710. Bought estate of Bilton in Warwickshire, 1711. “Spectator” published daily, 1 March 1711 to Dec. 1712. “Cato” produced at Drury Lane, 14 April 1713. Contrib. to “The Guardian,” May–Sept. 1713; to Steele’s “Lover,” and to a revived “Spectator,” June–Sept. 1714. Comedy “The Drummer” anonymously produced, 1715. Resumed political appointments, 1715–16. “The Freeholder” (55 nos.), published anonymously, Dec. 1715–June 1716. Married Countess of Warwick, 3 Aug. 1716. Retired from appointments, March 1718, owing to ill-health. Daughter born in Jan. 1718. Controversy with Steele in “Old Whig” (2 nos., 19 March and 2 April 1719). Died, in London, 17 June 1719. Works: “Dissertatio de insignioribus Romanis poetis,” 1692; “A Poem to His Majesty,” 1695; Latin Poem on the Peace of Ryswick, 1697; Lat. poems in “Examen Poeticum Duplex,” 1698, and “Musarum Anglicanarum Analecta,” vol. ii., 1699; “Letters from Italy to the Rt. Hon. Charles, Lord Halifax,” 1703; “Remarks on several Parts of Italy,” 1705; “The Campaign,” 1705; “Fair Rosamond” (anon.), 1707; “The Present State of the War” (anon.), 1708; Papers in “Tatler,” 1709–10; “Whig Examiner,” 1710; 274 nos. in “Spectator,” 1711–12; “The Late Tryal and Conviction of Count Tariff” (anon.), 1713; “Cato,” 1713; Papers in “Guardian,” 1713; in “Lover” and new “Spectator,” 1714; “Essay concerning the Error in distributing modern Medals,” 1715; “The Drummer” (anon.), 1716; [Poetical addresses to Princess of Wales and Sir G. Kneller, 1716]; “The Freeholder” (anon.), 1715–16; Translations of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” with Dryden and others, 1717; “Two Poems; viz., I. On the Deluge…. An ode to Dr. Burnett; II. In praise of Physic and Poetry. An ode to Dr. Hannes” (Lat. and Eng.), 1718; “The Resurrection: a poem,” 1718: “The Old Whig” (anon.), 1719; “The Patrician” (anon.), 1719. Posthumous: “Notes upon the twelve books of Paradise Lost” (from “Spectator”), 1719; “Skating: a poem” (Lat. and Eng.), 1720; “Evidences of the Christian Religion,” 1730; “Discourse on Ancient and Modern Learning,” 1739. “Collected Works:” first published by T. Tickell in 1721. Life: by Miss Aikin, 1843; by W. J. Courthope, 1884.

Personal

  I dined to-day with Dr. Garth and Mr. Addison at the Devil Tavern, by Temple Bar; and Garth treated. And it is well I dine every day, else I should be longer making out my letters…. Mr. Addison’s election has passed easy and undisputed, and I believe if he had a mind to be chosen King he would not be refused.

	Were there One whose fires
	True Genius kindles, and fair Fame inspires;
	Blest with each talent and each art to please,
	And born to write, converse, and live with ease:
	Should such a man, too fond to rule alone,
	Bear, like the Turk, no brother near the throne.
	View him with scornful, yet with jealous eyes,
	And hate for arts that caus’d himself to rise;
	Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer,
	And without sneering, teach the rest to sneer;
	Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike,
	Just hint a fault, and hesitate dislike;
	Alike reserv’d to blame, or to commend,
	A tim’rous foe, and a suspicious friend;
	Dreading ev’n fools, by Flatterers besieg’d,
	And so obliging, that he ne’er oblig’d;
	Like Cato, give his little Senate laws,
	And sit attentive to his own applause;
	While Wits and Templars ev’ry sentence raise,
	And wonder with a foolish face of praise:—
	Who but must laugh, if such a man there be?
	Who would not weep, if ATTICUS were he?

  Mr. Jo. Addison, who was made, about Easter last, secretary of state, is turned out of office, and made one of the tellers of the exchequer. His under-secretary was Mr. Tho. Tickell, that pretender to poetry, of Queen’s college. Mr. Addison was by no means qualifyed for the office of secretary, being not skilled in business, and not knowing how to speak. This is what is commonly said.

  It could not be imagined that to diminish a worthy man, as soon as he was no more to be seen, could add to him who had always raised, and almost worshipped, him when living. There never was a more strict friendship than between those gentlemen; nor had they ever any difference but what proceeded from their different way of pursuing the same thing. The one with patience, foresight, and temperate address always waited and stemmed the torrent; while the other often plunged himself into it, and was as often taken out by the temper of him who stood weeping on the brink for his safety, whom he could not dissuade from leaping into it.

	Can I forget the dismal night, that gave
	My soul’s best part for-ever to the grave!
	How silent did his old companions tread,
	By mid-night lamps, the mansions of the dead,
	Through breathing statues, then unheeded things,
	Through rowes of warriors, and through walks of kings!
	What awe did the slow solemn knell inspire;
	The pealing organ, and the pausing choir;
	The duties by the lawn-rob’d prelate pay’d;
	And the last words, that dust to dust convey’d!
	While speechless o’er thy closing grave we bend,
	Accept these tears, thou dear departed friend!
	Oh, gone for-ever, take this long adieu;
	And sleep in peace, next thy lov’d Montagu!
	*        *        *        *        *
	That awful form (which, so ye heavens decree,
	Must still be lov’d and still deplor’d by me)
	In nightly visions seldom fails to rise,
	Or, rous’d by fancy, meets my waking eyes.
	If business calls, or crowded courts invite,
	Th’ unblemish’d statesman seems to strike my sight;
	If in the stage I seek to soothe my care,
	I meet his soul, which breathes in Cato there;
	If pensive to the rural shades I rove,
	His shape o’ertakes me in the lonely grove:
	’Twas there of Just and Good he reason’d strong,
	Clear’d some great truth, or rais’d some serious song;
	There patient show’d us the wise course to steere,
	A candid censor, and a friend sincere;
	There taught us how to live; and (oh! too high
	The price for knowledge) taught us how to die.

  Mr. Addison wrote very fluently; but he was sometimes very slow and scrupulous in correcting. He would show his verses to several friends; and would alter almost everything that any of them hinted at as wrong. He seemed to be too diffident of himself; and too much concerned about his character as a poet: or (as he worded it) too solicitous for that kind of praise, which, God knows, is but a very little matter after all!… Many of his Spectators he wrote very fast; and sent them to the press as soon as they were written. It seems to have been best for him not to have had too much time to correct…. Addison was perfect good company with intimates; and had something more charming in his conversation than I ever knew in any other man: but with any mixture of strangers, and sometimes only with one, he seemed to preserve his dignity much; with a stiff sort of silence.

  To this great man I am the nearest male relation now living; I owe part of my education to him.

  Mr. Addison stayed above a year at Blois.—He would rise as early as between two and three in the height of summer, and lie a bed till between eleven and twelve in the depth of winter.—He was untalkative whilst here, and often thoughtful: sometimes so lost in thought, that I have come into his room and stayed five minutes there, before he has known anything of it.—He has his masters, generally, at supper with him; kept very little company beside; and had no amour whilst here, that I know of; and I think I should have known it, if he had had any.

  Addison was the best company in the world.

  In a word, one may justly apply to him what Plato, in his allegorical language, says of Aristophanes, that the Graces, having searched all the world for a temple wherein they might for ever dwell, settled at last in the breast of Mr. Addison.

  Mr. Addison was stedfast to his principles, faithful to his friends, a zealous patriot, honourable in public stations, amiable in private life, and as he lived, he died, a good man, and a pious Christian.

  Atticus could be a friend to men, without awaking their resentment, and he satisfied with his own virtue without seeking popular fame: he had the reward of his wisdom in his transquality, and will ever stand among the few examples of true philosophy, either ancient or modern…. You will think I have been too long on the character of Atticus. I own I took pleasure in explaining it. Pope thought himself covertly very severe on Addison, by giving him that name; and I feel indignation whenever he is abused, both from his own merit, and because he was ever your father’s friend; besides that it is naturally disgusting to see him lampooned after his death by the same man who paid him the most servile court while he lived, and was besides highly obliged by him.

  Dr. Young has published a new book, on purpose, he says himself, to have an opportunity of telling a story that he has known these forty years. Mr. Addison sent for the young Lord Warwick, as he was dying, to show him in what peace a Christian could die—unluckily he died of brandy—nothing makes a Christian die in peace like being maudlin! but don’t say this in Gath, where you are.

  Addison, a crawling sycophant, full of envy and spleen; frantic when a friend prospered; happy only when misfortune lighted on his associates; a hypocrite who would take you by the hand, and if he heard you utter a sentiment which in his heart he knew to be erroneous, would labour to confirm you in it with all his zeal, rejoicing in your inexperience, as Satan might exult over the fall of a young novice.

  Of this memorable friendship the greater praise must be given to Steele. It is not hard to love those from whom nothing can be feared; and Addison never considered Steele as a rival; but Steele lived, as he confesses, under an habitual subjection to the predominating genius of Addison, whom he always mentioned with reverence, and treated with obsequiousness. Addison, who knew his own dignity, could not always forbear to shew it, by playing a little upon his admirer; but he was in no danger of retort: his jests were endured without resistance or resentment. But the sneer of jocularity was not the worst. Steele, whose imprudence of generosity, or vanity of profusion, kept him always incurably necessitous, upon some pressing exigence, in an evil hour, borrowed an hundred pounds of his friend, probably without much purpose of repayment; but Addison, who seems to have had other notions of a hundred pounds, grew impatient of delay, and reclaimed his loan by an execution. Steele felt with great sensibility the obduracy of his creditor; but with emotions of sorrow rather than of anger.

  Many persons having doubts concerning this fact, I applied to Dr. Johnson to learn on what authority he asserted it. He told me he had it from Savage, who lived in intimacy with Steele, and who mentioned that Steele told him the story with tears in his eyes. Ben Victor, Johnson said, likewise informed him on this remarkable transaction, from the relation of Mr. Wilks the comedian, who was also an intimate of Steele’s. Some, in defence of Addison, here said, that “the act was done with the good-natured view of rousing Steele and correcting that profusion which always made him necessitous.” “If that were the case,” said Johnson, “and that he only wanted to alarm Steele, he would afterwards have returned the money to his friend, which it is not pretended he did.

  Among the Literary Quarrels of Pope one acquires dignity and interest from the characters of both parties. It closed by producing the severest, but the most masterly portrait of one man of genius, composed by another, which has ever been hung on the satiric Parnassus for the contemplation of ages. Addison must descend to posterity with the dark spots of Atticus staining a purity of character which had nearly proven immaculate.

  Addison, according to the traditions of Holland House, used, when composing, to walk up and down the long gallery there, with a bottle of wine at each end of it, which he finished during the operation. There is a little white house, too, near the turnpike, to which he used to retire when the Countess was particularly troublesome.

  Addison, I know not why, is personally no such favorite of mine as Sir Roger de Coverley should make him.

	Addison.  Dick! I am come to remonstrate with you on those unlucky habits which have been so detrimental to your health and fortune.
	Steele.  Many thanks, Mr. Addison; but really my fortune is not much improved by your arresting me for the hundred pounds; nor is my health, if spirits are an indication of it, on seeing my furniture sold by auction to raise the money.
	Addison.  Pooh, pooh, Dick! what furniture had you about the house.
	Steele.  At least I had the arm-chair, of which you never before had dispossessed me longer than the evening; and happy should I have been to enjoy your company in it again and again, if you had left it me.
	Addison.  We will contrive to hire another. I do assure you, my dear Dick, I have really felt for you.
	Steele.  I only wish, my kind friend, you had not put out your feelers quite so far, nor exactly in this direction; and that my poor wife had received an hour’s notice; she might have carried a few trinkets to some neighbour. She wanted her salts; and the bailiff thanked her for the bottle that contained them, telling her the gold head of it was worth pretty nearly half-a-guinea.

  Some blemishes may undoubtedly be detected in his character; but the more carefully it is examined, the more will it appear, to use the phrase of the old anatomists, sound in the noble parts—free from all taint of perfidy, of cowardice, of cruelty, of ingratitude, of envy. Men may easily be named in whom some particular good disposition has been more conspicuous than in Addison. But the just harmony of qualities, the exact temper between the stern and the humane virtues, the habitual observance of every law, not only of moral rectitude, but of moral grace and dignity, distinguished him from all men who have been tried by equally full information.

  Addison espoused a countess; and spent the rest of his life in taverns, clubs, and repentance.

  Of Holland House, the last residence of Addison, it would require a long article to give a fitting idea…. The general form is that of a half H. The projection in the center, forming at once porch and tower, and the two wings supported on pillars, give great decision of effect to it…. There is a fine entrance hall, a library behind it, and another library extending the whole length of one of the wings and the house upstairs, one hundred and five feet in length. The drawing-room over the entrance hall, called the Gilt Room, extends from front to back of the house, and commands views of the gardens both way; those to the back are very beautiful. In the house, are, of course, many interesting and valuable works of art; a great portion of them memorials of the distinguished men who have been accustomed to resort thither…. In the gardens are various memorials of distinguished men…. The traditions regarding Addison here are very slight. They are, simply, that he used to walk, when composing his “Spectators,” in the long library, then a picture gallery, with a bottle of wine at each end, which he visited as he alternately arrived at them; and that the room in which he died, though not positively known, is supposed to be the present dining-room, being then the state bed-room. The young Earl of Warwick, to whom he there addressed the emphatic words, “See in what peace a Christian can die!” died also, himself, in 1721, but two years afterward. The estate then devolved to Lord Kensington, descended from Robert Rich, earl of Warwick, who sold it, about 1762, to the Right Honorable Henry Fox, afterwards Lord Holland. Here the early days of the great statesman, Charles James, were passed; and here lived the late patriotic translator of Lope de Vega, amid the society of the first spirits of the age.

  To us it seems clear, that the great failing in Addison’s character was his fastidiousness; excellent as his heart was, this difficulty prevented his sympathies from extending as widely as religion would have them. It made him shrink from near approach to mankind in general, though warm-hearted to his friends and companions; and thus it often happens, that literary habits and a sensitive nature, though they have their own ways of manifestation, do something to unfit men for active usefulness; as the marble, though excellent for sculpture, is less adapted for works of public improvement than coarser varieties of stone. But after making all possible abatement, enough will remain to establish the character of Addison on the highest ground. As a writer, we look through the history of letters, and we find very few before him; as a man and a Christian, we know of none.

  When this man looks from the world whose weaknesses he describes so benevolently, up to the Heaven which shines over us all, I can hardly fancy a human face lighted up with a more serene rapture; a human intellect thrilling with a purer love and adoration than Joseph Addison’s. Listen to him: from your childhood you have known the verses; but who can hear their sacred music without love and awe?

	“Soon as the evening shades prevail,
	The moon takes up the wondrous tale,” etc.

It seems to me those verses shine like the stars. They shine out of a great deep calm. When he turns to heaven, a Sabbath comes over that man’s mind: and his face lights up from it with a glory of thanks and prayer…. If Swift’s life was the most wretched, I think Addison’s was one of the most enviable. A life prosperous and beautiful—a calm death—an immense fame and affection afterwards for his happy and spotless name.

  It seems to have been in Holland House (for he died shortly afterwards) that Addison was visited by Milton’s daughter, when he requested her to bring him some evidences of her birth. The moment he beheld her he exclaimed: “Madam, you need no other voucher; your face is a sufficient testimonial whose daughter you are.” It must have been very pleasing to Addison to befriend Milton’s daughter, for he had been the first to popularize the great poet by his critiques on “Paradise Lost,” in the “Spectator.”

  There is not a name in the annals of English literature more widely associated with pleasant recollections than that of Addison. His beautiful hymns trembled on our lips in childhood; his cheerful essays first lured us, in youth, to a sense of the minor philosophy of life; we tread his walk at Oxford with loving steps; gaze on his portrait, at Holland House or the Bodleian Gallery, as on the lineaments of a revered friend; recall his journey into Italy, his ineffectual maiden speech, his successful tragedy, his morning studies, his evenings at Button’s, his unfortunate marriage, and his holy death-bed, as if they were the experiences of one personally known, as well as fondly admired; and we muse beside the marble that designates his sepulchre in Westminster Abbey, between those of his first patron and his most cherished friend, with an interest such as is rarely awakened by the memory of one familiar to us only through books. The harmony of his character sanctions his writings; the tone of the “Spectator” breathes friendliness as well as instruction; and the tributes of contemporaries to his private worth, and of generations to his literary excellence, combine with our knowledge of the vicissitudes of his life, to render his mind and person as near to our sympathies as they are high in our esteem. Over his faults we throw the veil of charity, and cherish the remembrance of his benevolence and piety, his refinement and wisdom, as the sacred legacy of an intellectual benefactor.

  He was an amiable and highly gifted, rather than a strong or great man. His shrinking timidity of temperament, his singular modesty of manners, his quiet, sly power of humorous yet kindly observation, his minute style of criticism, even the peculiar cast of his piety, all served to stamp the lady-man. In taciturnity alone he bore the sex no resemblance. And hence it is that Campbell in poetry, and Addison in prose, are, or were, the great favourites of female readers. He had many weaknesses, but, as in the character of woman, they appeared beautiful, and cognate to his gentle nature. His fear of giving offence was one of the most prominent of these. In his writings and in his life, he seems always treading on thin ice.

  Thus died one to whom the English nation owes the formation of mind and character in its youth of modern times. A gentler monitor never wrote for the delight of ages; a truer friend never existed; a more religious man—his faith being as pure from Calvinism as it was from superstition,—never combated with this world’s sins and temptations than Addison. We would willingly draw a veil over his reported habits of intemperance; but if that cannot be done, we may plead that they were the effect rather of unhappiness than of criminal self-indulgence.

  Next came the age of the “Tatler” and “Spectator.” Steele, editor of the first, is buried at his seat near Carmarthen. His second wife, “his dearest Prue,” is laid amongst the poets. But the great funeral of this circle is that of Addison. The last serene moments of his life were at Warwick House. “See how a Christian can die.”… The spot selected was the vault in the north aisle of that Chapel, in the eastern recess of which already lay the coffins of Monk and his wife, Montague Earl of Sandwich, and the two Halifaxes. Craggs was to follow within a year. Into that recess, doubtless in order to rest by the side of his patron, Montague Earl of Halifax, the coffin of Addison was lowered. At the head of the vault, Atterbury officiated as Dean, in his prelate’s robes. Round him stood the Westminster scholars, with their white tapers, dimly lighting up the fretted aisle. One of them has left on record the deep impression left on them by the unusual energy and solemnity of Atterbury’s sonorous voice. Close by was the faithful friend of the departed—Tickell, who has described the scene in poetry yet more touching than Macaulay’s prose.

  His politeness received from his character a singular bent and charm. It was not external, simply voluntary and official; it came from the heart. He was gentle and kind, of a refined sensibility, so timid even as to remain quiet and seem dull in a numerous company or before strangers, only recovering his spirits before intimate friends, and confessing that he could not talk well to more than one. He could not endure a sharp discussion; when the opponent was intractable, he pretended to approve, and for punishment, plunged himself discreetly into his own folly…. Picture now this mind, so characteristically mediocre, limited to the discovery of good motives of action. What a reflective man, always equal and dignified! What a store he has of resolutions and maxims! All rapture, instinct, inspiration, and caprice, are abolished or disciplined. No case surprises or carries him away. He is always ready and protected; so much so, that he is like an automaton. Argument has frozen and invaded him.

  He was possessed of qualities which in a smaller man must have been held up to ridicule and contempt. Those who call him proud forget that he was sometimes obsequious; those who call him modest forget that he was an egotist; those who call him noble as a man forget that he was treacherous as a friend and cowardly as an enemy. He was certainly selfish; he was certainly mean. He was cautiously solicitous to serve his own ends, and cautiously solicitous to defeat the ends of others. As a writer he was the purest that ever took pen in hand; as a man he was the most insidious that ever sapped the hopes of those whom he seemed to caress.

  Swift, looking with a slight touch at Addison’s easy stride onward, remarks to Stella his belief that he could become a king if he chose. His wife, the Countess of Warwick, might be said to have been given to him as a reward. It was a mistake, and gave satisfaction to neither of the parties, though perhaps it was of service in teaching to the world the lesson that if, in wedded life, community of taste is desirable, the natural rise of the indissoluble union out of a community of social conditions is still more desirable.

  The “Dunciad” is the imperishable monument of his animosities. In all the literature of that age “no whiter page than Addison’s remains;” yet even Addison he cruelly maltreated. It may be doubted whether a subsequent generation will recognise the great humane humorist, except as he appears in Pope’s cruelly skilful lines. Already the “Spectator’s” mild features begin to grow indistinct, and the formidable shade of Atticus usurps his place. The copy, of course, bears a likeness to the original; and though the wrinkles and crows’-feet obtain malicious prominence, yet are they drawn with exquisite delicacy, and a touch of surprising lightness and dextrous reserve. Nor need we wonder that Pope and Addison could not continue friends. The temperance of Addison’s character would not exercise a soothing influence over Pope’s vehement temper. We can fancy that the exquisite urbanity which no provocation could disturb must have often exasperated the “formidable cripple” past endurance.

  Without taint of perfidy, of cowardice, of cruelty, of ingratitude, or of envy; satirical without abuse, tempering ridicule with a tender compassion for all that is frail, and a profound reverence for all that is sublime. The greatest and most salutary reform of public morals and tastes ever affected by any satirists, he accomplished without a personal lampoon. Himself a Whig, he was described by the bitterest Tories as a gentleman of wit and virtue, in whose friendship many persons of both parties were happy, and whose name ought not to be mixed up with factious squabbles. In the heat of controversy, no outrage could provoke him to a retaliation unworthy of a Christian and a gentleman. With a boundless power of abusing men, he never used it. His modesty amounted to bashfulness.

  He had political friends who loved him, and he went with them into politics as he might have travelled in company with them, and for the sake of their company, although caring nothing for travel himself. No man was better aware of his incapacity for the real business of public life. Addison had himself pointed out all the objections to his political advancement before that advancement was pressed upon him. He was not a statesman; he was not an administrator; he could not do any genuine service as head of a department; he was not even a good clerk: he was a wretched speaker; he was consumed by a morbid shyness, almost as oppressive as that of the poet Cowper in a later day, or of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the American novelist, later still. His whole public career was at best but a harmless mistake. It has done no harm to his literary fame. The world has almost forgotten it. Even lovers of Addison might have to be reminded now that the creator of Sir Roger de Coverley was once a diplomatic agent, and a secretary of State, and a member of the House of Commons. Some of the essays which Addison contributed to the “Spectator” are like enough to outlive the system of government by party, and perhaps even the whole system of representative government. Sir Roger de Coverley will not be forgotten until men forget Parson Adams, and Robinson Crusoe, and Gil Blas, and for that matter Sir John Falstaff and Don Quixote.

  This absence of dramatic incident in Addison’s life would lead us naturally to conclude that he was deficient in the energy and passion which cause a powerful nature to leave a mark upon its age. Yet such a judgment would certainly be erroneous. Shy and reserved as he was, the unanimous verdict of his most illustrious contemporaries is decisive as to the respect and admiration which he excited among them. The man who could exert so potent an influence over the mercurial Steele, who could fascinate the haughty and cynical intellect of Swift, whose conversation, by the admission of his satirist Pope, had in it something more charming than that of any other man; of whom it was said that he might have been chosen king if he wished it; such a man, though to the coarse perception of Mandeville he might have seemed no more than “a parson in a tye-wig,” can hardly have been deficient in force of character.

  Addison lies under more obligations to happy fortune than any other literary Englishman of high rank. Halifax saved him from the Church and the probable oblivion of a seat on the bench of bishops, and sent him to cultivate his genius by foreign travel. When, on his return, he seemed sinking into poverty, the same warm patron introduced him to Godolphin’s notice and procured for him the inspiration of “The Campaign” in the shape of a promise of office. Throughout life, as thus in its opening, friends, admirers, employments, themes, and applause were found for him; and if in his death he had not the crowning favor of a good biographer, the defect was more than made up in later years by the luck of having Macaulay for his eulogist…. At the time, Macaulay’s rhetoric, force, and fame bore down the feeble protests that strove here and there against the injustice and untruthfulness of the funeral oration he had pronounced over his predecessor in the Great-Mogulship of the middle classes. He had not, however, erased the name of “Atticus”—ah, if Addison had only escaped Pope’s satire as nobly as Swift’s jests! “Atticus” is a perpetual interrogation mark affixed to Addison’s repute; it cannot be passed by, it tempts curiosity, it leads on to investigation.

  It is generally said that Addison gave in too much to the ordinary drinking habits of the time; and indications in his letters and elsewhere confirm this solitary imputation upon his moral propriety. The annotator to the “Tatler” (vol. iv. p. 300, ed. 1797) gives a report that Addison shortened his life by an excessive use of “Canary wine and Barbadoes water,” and says that Tonson boasted of paying his court to the great man by giving him excuses for such indulgence. Steele seems to suggest the truth in the “Tatler” (No. 252). Speaking obviously of Addison, he says that “you can seldom get him to the tavern; but when once he is arrived to his pint and begins to look about and like his company, you admire a thousand things in him which before lay buried.” Addison, in fact, though not intemperate according to the standard of his time, sometimes resorted to stimulants to overcome bashfulness or depression of spirits. The charm of his conversation when once the ice was broken is attested by observers less partial than Steele. Swift, who never mentions him without praise, declares that, often as they spent their evenings together, they never wished for a third person (Delany, Observations, p. 32). Lady Mary Wortley Montagu declared that Addison was the best company in the world; Dr. Young speaks of his “noble stream of thought and language” when once he had overcome his diffidence; and even Pope admitted the unequalled charm of his conversation.

  Addison Road, Kensington, runs from the Kensington Road, west of Holland House, to the Uxbridge Road, opposite Royal Crescent, named after Joseph Addison, who lived at Holland House after his marriage with the Countess of Warwick.

  The harmony and symmetry of this winning personality has, in a sense, told against it; for men are prone to call the well-balanced nature cold and the well-regulated life Pharisaic. Addison did not escape charges of this kind from the wild livers of his own time, who could not dissociate genius from profligacy nor generosity of nature from prodigality. It was one of the greatest services of Addison to his generation and to all generations, that in an age of violent passions, he showed how a strong man could govern himself. In a time of reckless living, he illustrated the power which flows from subordination of pleasure to duty. In a day when wit was identified with malice, he brought out its power to entertain, surprise, and delight, without taking on the irreverent levity of Voltaire, the bitterness of Swift, or the malice of Pope.

  Addison’s individuality stands in striking contrast with that of his friend, Steele. He was a man of pure and noble character, of lofty ideals, and genuine piety; but we miss in him the fervour and spontaneity that make Steele, with all his errors and infirmities, so delightful and engaging a figure. He was proud, shy, reserved, intensely self-conscious, and thus often left with those about him an impression of coldness and austerity. But he was, in reality, one of the kindest and most sympathetic of men. In the annals of literature he may well bear “without abuse the grand old name of gentleman,” for along with exquisite breeding and urbanity he possessed masculine courage and feminine sensibility and grace.

An Account of the Greatest English Poets, 1694

  His “Account of the Principal English Poets” is just but tame; he probably wrote it in metre merely because Roscommon had done something of the same kind before him; at any rate, by the side of the animated judgments of Pope in his “Epistle to Augustus,” his historical survey of English poetry seems flat and languid.

  It would be a great mistake to confound these verses, which are scarcely more than an exercise in penmanship, with Addison’s real work.

Letters from Italy, 1703

  Few poems have done more honour to English genius than this. There is in it a strain of political thinking that was, at that time, new in our poetry. Had the harmony of this been equal to that of Pope’s versification, it would be incontestably the finest poem in our language; but there is a dryness in the numbers, which greatly lessens the pleasure excited both by the poet’s judgment and imagination.

Remarks on Several Parts of Italy, 1705

  Mr. Addison’s “Travells” is a book very trite, being made up of nothing but scraps of verses, and things which have been observed over and over, without any additions of things not discovered before; and even some of those which he has inserted, that have been already taken notice of, are ridiculous; though it must be acknowledged, that the book is written in a clean style, and for that reason will please novices and superficial readers.

  At his return he published his “Travels,” with a dedication to lord Somers. As his stay in foreign countries was short, his observations are such as might be supplied by a hasty view, and consist chiefly in comparisons of the present face of the country with the descriptions left us by the Roman poets, from whom he made preparatory collections, though he might have spared the trouble, had he known that such collections had been made twice before by Italian authors. The most amusing passage of his book is his account of the minute republick of San Marino; of many parts it is not a very severe censure to say, that they might have been written at home. His elegance of language, and variegation of prose and verse, however, gains upon the reader; and the book, though a while neglected, became in time so much the favourite of the publick, that before it was reprinted it rose to five times its price.

  Many parts of this work exhibit Addison as a vulgar bigot.

  From one end of Italy to the other, this ingenious young gentleman of Oxford, with difficulty snatched from Anglican orders, is sternly Protestant. The legends of Rome are all “imposture” and “bungling tricks;” at Siena the stories about St. Catherine seem to him nothing but “Gross and absurd.” Nor is he more or less opposed to the Gothic forms of architecture than were his contemporaries. He is passionately in favour of the Palladian style, and all others seem to him savage. With Milan Cathedral he is extremely disappointed, and he dismisses Siena as a “barbarous Building.” Palladio’s church of Santa Justina in Padua, on the other hand, lifts him to an ecstasy; it is “the most handsome, luminous, disencumber’d Building” Addison ever saw. In this the young traveller was of his time…. On the whole, Addison’s lively description of Swiss places and conditions is better calculated than are his stiffer and more pedantic Italian chapters to make us realize what he visited, and the changes ’twixt now and then. For one thing, his inevitable Commonplace-book from the Classics gave out as soon as he crossed the Alps, and he had no Lucan or Silius Italicus to tell him beforehand what his sensations ought to be by the Lake of Geneva or in the crocus meadows of the valley of the Aar.

The Campaign, 1705

	On Addison’s sweet lays attention waits,
	And silence guards the place while he repeats;
	His Muse alike on ev’ry subject charms,
	Whether she paints the God of love, or arms:
	In him, pathetick Ovid sings again,
	And Homer’s “Iliad” shines in his “Campaign.”

  That gazette in rhyme.

  The next composition is the far-famed “Campaign,” which Dr. Warton has termed a “Gazette in Rhyme,” with harshness not often used by the good-nature of his criticism. Before a censure so severe is admitted, let us consider that War is a frequent subject of Poetry, and then enquire who has described it with more justness and force. Many of our own writers tried their powers upon this year of victory: yet Addison’s is confessedly the best performance; his poem is the work of a man not blinded by the dust of learning; his images are not borrowed merely from books. The superiority which he confers upon his hero is not personal prowess, and “mighty bone,” but deliberate intrepidity, a calm command of his passions, and the power of consulting his own mind in the midst of danger. The rejection and contempt of fiction is rational and manly.

  Mr. Harte related to me that Pope, in one of their usual walks together, desired him to go with him to a house in Haymarket, where he would show him a curiosity. On being admitted by an old woman who kept a little shop, and going up three pair of stairs into a small room: “In this garret,” said Pope, “Addison wrote his ‘Campaign’.”

  A commanded poem, “The Campaign” has experienced the constant fate of performances of its own class—works of skill, of talent, and of elegance, which, confounded often at their first appearance with the diviner inspirations of the muse, fall afterwards not only into neglect, which might perhaps be excusable, but into contempt, which is certainly unjust. Of this poem it may be said with confidence that it set an example of good sense and good taste before undreamed of in similar productions. There is no exaggeration, no bombast, no extravagance of flattery, no insipid parade of classical allusions and Homeric machinery…. The poem is, however, far from faultless; for even if it could with truth be said that the plan and conduct of the piece were free from objection, it must be admitted that in frequent examples of feebleness and tautology it betrays at least a hasty and careless execution, if not some barrenness of fancy. But these blemishes are well redeemed by passages of indisputable and varied merit. The celebrated simile of the angel, though defective as a comparison from too great resemblances to the object compared, may justly claim the character of grandeur, if not of absolute sublimity.

  Addison’s “Blenheim” is poor enough; one might think it a translation from some German original of those times. Gottsched’s aunt, or Bodmer’s wet-nurse, might have written it.

  Addison left off at a good moment. That simile was pronounced to be of the greatest ever produced in poetry. That angel, that good angel, flew off with Mr. Addison, and landed him in the place of Commissioner of Appeals—vice Mr. Locke providentially promoted. In the following year, Mr. Addison went to Hanover with Lord Halifax, and the year after was made Under-Secretary of State. O angel visits? you come “few and far between” to literary gentlemen’s lodgings! Your wings seldom quiver at second-floor windows now!… How many fourth-form boys at Mr. Addison’s school of Charter-house could write as well as that now? The “Campaign” has blunders, triumphant as it was; and weak points like all campaigns.

  Marlborough, though a first-rate marshal, was not a great man, not by any means so great as Wellington, far less as Napoleon; and how can a heroic poem be written without a hero? Yet the poem fell in with the humour of the times, and was cried up as though it had been another book of the Iliad.

  His principal piece, “The Campaign,” is an excellent model of becoming and classical style. Each verse is full, perfect in itself, with a clever antithesis, or a good epithet, or a figure of abbreviation.

  As a poem, “The Campaign” shows neither loftiness of invention nor enthusiasm of personal feeling, and it cannot therefore be ranked with such an ode as Horace’s “Qualem ministrum,” or with Pope’s very fine “Epistle” to the Earl of Oxford after his disgrace. Its methodical narrative style is scarcely misrepresented by Warton’s sarcastic description of it; but it should be remembered that this style was adopted by Addison with deliberate intention…. The design here avowed is certainly not poetical, but it is eminently business-like and extremely well adapted to the end in view. What Godolphin wanted was a set of complimentary verses on Marlborough. Addison, with infinite tact, declares that the highest compliment that can be paid to the hero is to recite his actions in their unadorned grandeur. This happy turn of flattery shows how far he had advanced in literary skill since he wrote his address “To the King.”

  The poem, like all Addison’s performances of the kind, shows facility and poetic sensibility, stopping short of poetic genius. It is better than a similar poem of Halifax’s on the battle of the Boyne, but does not stand out at any great elevation above the work of the time; and Macaulay’s remark that it is not absurdly mythological is praise which might equally be applied to Halifax and others. Macaulay notes that the simile of the angel owed its great effect to its allusion to the famous storm of 1703; and Johnson quotes the remark of Dr. Madden that if he had proposed the same topic to ten schoolboys, he should not have been surprised if eight had brought him the angel. Warton unkindly calls the poem a “Gazette in rhyme.” We may be content to say that it was on the higher level of official poetry, and helped Addison’s rise in literature and politics.

Fair Rosamond, 1707

  A criticism on this most wretched performance is more than it deserves, but, to account for the bad reception it met with, it is necessary to mention that the music preponderating against the elegance and humour of the poetry, and the reputation of its author, bore it down the third night of representation. To begin with the overture; it is in three parts, and in the key of D with the greater third; the first movement pretends to a great deal of spirit, but is mere noise. The two violin parts are simple counterpoint, and move in thirds almost throughout; and the last movement intended for an air is the most insipid ever heard. As to the songs, they have neither air nor expression. There is one that sings thus:—

O the pleasing, pleasing, pleasing, pleasing, pleasing anguish.

  An ingenious and sensible writer, mentioned in a preceding note, who was present at the performance, says of “Rosamond” that it is a confused chaos of music, and that its only merit is its shortness.

  The whole drama is airy and elegant; engaging in its process, and pleasing in its conclusion. If Addison had cultivated the lighter parts of poetry, he would probably have excelled.

  One of the most pleasing of his compositions.

  It is in the highest and easiest style of Dryden,—that in which he wrote “Alexander’s Feast,” and some other of his lyrics,—but is sustained for some fifteen hundred lines with an energy and a grace which we doubt if even Dryden could have equalled. Its verses not only move but dance. The spirit is genial and sunny, and above the mazy motions shines the light of genuine poetry.

  Critics melted to the foreign syren. Addison himself condescended to write a musical piece on the story of Fair Rosamond; and when he had written his text, announced his wonderful taste in music by abusing the strange musician who had lately come to London—one “Mynheer Handel,” as he called him in contempt—and setting Clayton to write the score! “Rosamond,” as an opera, had but a poor success—and critics laughed at the anachronism of a reference to French artillery in the reign of Henry II!

Crushed by the thunder of the Gaul

was perhaps a lost line from “The Campaign.”

  Addison lacked the qualities of a successful libretto writer. He was too serious, and despite the lightness of his touch, there was a certain rigidity in him which made him unapt at versification which required quickness, agility, and variety. When he attempted to give his verse gayety of manner, he did not get beyond awkward simulation of an case which nature had denied him.

  The opera of “Rosamond” is, indeed, clearly modelled on Dryden in its serious parts, but is no great success there. The lighter and more whimsical quality of Addison’s humour enabled him to do better in the farcical passages, which, especially the speeches of Sir Trusty, sometimes have a singularly modern and almost Gilbertian quality about them.

The Tatler, 1709–10

  A finer piece of humour was never written, than Addison’s Journal of the Court of honour in the “Tatler;” in which every reader perceives the opposition of dignity and meanness: the latter arising from the insignificance of the causes; the former from the serious air of the narrative, from the accuracy of detail and minuteness of enquiry in the several examinations, and from the grave deportment of the judge and jury. Indeed, through the whole work, the personage of Isaac Bickerstaff is supported with inimitable pleasantry. The conjurer, the politician, the man of humour, the critic; the seriousness of the moralist, and the mock dignity of the astrologer; the vivacities and the infirmities peculiar to old age, are all so blended and contrasted in the censor of Great Britain, as to form a character equally complex and natural, equally laughable and respectable.

  It has been too much the fashion to depreciate the Tatler, and to contrast it with its more elaborate and finished successor the Spectator. The attempt, however, is not just; they are built upon very different plans; and if it be allowed, as it probably must upon comparison, that there is more unity, regularity, and polish in the conduct and plan of the Spectator, it may, I think, with equal truth be asserted of the Tatler, that it possesses more vivacity, wit, and variety, than any periodical paper extant.

  We now enter on those parts of Mr. Addison’s prose works, which have done him the greatest honour, and have placed him at the head of those whom we call our polite writers. I know that many readers prefer Dr. Swift’s prose to his:—but, whatever other merit the Dean’s writings may have, (and they have, certainly, a great deal,) I affirm it with confidence, (because I have examined them both with care,) that they are not comparable to Mr. Addison’s, in the correctness, propriety, and elegance of expression. Mr. Addison possessed two talents, both of them very uncommon, which singularly qualified him to excel…. I mean an exquisite knowledge of the English tongue in all its purity and delicacy; and a vein of humour, which flowed naturally and abundantly from him on every subject; and which experience hath shown to be inimitable. But it is in the former respect only that I shall criticise these papers; and I shall do it with severity, lest time, and the authority of his name, (which, of course, must become sacred,) should give a sanction even to his defects. If any man of genius should be so happy, as to equal all the excellencies of his prose, and to avoid the few blemishes which may, haply, be found in it, he would be a perfect model of style, in this way of writing: but of such an one, it is enough to say at present, (and I shall, surely, offend no good writer in saying it,)

“—hunc nequeo monstrare, et sentio tantum.”

  Apart from the fortunate popularity attaching to the central figure, and the advantage arising from a narrower field of operation, it can scarcely be affirmed that the “Spectator” greatly excelled the “Tatler,” especially when attention is confined to its more enduring characteristics. If we withdraw the critical work of Addison, part of which, according to Tickell, was not prepared expressly for its pages, and to-day has lost much of its value,—if we withdraw the moral essays of Steele, now grown tedious by frequent imitation, what remains is neither better nor worse than the staple material of the “Tatler.” In the social paper neither writer surpassed what he had done before. As already stated, Addison’s best work in the “Spectator,” though perhaps more sustained, is not superior to his best work in its predecessor; while Steele in that predecessor is distinctly stronger.

The Spectator, 1711–12

  It would have been impossible for Mr. Addison, who made little or no use of letters sent in by the numerous correspondents of the “Spectator,” to have executed his large share of this task, in so exquisite a manner, if he had not ingrafted into it many pieces, that had lain by him in little hints and minutes, which he from time to time collected, and ranged in order, and moulded into the form in which they now appear.

  Many of his “Spectators” he wrote very fast; and sent them to the press as soon as they were written. It seems to have been best for him not to have had too much time to correct.

	When panting Virtue her last efforts made,
	You brought your Clio to the virgin’s aid.

  Rare as the intercourse was between the capital and the Highlands of Scotland, yet did the “Spectator” find its way regularly to that part of the kingdom. Mr. Steuart of Dalguise, a gentleman of Perthshire, of very great respectability, who died, near ninety, about twelve or fourteen years ago, has informed us, that when, as usual in that country, the gentlemen met after church on Sunday, to discuss the news of the week, the “Spectators” were read as regularly as the journal. He informed us also, that he knew the perusal of them to be general through the country.

  It is in the “Spectator” that the genius of our author beams with unclouded lustre. The essays most valuable for their humour, invention, and precept, are the product of his pen; and it soon became, in consequence of his large contributions, the most popular work this country has produced.

  I have lately studied “The Spectator,” and with increasing pleasure and admiration. Yet it must be evident to you that there is a class of thoughts and feelings, and these, too, the most important, even practically, which it would be impossible to convey in the manner of Addison, and which, if Addison had possessed, he would not have been Addison…. “The Spectator” itself has innocently contributed to the general taste for unconnected writing, just as if “Reading made easy” should act to give men an aversion to words of more than two syllables, instead of drawing them through those words into the power of reading books in general.

  Not many years ago, it was very generally the custom, I remember, for every young person, male and female, to go through a course of reading of the papers of the “Spectator.” This has fallen quite into disuse now-a-days, and I do not know that it is much to be regretted. The “Spectator” contains, undoubtedly, much sensible and sound morality; but it is not a very high order of Christian ethics. It contains much judicious criticism, but certainly not comparable to the deeper philosophy of criticism which has entered into English literature in the present century. Those papers will always have a semi-historical interest, as picturing the habits and manners of the times—a moral value, as a kindly, good-natured censorship of those manners. In one respect, the “Spectator” stands unrivalled to this day: I allude to the exquisite humour in those numbers in which Sir Roger de Coverley figures. If any one desire to form a just notion of what is meant by that very indefinable quality called “humour,” he cannot more agreeably inform himself than by selecting the Sir Roger de Coverley papers, and reading them in series.

  He has, in his imaginary Club, created a number of characters which will be recognized and loved wherever English is read. The prose of these exquisite Essays is perfect, as a specimen of the very best work of the era. To the young student it will, of course, have something of an old-world flavour, but its quaintness and pleasantness will amply repay him for any unfamiliarity with the terms of the expression of the day. It is always clear and easy, free from pomposity, pedantry, and verbosity, deeply religious in feeling, and tenderly humorous in expression.

  It civilized England more, perhaps, than any one book.

  Addison was certainly at his best in the “Spectator.”… Addison had, indeed, been little more than an occasional contributor to the “Tatler,” and although some of his articles in that periodical take rank among his finest work, yet it was only in the “Spectator” that he found opportunity to show fully all his powers.

  Finished in style, but genuinely human in feeling, betraying the nicest choice of words and the most studied care for elegant and effective arrangement, and yet penetrated by geniality, enlivened by humor, elevated by high moral aims, often using the dangerous weapons of irony and satire, and yet always well-mannered and kindly,—these papers reveal the sensitive nature of Addison and the delicate but thoroughly tempered art which he had at his command. Rarely has literature of so high an order had such instant success; for the popularity of the “Spectator” has been rivaled in English literature only by that of the Waverley novels or of the novels of Dickens. Its influence was felt not only in the sentiment of the day, and in the crowd of imitators which followed in its wake, but also across the Channel. In Germany, especially, the genius and methods of Addison made a deep and lasting impression.

  The treatment of the character-sketch by Steele and Addison in the “Spectator” (1711–12) was highly original. They drew portraits of representative Englishmen, and brought them together in conversation in a London club. They conducted Sir Roger de Coverley through Westminster Abbey, to the playhouse, to Vauxhall, into the country to Coverley church and assizes; they incidentally took a retrospective view of his life, and finally told the story of his death. When they had done this they had not only created one of the best defined characters in our prose literature, but they had almost transformed the character-sketch into a novel of London and provincial life. From the “Spectator” the character-sketch, with its types and minute observation and urbane ridicule passed into the novel, and became a part of it.

Sir Roger de Coverley

  It is recorded by Budgell, that of the characters feigned or exhibited in the “Spectator,” the favourite of Addison was Sir Roger de Coverley, of whom he had formed a very delicate and discriminate idea, which he would not suffer to be violated; and therefore, when Steele had shewn him innocently picking up a girl in the Temple, and taking her to a tavern, he drew upon himself so much of his friend’s indignation, that he was forced to appease him by a promise of forbearing Sir Roger for the time to come. The reason which induced Cervantes to bring his hero to the grave, para mi sola nacio Don Quixote, y yo para el, made Addison declare, with undue vehemence of expression, that he would kill Sir Roger; being of opinion that they were born for one another, and that any other hand would do him wrong.

  Sir Roger de Coverley is one of those truthful types of character, which, though created by the mind of man, yet, by the ordination of Nature herself (for Nature includes art among her works), outlasts the successive generations of flesh and blood which it represents. The individuals perish, and leave no memorial; nay, we hardly care to know them while living. We might find them tiresome. We feel that Nature has done well in making them; we are grateful for the race; especially on behalf of others, and of the poor; but we do not particularly see the value of their society; when, lo! in steps one of Nature’s imitators—called men of genius—and, by the mere fact of producing a likeness of the species to the mind’s eye, enchants us forever both with it and himself. A little philosophy may easily explain this; but perhaps a little more may still leave it among the most interesting of mysteries.

  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 brooks 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.”

  Of all things else that Addison has done there remains one pre-eminent 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.

  It is a rather singular circumstance that we have in our literature one well-drawn character—fulfilling all the requirements of a “study” from the life, one of our important and most classic characters indeed—existing entirely outside the pages of a novel, a drama, or of any formal fiction. This is genial, worthy old Sir Roger de Coverley, who in the year 1711 strolled into England quietly and unannounced, introduced and hospitably entertained by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. Addison, it is true, produced no novel; he did as great a thing, for he drew a character so strongly individualized, so amiable in its attributes, that it has lived from that day to ours one of the best beloved in English fiction. Thus Joseph Addison may be regarded as at the very beginning of the century suggesting if not inventing the novel form, and as setting a pattern in the portrayal of real character which has rarely been surpassed.

  While “The Spectator” contains ample material for a fully developed novel, it only just falls short of making a fully developed novel out of it. Had the various detached episodes in which the essayist and his companions figure been more closely related to one another—had they been gathered up and carefully woven into the definite pattern of a plot—then the “Sir Roger de Coverley Papers” here reprinted would have been to all intents and purposes a serial novel running through a periodical. As it is, we can never properly neglect them in any historical survey of English prose fiction.

Cato, 1713

  “Cato,” a most noble play of Mr. Addison, and the only one he writ, is to be acted in Easter week. The town is full of expectation of it, the Boxes being already bespoke, and he designing to give all the Benefit away among the Actors in proportion to their performing.

  I was this morning, at ten, at the rehearsal of Mr. Addison’s play called “Cato,” which is to be acted on Friday. There was not above a score of us to see it. We stood on the stage, and it was foolish enough to see the actors prompted every moment, and the poet directing them; and the drab, that acts Cato’s daughter, out in the midst of a passionate part, and then calling out, “What’s next?” The Bishop of Clogher was there too, but he stood privately in a gallery.

  Cato was not so much the wonder of Rome in his days as he is of Britain in ours; and though all the foolish industry possible has been used to make it thought a party play, yet what the author once said of another may the most properly in the world he applied to him on this occasion:

	Envy itself is dumb, in wonder lost,
	And factions strive who shall applaud him most.

  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, of the prologue-writer, who was clapped into a stanch Whig at almost every two lines. I believe you have heard, that after all the applauses 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, as it is said, and therefore design a present to the same Cato very speedily; in the meantime they are getting ready as good a sentence as the former on their side, so betwixt them it is probable that Cato (as Dr. Garth expressed it) may have something to live upon after he dies.

	While you the fierce divided Britons awe,
	And Cato with an equal virtue, draw;
	While Envy is itself in Wonder lost,
	And Factions strive who shall applaud you most;
	Forgive the fond ambition of a friend,
	Who hopes himself, not you, to recommend,
	And join th’ applause which all the Learn’d bestow
	On one, to whom a perfect work they owe.
	To my light Scenes I once inscrib’d your name,
	And impotently strove to borrow fame:
	Soon will that die, which adds thy name to mine;
	Let me, then, live, join’d to a work of thine.

	Illustrious deeds in distant nations wrought,
	And virtues by departed heroes taught,
	Raise in your soul a pure immortal flame,
	Adorn your life, and consecrate your fame;
	To your renown all ages you subdue,
	And Cæsar fought, and Cato bled for you.

  But now let us sum up all these absurdities together. Sempronius goes at noon-day, in Juba’s clothes and with Juba’s guards, to Cato’s palace, in order to pass for Juba, in a place where they were both so very well known: he meets Juba there, and resolves to murder him with his own guards. Upon the guards appearing a little bashful, he threatens them:

	Hah! Dastards, do you tremble!
	Or act like men; or, by yon azure heav’n!

But the guards still remaining restive, Sempronius himself attacks Juba, while each of the guards is representing Mr. Spectator’s sign of the Gaper, awed, it seems, and terrified by Sempronius’s threats. Juba kills Sempronius, and takes his own army prisoners, and carries them in triumph away to Cato. Now, I would fain know, if any parts of Mr. Bayes’s tragedy is so full of absurdity as this?

  It is in every body’s memory, with what applause it was received by the public; that the first run of it lasted for a month; and then stopped, only because one of the performers became incapable of acting a principle part. The Author received a message, that the Queen would be pleased to have it dedicated to her: but as he had designed that compliment elsewhere, he found himself obliged by his duty on the one side, and his honour on the other, to send it into the world without any dedication. The fame of this Tragedy soon spread through Europe, and it has not only been translated, but acted in most of the languages of Christendom. The translation of it into Italian, by Signor Salvini, is very well known; but I have not been able to learn, whether that of Signor Valetta, a young Neapolitan nobleman, has ever been made public.

  The first English writer who compos’d a regular Tragedy, and infus’d a spirit of elegance thro’ every part of it, was the illustrious Mr. Addison. His CATO is a master-piece both with regard to the diction, and to the beauty and harmony of the numbers. The character of Cato is, in my opinion, vastly superior to that of Cornelia in the POMPEY of Corneille: For Cato is great without any thing like fustian, and Cornelia, who besides is not a necessary character, tends sometimes to bombast. Mr. Addison’s Cato appears to me the greatest character that ever was brought upon any Stage, but then the rest of them do not correspond to the dignity of it: And this dramatic piece so excellently well writ, is disfigur’d by a dull love-plot, which spreads a certain languor over the whole, that quite murders it…. The judicious Mr. Addison had the effeminate complaisance to soften the severity of his dramatic character so as to adapt it to the manners of the age; and from an endeavour to please quite ruin’d a master-piece in its kind.

  In 1703, nine years before it was acted, I had the pleasure of reading the first four acts (which was all of it then written) privately with Sir Richard Steele: it may be needless to say it was impossible to lay them out of my hand until I had gone through them; or to dwell upon the delight his friendship to the author received, upon my being so warmly pleased with them; but my satisfaction was as highly disappointed when he told me, whatever spirit Mr. Addison had shown in his writing it, he doubted he would never have courage enough to let his “Cato” stand the censure of an English audience; that it had only been the amusement of his leisure hours in Italy, and was never intended for the stage. The poetical diffidence sir Richard himself spoke of with some concern, and in the transport of his imagination could not help saying, “Good God! what a part would Betterton make of Cato!” But this was seven years before Betterton died, and when Booth (who afterwards made his fortune by acting it) was in his theatrical minority. In the latter end of queen Anne’s reign, when our national politics had changed hands, the friends of Mr. Addison then thought it a proper time to animate the public with the sentiments of Cato. In a word, their importunities were too warm to be resisted; and it was no sooner finished than hurried to the stage, in April 1712.

  Is a glaring instance of the force of party; so sententious and declamatory a drama would never have met with such rapid and amazing success, if every line and sentiment had not been particularly tortured and applied to recent events, and the reigning disputes of the times. The purity and energy of the diction, and the loftiness of the sentiments, copied in a great measure from Lucan, Tacitus, and Seneca the philosopher, merit approbation. But I have always thought, that those pompous Roman sentiments are not so difficult to be produced, as is vulgarly imagined; and which, indeed, dazzle only the vulgar. A stroke of nature is, in my opinion, worth a hundred such thoughts as

	When vice prevails, and impious men bear sway,
	The post of honour is a private station.

“Cato” is a fine dialogue on liberty, and the love of one’s country; but considered as a dramatic performance, nay, as a model of a just tragedy, as some have affectedly represented it, it must be owned to want action and pathos; the two hinges, I presume, on which a just tragedy ought necessarily to turn, and without which it cannot subsist. It wants also character.

  Of a work so much read, it is difficult to say any thing new. About things on which the publick thinks long, it commonly attains to think right; and of “Cato” it has been not unjustly determined, that it is rather a poem in dialogue than a drama, rather a succession of just sentiments in elegant language, than a representation of natural affections, or of any state probable or possible in human life.

  Addison possesses an elegant mind, but he was by no means a poet. He undertook to purify the English tragedy, by a compliance with the supposed rules of good taste. We might have expected from a judge of the ancients, that he would have endeavoured to approach the Greek models. Whether he had any such intention I know not, but certain it is, that he has produced nothing but a tragedy after the French cut. “Cato” is a feeble and frigid piece, almost destitute of action, without one truly overpowering moment. Addison has so narrowed a great and heroic picture by his timid manner of treating it, that he could not even fill up the frame without foreign intermixtures…. Addison took his measures well; he brought all the great and small critics, with Pope at their head, the whole militia of good taste under arms, that he might excite a high expectation of the piece which he had produced with so much labour. “Cato” was universally praised, as a work without an equal. And on what foundation do these boundless claims rest? On regularity of form? This had been already observed by the French poets for nearly a century, and notwithstanding the constraint, they had often attained a much stronger pathetic effect. Or on the political sentiments? But in a single dialogue between Brutus and Cassius, in Shakspeare, there is more of a Roman way of thinking, and republican energy, than in all “Cato.”

  Addison’s “Cato,” in spite of Dennis’s criticism, still retains possession of the stage with all its unities. My love and admiration for Addison is as great as any person’s, let that other person be who he will; but it is not founded on his “Cato,” in extolling which Whigs and Tories contended in loud applause. The interest of this play (bating that shadowy regret that always clings to and flickers round the form of free antiquity) is confined to the declamation, which is feeble in itself, and not heard on the stage. I have seen Mr. Kemble in this part repeat the Soliloquy on Death without a line being distinctly heard; nothing was observable but the thoughtful motion of his lips, and the occasional extension of his hand in sign of doubts suggested or resolved; yet this beautiful and expressive dumb-show, with the propriety of his costume, and the elegance of his attitude and figure, excited the most lively interest, and kept attention even more on the stretch, to catch every imperfect syllable or speaking gesture. There is nothing, however, in the play to excite ridicule, or shock by absurdity, except the love scenes, which are passed over as what the spectator has no proper concern with; and however feeble or languid the interest produced by a dramatic exhibition, unless there is some positive stumbling-block thrown in the way, or gross offence given to an audience, it is generally suffered to linger on to a euthanasia, instead of dying a violent and premature death.

  The exquisite taste and fine observation of Addison, produced only the solemn mawkishness of Cato.

  A tragedy, which, whatever merit it may possess, notwithstanding Pope’s deprecation of “French translation” and his panegyric on “native rage,” is as completely un-English in its whole conception and conduct, as Aaron Hill’s Merope, or Alzire, or any other avowed translation from the French theatre.

  A play, the whole merit of which consists in its stately rhetoric,—a rhetoric sometimes not unworthy of Lucan,—about hating tyrants and dying for freedom, is brought on the stage in a time of great political excitement. Both parties crowd to the theatre. Each affects to consider every line as a compliment to itself, and an attack on its opponents. The curtain falls amidst an unanimous roar of applause. The Whigs of the “Kit Cat” embrace the author, and assure him that he has rendered an inestimable service to liberty. The Tory Secretary of State represents a purse to the chief actor for defending the cause of liberty so well. The history of that night was, in miniature, the history of two generations.

  “Cato” was really and afflictingly a rational play.

  “Cato” was not popular for a moment, nor tolerated for a moment, upon any literary ground, or as a work of art. It was an apple of temptation and strife thrown by the goddess of faction between two infuriated parties. “Cato,” coming from a man without parliamentary connections, would have dropped lifeless to the ground.

  Time is a great iconoclast—reverses all sort of verdicts. What has become of “Cato”? as a poem? as a play? In his day it did much to raise Addison’s fame: it does little to support it now. Johnson calls it the noblest production of Addison’s genius. Macaulay places it long after the masterpieces of the Attic stage, after the Elizabethan dramatists, after Schiller, Alfieri, Voltaire, Corneille, Racine. In truth, Addison, in spite of his refinedly sensitive organisation and his great knowledge and appreciation of human nature, produced a play without feeling and without nature—a literary bas-relief, carven out of cold and colourless stone—its only recommendations, that it was right according to rule, and fashioned accurately after classical patterns. It gave London a month’s excitement, and has since supplied the world with some trite quotations—that is all. It is melancholy to think that Mr. John Dennis’s coarse criticisms were probably just.

  Addison designed his “Cato” (1713) as a great contribution to the task of reforming English tragedy in several important respects. Licentious language was to be banished as a matter of course; but also the British lawlessness in regard to technical rules was to be abjured; and an English tragedy, written in the language and metre of Shakspeare, was to have as much classical correctness, and observe the unities as scrupulously, as the masterpieces of Racine. The play was successful at the time, and it may be pronounced to be still worth reading; several lines from it are familiar to all ears; nevertheless it was not written with sufficient power to found a new school, or form an era in style; it is better than any of its imitations, but not good enough for immortality.

  It is difficult to consider the success of “Cato” in the first instance, and its subsequent protracted popularity, to have resulted from any other influence than that of extravagant puffery, aided in its effect by the elevated station of the author.

  Addison’s poetry in general is rhetorical prose in verse; a striking proof of this is his tragedy “Cato.” It was performed at Drury Lane in 1713, and the immense applause it called forth bore witness to the deterioration of dramatic taste in the native country of Shakespeare.

  “Cato” is full of effective commonplaces, many of which are to this day current as familiar quotations; but otherwise it would be difficult to find in it any distinguishing feature. Voltaire extolled it as the first English tragedie raisonnable, i. e. as the first in which the Rules had been observed with perfect obedience to them as based upon reason; but Dennis had some grounds for his remark, that by observing the Unity of Place the author had only contrived to render the action impossible. For, in order to accommodate his incidents to the Rules, Addison was obliged to exclude much that was essential to the action, while he included much that is not only non-essential but disturbing. It would be difficult to mention a drama in which the amatory episodes are more decidedly tedious and intrusive. Not less than six lovers appear in the piece, and at the close, as Schlegel points out, Cato, before dying, feels himself called upon like a good father in a comedy to arrange a brace of marriages. Moreover, with the exception of these arrangements, the hero of the tragedy is given nothing to do; and where an original feature is added, its introduction is inopportune—thus, the apprehension expressed by Cato that he has been too hasty in committing suicide, seems quite out of harmony with his Stoic opinions. Macaulay with his usual courage defends “Cato,” but cannot say more on its behalf than that it “contains excellent dialogue and declamation, and that among plays fashioned on the French model, it must be allowed to rank high.” But even to this praise certain exceptions might with justice be taken. The language, like every page that came from Addison’s pen, is transparently pure; but where can it be said to approach the grandeur of “Cinna,” or to sparkle like that pure stream from the Castalian fount which permeates the dramas of Racine, even when they fall short of the highest excellence within his reach? And if excellent dialogue means a lifelike interchange of speech—is even so much as this to be found in “Cato?”

  Its dramatic weakness has never been denied. The love scenes are incongruous. It consists in the great part of declamation which Addison’s taste restrained within limits, and polished into many still familiar quotations, but which remains commonplace.

  It had its day of prosperity upon the stage; indeed, it supplied the model for many a later example of less scholarly writers, and now it enjoys the somewhat dubious honor of being bound as part of Addison’s Works—and frequently skipped in the reading thereof. Viewed from the present standpoint it seems prosy and lacking in situation.

The Drummer, 1716

  It had been some years in the hands of the author, and falling under my perusal, I thought so well of it, that I persuaded him to make some additions and alterations to it, and let it appear upon the stage. I own I was very highly pleased with it, and liked it the better, for the want of those studied similies and repartees, which we, who have writ before him, have thrown into our plays, to indulge and gain upon a false taste that has prevailed for many years in the British theatre. I believe the author would have condescended to fall into this way a little more than he has, had he, before the writing of it, been often present at theatrical representations…. As it is not in the common way of writing, the approbation was at first doubtful, but has risen every time it has been acted, and has given an opportunity in several of its parts for as just and good action as ever I saw on the stage.

  Is a pleasant farce enough, but adds nothing to our idea of the author of the “Spectator.”

  It is one of the wonders of literature that Addison with a wit so keen, a literary touch so delicate, and a fertility of fancy so great, should have failed as a comedy-writer. Macaulay, noting how the “Roger de Coverley” papers work into a charming narrative, regrets that a writer so capable of invaluable character-fiction should never have attempted a true novel. Addison’s comedy, “The Drummer,” written with probably some help from Steele, goes some way, though not the whole way, to induce us to think that this regret was groundless. The “Drummer” has in places a humour of its own, but were its authorship unknown few critics probably would detect in its scenes the masterly touch and refined taste of Addison. It was perhaps the moralizing tendency of the author and the age that make this comedy wanting in the right comedy flavour.

Criticisms

  It gives one pain to refuse to such a writer as Mr. Addison, any kind of merit, to which he appears to have laid claim, and which the generality [of his readers] have seemed willing to allow him. Yet it must not be dissembled, that criticism was, by no means, his talent. His taste was truly elegant; but he had neither that vigour of understanding, nor chastised, philosophical spirit, which are so essential to this character, and which we find in hardly any of the antients, besides Aristotle, and but in a very few of the moderns. For what concerns his criticism on Milton in particular, there was this accidental benefit arising from it, that it occasioned an admirable poet to be read, and his excellencies to be observed. But for the merit of the work itself, if there be anything just in the plan, it was, because Aristotle and Bossu had taken the same route before him. And as to his own proper observations, they are for the most part, so general and indeterminate, as to afford but little instruction to the reader, and are, not unfrequently, altogether frivolous.

  It is already well known, that Addison had no very intimate acquaintance with the literature of his own country. It is known, also, that he did not think such an acquaintance any ways essential to the character of an elegant scholar and littérateur. Quite enough he found it, and more than enough for the time he had to spare, if he could maintain a tolerable familiarity with the foremost Latin poets, and a very slender one indeed with the Grecian. How slender, we can see in his “Travels.” Of modern authors, none as yet had been published with notes, commentaries, or critical collations of the text; and, accordingly, Addison looked upon all of them, except those few who professed themselves followers in the retinue and equipage of the ancients, as creatures of a lower race. Boileau, as a mere imitator and propagator of Horace, he read, and probably little else amongst the French classics. Hence it arose that he took upon himself to speak sneeringly of Tasso. To this, which was a bold act for his timid mind, he was emboldened by the countenance of Boileau. Of the elder Italian authors, such as Ariosto, and, a fortiori, Dante, he knew absolutely nothing. Passing to our own literature, it is certain that Addison was profoundly ignorant of Chaucer and of Spenser. Milton only,—and why? simply because he was a brilliant scholar, and stands like a bridge between the Christian literature and the Pagan,—Addison had read and esteemed.

  We must remember that, however narrow, and prejudiced, and exclusive may seem to us the dogmas of Addison’s literary criticisms, yet that these were the first popular essays in English towards the investigation of the grounds and axioms of æsthetic science, and that even here, in innumerable instances (as, for example, in the celebrated reviews of “Paradise Lost,” and of the old national ballad of “Chevy Chase”), we find the author’s natural and delicate sense of the beautiful and sublime triumphing over the accumulated errors and false judgment of his own artificial age, and the author of “Cato” doing unconscious homage to the nature and pathos of the rude old Border ballad-maker.

  These papers constitute a Primer to “Paradise Lost.” Most skilfully constructed both to interest and instruct, but still a Primer. As the excellent setting may the better display the gem of incalculable value: so may Addison’s thought help us to understand Milton’s “greatness of Soul, which furnished him with such glorious Conceptions.” Let us not stop at the Primer, but pass on to a personal apprehension of the great English Epic.

  His celebrated commentary on “Paradise Lost” is little better than the dissertations of Batteux and Bossu.

  Addison’s sensitive nature gave refinement to his humour, and delicacy to his sense of the charm of style. He was the best critic of his day, and the more readily accepted because he shared to some extent, conventional opinions of his time. He enjoyed “Chevy Chase” and “the Babes in the Wood,” and did so for good human reasons. But when he tried in Spectator papers to show cause for his enjoyment, it was by suggesting resemblances to Horace and Vergil. There are passages in Addison’s criticisms of “Paradise Lost” by which he made Spectator papers a means of rescuing Milton from the prejudices of the day, in which the prejudices themselves govern his argument; and what we might now look upon as the weak part of his criticism, was in his own time a safeguard to his reputation. But there was nothing conventional in Addison’s tastes. The sympathetic insight of genius and the religious depths of character caused him to fasten only on that which was good; all that could be affected by convention was his manner of accounting critically for his right impressions.

  In his own day Addison was held in higher esteem as a critic than later generations have deemed him to deserve. His formal critical studies show no especial force or insight. That refined taste and correctness which always marked him, certainly appears in his judgments of literature, but frequently his thoughts are too mild to be stimulating, and we turn from the papers on Milton, as well as from the various ethical reflections, to his delicate social satire, or those genial character-sketches which never lose their charm. Yet all his writing is agreeable, if for nothing more than its exquisite expression—clear, quiet, unobtrusive, finished yet always easy; every essay shows, too, the thought and spirit as well as the language of a cultivated gentleman.

  Addison brought to the study of literature a mind which was open to receive impressions from every side. He commenced, as he was bound to do, with an application of the rules of Aristotle, but he acquired confidence in his own judgment as he proceeded in his researches, and finally availed himself freely of new elements of human knowledge which were unknown to Aristotle. His application of the Aristotelian canons to “Paradise Lost” was undertaken in deference to the spirit of the age, but in his essay on “The Pleasures of the Imagination,” he discovers a new principle to which the charm and power of poetic literature is to be referred: a principle which, unlike the appeal to “fear and pity,” is applicable not to one but to every form of poetry and fiction. And in so doing he introduces fresh considerations, which affect all manifestations of art, but of which the rules of Aristotle take no account, and notices new effects for which these rules provide no tests; and in supplying these emissions he has permanently widened the scope of criticism, whether the object of its inquiry be a picture or a poem, form or thought…. By the work of Addison criticism was brought into line with modern thought; and the critic was provided with a test which he could apply with equal success to every fresh form which literature had developed.

General

  The ingenious Mr. Addison, of Oxford.

  His wit, natural good sense, generous sentiments, and enterprising genius, with a peculiar delicacy and easiness of writing, seem those qualities which distinguished Mr. Steele. Mr. Addison has the same talents in a high degree, and is likewise a great philosopher, having applied himself to the speculative studies more than any of the wits that I know.

	With graceful step see Addison advance,
	The sweetest child of Attic elegance.

  Mr. Addison, for a happy and natural style, will be always an honour to British literature. His diction indeed wants strength, but it is equal to all the subjects he undertakes to handle, as he never (at least in his finished works) attempts anything in the argumentative or demonstrative way.

  Addison wrote little in verse, much in sweet, elegant, Virgilian prose; so let me call it, since Longinus calls Herodotus most Homeric; and Thucydides is said to have formed his style on Pindar. Addison’s compositions are built with the finest materials, in the taste of the ancients. I never read him, but I am struck with such a disheartening idea of perfection, that I drop my pen. And, indeed, far superior writers should forget his compositions, if they would be greatly pleased with their own.

  The cold and well-disciplined merit of Addison.

  His own powers were such as might have satisfied him with conscious excellence. Of very extensive learning he has indeed given no proofs. He seems to have had small acquaintance with the sciences, and have read little except Latin and French; but of the Latin poets his “Dialogues on Medals” shew that he had perused the works with great diligence and skill. The abundance of his own mind left him little indeed of adventitious sentiments; his wit always could suggest what the occasion demanded. He had read with critical eyes the important volume of human life, and knew the heart of man from the depths of stratagem to the surface of affectation…. His poetry is first to be considered; of which it must he confessed that it has not often those felicities of diction which gave lustre to sentiments, or that vigour of sentiment that animates diction: there is little of ardour, vehemence, or transport; there is very rarely the awfulness of grandeur, and not very often the splendour of elegance. He thinks justly; but he thinks faintly. This is his general character; to which, doubtless, many single passages will furnish exception. Yet, if he seldom reaches supreme excellence, he rarely sinks into dulness, and is still more rarely entangled in absurdity. He did not trust his powers enough to be negligent. There is in most of his compositions a calmness and equability, deliberate and cautious, sometimes with little that delights, but seldom with anything that offends…. As a describer of life and manners, he must be allowed to stand perhaps the first of the first rank…. As a teacher of wisdom, he may be confidently followed. His religion has nothing in it enthusiastick or superstitious: he appears neither weakly credulous, nor wantonly sceptical; his morality is neither dangerously lax, nor impracticably rigid…. His prose is the model of the middle style; on grave subjects not formal, on light occasions not groveling; pure without scrupulosity, and exact without apparent elaboration; always equable, and always easy, without glowing words or pointed sentences…. Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison.

	In front of these came Addison. In him
	Humour in holiday and slightly trim,
	Sublimity and Attic taste combined,
	To polish, furnish, and delight the mind.

  Of the latter of these, the highest, most correct, and ornamented degree of the simple manner, Mr. Addison, is, beyond doubt, in the English language, the most perfect example: and, therefore, though not without some faults, he is, on the whole, the safest model for unitation, and the freest from considerable defects, which the language affords. Perspicuous and pure, he is in the highest degree; his precision, indeed, not very great, yet nearly as great as the subjects which he treats of require; the construction of his sentences easy, agreeable, and commonly very musical; carrying a character of smoothness more than of strength. In figurative language, he is rich particularly in similes and metaphors; which are so employed, as to render his style splendid, without being gaudy. There is not the least affectation in his manner; we see no marks of labour, nothing forced or constrained; but great elegance, joined with great ease and simplicity. He is, in particular, distinguished by a character of modesty, and of politeness, which appears in all his writings. No author has a more popular and insinuating manner; and the great regard which he every where shows for virtue and religion, recommends him highly. If he fails in anything it is in want of strength and precision, which renders his manner, though perfectly suited to such essays as he writes in the “Spectator,” not altogether a proper model for any of the higher and more elaborate kinds of composition. Though the public have ever done much justice to his merit, yet the nature of his merit has not always been seen in its true light; for, though his poetry be elegant, he certainly bears a higher rank among the prose writers, than he is entitled to among the poets, and, in prose, his humour is of a much higher, and more original strain, than his philosophy. The character of Sir Roger de Coverly discovers more genius than the critique on Milton.

  Addison is a writer eminently enervated; and few authors, distinguished in the belles-lettres and of so recent a date, will be found more strikingly loose and unsystematical in their diction.

  To the keenest preception of the beautiful and sublime in composition, he added a taste pre-eminently delicate and correct, and the most engaging and fascinating style that this country had ever witnessed; with these were combined the most unrivalled humour, a morality lovely and interesting as it was pure and philanthrophic, and a fancy whose effusions were peculiarly sweet, rich, and varied…. The great object which Addison ever steadily held in view, and to which his style, his criticism, his humour and imagination are alike subservient, was the increase of religious, moral, and social virtue. Perhaps to the writings of no individual, of any age or nation, if we except the result of inspiration, have morality and rational piety been more indebted than to those which form the periodical labours of our author.

  The style of Addison is pure and clear, rather diffuse than concentrated, and ornamental to the highest degree consistent with good taste. But this ornament consists, not in the splendor of imagery, not in the ordonnance of words; his readers will seek in vain for those sonorous cadences with which the public ear has been familiarized since the writings of Dr. Johnson. They will find no stately magnificence of phrase, no trials of sentences artfully balanced, so as to form a sweep of harmony, at the close of a period. His words are genuine English; he deals little in inversions, and often allows himself to conclude negligently with a trivial word. The fastidious ear may occasionally be offended with some colloquial phrases, and some expressions which would not now, perhaps, be deemed perfectly accurate—the remains of barbarisms which he, more than any one, had labored to banish from good writing—but the best judges have doubted whether our language has not lost more than it has gained since his time. An idiomatic style gives a truth and spirit to a composition that is but ill compensated by an elaborate pomp, which sets written composition at too great a distance from speech, for which it is only the substitute.

  The extreme caution, timidity, and flatness of this author in his poetical compositions—the narrowness of his range in poetical sentiment and diction, and the utter want either of passion or of brilliancy, render it difficult to believe that he was born under the same sun with Shakespeare, and wrote but a century after him. His fame, at this day, stands solely upon the delicacy, the modest gaiety, and ingenious purity of his prose style;—for the occasional elegance and small ingenuity of his poems can never redeem the poverty of their diction, and the tameness of their conception.

  The very name of Addison inspires delight. That charming writer was not only, in himself, one of the most perfect of prose authors, but, in the Spectator, (of which he might be called at once the patron and promoter) he set an example of instructing the intellectual public, at certain short periods, with essays, tales, allegories, and criticisms, such as had never before met their eyes. He not only brought a good philological taste into fashion, and placed Milton upon a pedestal from which he can never be pulled down, but gave a pleasing and popular turn to religious studies and duties. In this latter department there is, occasionally, a sort of easy and natural sublimity about Addison, which belongs peculiarly to himself. Confidence, hope, comfort, love, gratitude, and adoration, are what he infuses into a christian spirit; and his two celebrated pieces of poetry, or short hymns, illustrative of what he has inculcated in prose, are perfect master-pieces of their kind. But the reader, I apprehend, is beginning to be fearful lest I should omit the mention of that peculiar feature in the compositions of Addison, which stamps him as an undoubted original. It is his Humour, then, wherein he is unrivalled. But this is a theme, almost inexhaustible in itself, and familiar to us from boyhood; and so I draw back from expatiating.

  I have sometimes thought that Addison wanted profundity, though he was always elegant and always just. I prefer Cowley’s prose style to Addison’s.

  Addison was a mere lay preacher, completely bound up in formalism, but he did get to say many a true thing in his generation; an instance of one formal man doing great things. Steele had infinitely more naïveté, but he was only a fellow-soldier of Addison, to whom he subordinated himself more than was necessary. It is a cold vote in Addison’s favor that one gives.

  As a moral satirist, he stands unrivalled. If ever the best “Tatlers” and “Spectators” were equalled in their own kind, we should be inclined to guess that it must have been by the lost comedies of Menander. In wit, properly so called, Addison was not inferior to Cowley or Butler. No single ode of Cowley contains so many happy analogies as are crowded into the lines to Sir Godfrey Kneller; and we would undertake to collect from the “Spectators” as great a number of ingenious illustrations as can be found in “Hudibras.” The still higher faculty of invention Addison possessed in still larger measure. The numerous fictions, generally original, often wild and grotesque, but always singularly graceful and happy, which are found in his essays, fully entitle him to the rank of a great poet—a rank to which his metrical compositions give him no claim. As an observer of life, of manners, of all the shades of human character, he stands in the first class. And what he observed he had the art of communicating in two widely different ways. He could describe virtues, vices, habits, whims, as well as Clarendon. But he could do something better. He could call human beings into existence, and make them exhibit themselves. If we wish to find anything more vivid than Addison’s best portraits, we must go either to Shakspeare or to Cervantes…. We own that the humour of Addison is, in our opinion, of a more delicious flavour than the humour of either Swift or Voltaire…. Of Addison it may be confidently affirmed that he has blackened no man’s character, nay, that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to find in all the volumes which he has left us a single taunt which can be called ungenerous or unkind…. We have not the least doubt, that, if Addison had written a novel, on an extensive plan, it would have been superior to any that we possess. As it is, he is entitled to be considered, not only as the greatest of the English essayists, but as the forerunner of the great English novelists.

  In refined and delicate humour Addison has no superior, if he has any equal, in English prose literature…. Who can set limits to the influence which such a mind has exerted? And what a lesson should it read to the conductors of our periodic press, from the stately quarterly to the daily newspaper! What untold gain would it be to the world if they would think less of party, and more of TRUTH: if they would ever be found the firm advocates of every thing that tends to elevate and bless man, and the steadfast, outspoken opponents of all that tends to degrade, debase, and brutalize him.

  He amuses himself with people, not because he dislikes them, but because he likes them, and is not discomposed by their absurdities. He does not go very far down into the hearts of them; he never discovers any of the deeper necessities which there are in human beings. But everything that is upon the surface of their lives, and all the little cross-currents which disturb them, no one sees so accurately, or describes so gracefully. In certain moods of our mind, therefore, we have here a most agreeable friend, one who takes us to no great effort, who does not set us on encountering any terrible evils, or carrying forward any high purpose, but whom one must always admire for his quietness and composure; who can teach us to observe a multitude of things that we should else pass by, and reminds us that in man’s life, as in nature, there are days of calm and sunshine as well as of storm.

	Exquisite Genius, to whose chisell’d line
	The ivory’s polish lends the ivory’s shine—

  The distinctive characteristic of Addison may perhaps be compared to what is said to give the peculiar charm to Circassian beauty—a certain luxurious air of dreamy repose in the half-closed eyelids.

  Well, but Addison’s prose is Attic prose. Where, then, it may be asked, is the note of provinciality in Addison? I answer, in the commonplace of his ideas. This is a matter worth remarking. Addison claims to take leading rank as a moralist. To do that, you must have ideas of the first order on your subject,—the best ideas, at any rate, attainable in your time,—as well as be able to express them in a perfectly sound and sure style…. Now Addison has not, on his subject of morals, the force of ideas of the moralists of the first class,—the classical moralists; he has not the best ideas attainable in or about his time, and which were, so to speak, in the air then, to be seized by the finest spirits; he is not to be compared for power, searchingness, or delicacy of thought to Pascal, or La Bruyère, or Vauvenargues; he is rather on a level, in this respect, with a man like Marmontel; therefore, I say, he has the note of provinciality as a moralist; he is provincial by his matter, though not by his style.

  Addison’s style is indeed simple, beautiful, clear, and expressive: It has the greatest ease possible. Even when the matter is small and insignificant, one reads on and on with pleasure, because a master holds the pen.

  For graceful style, for polished satire, for delicate delineation of character, Addison has never been surpassed; but on the stage of active politics he was scarce a match for the passionate ardour, the withering irony, of Swift.

  His writings are conversations, masterpieces of English urbanity and reason; nearly all the details of his character and life have contributed to nourish this urbanity and this reasonableness…. His writings are the pure source of classical style; men never spoke in England better. Ornaments abound, and rhetoric has no part in them. Throughout we have just contrasts, which serve only for clearness, and are not too much prolonged; happy expressions, easily discovered, which give things a new and ingenious turn; harmonious periods, in which the sounds flow into one another with the diversity and sweetness of a quiet stream; a fertile vein of inventions and images, through which runs the most amiable irony.

  He made all that he wrote luminous with piety and fragrant with virtue. Writing in a day when blasphemy was accounted a high kind of wit, and obscenity a high kind of humour, he has transmitted almost nothing to which the most rigid female purist of our own most moral epoch could take the smallest exception. You will appreciate the amazing vigour of his mind which enabled him to leap so effectually and so far from the gutter in which the turgid and noisome dialect of that era flowed into the sewers, by comparing him with his contemporaries. Swift, who was exceptionally bad, may be omitted; but compare him with Wycherley, Congreve, Gay, Garth, Prior, Dryden (who was still recent), and the noble rhymesters, such as Buckingham, Halifax, and Granville.

  The clouded fame of Marlborough has sensibly decayed; few new care to pursue the devious intrigues of Bolingbroke and Oxford; but from the successful reign of Queen Anne still gaze down upon us a cluster of thoughtful faces whose lineaments the world will never cease to trace with interest, and to whom mankind must ever turn with grateful regard. One fair, soft countenance alone is always serene. No lines of fierce struggles or of bitter discontent, of brooding madness or of envious rage, disturb that gentle aspect. A delicate taste, a tranquil disposition, a clear sense of the vanity of human passions and of all earthly aims, have softened and subdued the mental supremacy of Addison. To some he has seemed feeble; for many he wants the fire of genius. But multitudes in every age have been held willing captives by the lively play of his unwearied fancy, his melodious periods, his tenderness and truth; have yielded to a power that is never asserted, and to an art that is hidden in the simplicity of a master.

  The crowning quality of these papers, as work of literature, is their elegance. This made of prose a fine art, and ranked its best productions, with those of poetry, among the permanent products of taste. This excellence was fully achieved, for the first time in our literature, by Addison; and since his day elegant culture has found constant expression in prose. The art of Addison is far less cold and critical than that of Pope. It preserves its freedom, and moves with a simplicity and ease, that are open indeed to error, but are also able to make that error seem slight and unimportant. There is in his style no opposition between nature and art; the substance and form remain inseparable, the thought lifting itself into light and being at once, rising in a single creative act out of the chaos of material.

  Greater energy of character, or a more determined hatred of vice and tyranny, would have curtailed his usefulness as a public censor. He led the nation gently and insensibly to a love of virtue and constitutional freedom, to a purer taste in morals and literature, and to the importance of those everlasting truths which so warmly engaged his heart and imagination. The national taste and circumstances have so much changed during the last century and a half, that these essays, inimitable as they are, have become antiquated, and are little read.

  Little as the people had previously read English books, there is no evidence that Addison’s numerous papers on “Paradise Lost,” in which he taught the readers of the “Spectator” how to enjoy and appreciate a poem which few newspaper readers of the present day are capable of enjoying, were less popular than those on higher subjects. Steele made his subscribers acquainted with Pope, Dryden, Swift, and other writers who had previously been read by few but schoolmen; while it is not improbable, even, that Addison did more than the clergy to persuade men to read the Bible for other purposes than that of quieting conscience.

  His style, with its free, unaffected movement, its clear distinctness, its graceful transitions, its delicate harmonies, its appropriateness of tone; the temperance and moderation of his treatment, the effortless self-mastery, the sense of quiet power, the absence of exaggeration or extravagance, the perfect keeping with which he deals with his subjects; or again the exquisite reserve, the subtle tenderness, the geniality, the pathos of his humour—what are these but the literary reflection of Addison himself, of that temper so pure and lofty yet so sympathetic, so strong yet so lovable.

  Accustomed as we are to the pungent and the drastic, we yawn over the stingless, self-effacing irony of the gentle Addison; the colors seem pale, the bouquet imperceptible. Is it possible that time has bleached the page of Addison, until it has become like a faded fresco by some old master who worked in inferior colors? Can it be that there are now scores of writers his equals in point of style, his superiors in intellectual resources? Must then this stylist, whose primacy no contemporary dared question, who made the term “Addisonian” signify for prose what “Virgilian” signifies for verse, of whom Thackeray so lately said, “We owe as much pleasure to him as to any human being that ever wrote,”—must he who has charmed, consoled, instructed, formed, so many generations, now become an emeritus? It is safe to assume that those who would answer these questions affirmatively have never lived with Addison; that they have, at best, but a bowing acquaintance with him…. Perhaps there has never been a time since the immediate objects of the “Spectator” were accomplished when its satire and instruction were more applicable than here and now.

  Addison was welcome for the same reason for which Butler and Swift were unwelcome. He knew as they did not the more sympathetic side of human nature and how to address himself to it. He was in this respect the Washington Irving of English Prose…. So particular was he in composition, that, according to Warton, he would often stop the press to insert a new preposition or conjunction. He was as fastidious in prose as Pope and Dryden were in poetry…. Verbal precision overreaches itself in Addison. It was, indeed, the error of the age.

  It is difficult in a short summary of facts to give any impression of the influence exercised on the mind and feelings of his country by Addison. It was out of proposition with the mere outcome of his literary genius. It was the result of character almost more than of intellect, of goodness and reasonableness almost more than of wit. His qualities of mind, however, if not of the very loftiest order, were relatively harmonised to an astonishing degree, so that the general impression of Addison is of a larger man than the close contemplation of any one side of his genius reveals him as being. He has all the moral ornaments of the literary character; as a writer he is urbane, cheerful, charming, and well-mannered to a degree which has scarcely been surpassed in the history of the world. His wit is as penetrating as a perfume; his irony presupposes a little circle of the best and most cultivated listeners; his fancy is so well tempered by judgment and observation that it passes with us for imagination. We delight in his company so greatly that we do not pause to reflect that the inventor of Sir Roger de Coverley and Will Honeycomb had not half of the real comic force of Farquhar or Vanbrugh, nor so much as that of the flashing wit of Congreve. Human nature, however, is superior to the rules, and Addison stands higher than those more original writers by merit of the reasonableness, the good sense, the wholesome humanity that animates his work. He is classic, while they are always a little way over on the barbaric side of perfection. The style of Addison is superior to his matter, and holds a good many flies in its exquisite amber. It did not reach its highest quality until Addison had become acquainted with “A Tale of a Tub,” but it grew to be a finer thing, though not a greater, than the style of Swift.

  Nobody nowadays reads his verse, which was so loudly applauded by his contemporaries; and only those among us who are curious in tracing the history of English prose affect to find any pleasure in his contributions to the “Tatler” and the “Spectator.”

  The finest critic, the finest gentleman, the most tender humorist of his age…. 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.

  The alliance between Addison and Steele was so intimate, that to judge of one apart from the other, would be fair to neither…. That while Steele might, under very inferior conditions, have produced the “Tatler” and “Spectator” without Addison, it is highly improbable that Addison, as an essayist, would have existed without Steele.

  It is the supreme distinction of Addison, as the chief founder of English essay-writing, to have created in England a school of literary taste which, without sacrificing any of the advantages derived from liberty, has raised our language almost to a level with the French in elegance and precision…. These characteristics of Addison’s thought are reproduced in his style, which reflects in the most refined and beautiful form the conversational idiom of his period. He is, indeed, far from attaining that faultless accuracy which has been sometimes ascribed to him. It was his aim to make philosophy popular, and always to discourse with his readers in familiar language; but it is observable that, when writing on abstract subjects, he frequently becomes involved and obscure…. In a word, it may be said that the essay in the hands of Addison acquired that perfection of well-bred ease which arises from a complete understanding between an author and his audience.

  Addison’s unity is usually faultless. His coherence depends largely upon word-order and sentence-structure; of 300 sentences only 13 begin with and, 16 with but. His massing, when compared with Swift’s, is defective. In brief, the paragraph structure is easy and flowing, correct in unity, defective in emphasis. Addison’s favorite paragraph is loose, with one or two introductory sentences. Deductive specimens are not infrequent. The topic is often developed by repetition from changing points of view,—what Scott and Denney have termed the alternating method. The method is frequently overdone. Addison had little sense of the value of the short sentence, either as a means of emphasis, or as a way of varying paragraph rhythm. His rhythm remained a somewhat monotonous sentence-rhythm.

  He [Landor] was interesting about Addison: he said that an engaging simplicity shone through all that he wrote; that there was coyness in his style, the archness and shyness of a graceful and beautiful girl.

  Style without “preciosity;” natural style; fitness of phrase: clearness and “netteté:” a style without mannerism: yet wholly individual: this seems to be more likely to be attained by the reading of Addison than by that of Stevenson.

  In graphic portraiture and genial humor, in sweet temper and moral purity, combined with a courtly grace and tender sympathy, Addison stands surpassingly great. He is a great poet using the form of prose. His imagination is associative, penetrative, and reflective.

  Of his English verse nothing has survived, except his really beautiful hymns, where the combination of sincere religious feelings (of the sincerity of Addison’s religion there is absolutely no doubt, though it was of a kind now out of fashion) and of critical restraint produced things of real, though modest and quiet, excellence. “The Lord my pasture shall prepare,” “The spacious firmament on high,” and “How are Thy servants blest! O Lord,” may lack the mystical inspiration of the greatest hymns, but their cheerful piety, their graceful use of images, which, though common, are never mean, their finish and even, for the time, their fervour make them singularly pleasant. The man who wrote them may have had foibles and shortcomings, but he can have had no very grave faults, as the authors of more hysterical and glowing compositions easily might. The two principal prose works are little read now, but they are worth reading…. They exhibit, in the opening of the “Medals” and in all the descriptive passages of the “Italy,” the curious insensibility of the time to natural beauty, or else its almost more curious inability to express what it felt, save in the merest generalities and commonplaces.

  As a rule his epistolary style has the defect of his essays: it is too finished, formal, and self-conscious. He is so desperately afraid of betraying the least emotion, that he appears more frigid than he really was. Suaviter subridens he dares not break into a hearty laugh. “Elegant” to the point of exasperation, he conveys an unfortunate, and indeed erroneous, impression of insincerity.

  Occasionally a writer may even gain deserved eminence chiefly by the excellence of his style. Joseph Addison was regarded for nearly a century as our first master of English prose. And not unjustly. Few writers ever have been able to render themselves with greater nicety. His style is flexible, graceful, urbane; it is Mr. Addison in speech. As we read it we see the very man as he was. As far as style goes, our grandfathers were right in their praise. But Addison never added much to the stock of human thought, never stirs our feelings very deeply. We see that there is not much in the man after all—no profound or original ideas, no deep passions.

  Excellent and devout spirit as Addison was, he escaped the dangers of zeal, and to him party-spirit appeared to be a deplorable form of madness. He could not understand why multitudes of honest gentlemen, who entirely agree in their lives, should take it in their heads to differ in their religion.

  We read his writings with a refined and soothing pleasure. They possess a genial humor and unvarying cheerfulness that are contagious and delightful. There is no other writer who has greater power to dispel gloominess. As seen through his pages, the world appears wrapped in a mellow light. We learn to think more kindly of men, to smile at human foibles, to entertain ennobling sentiments, to trust in an overruling providence. He does not indeed usually treat of the deeper interests of human life; he is never profound; he does not try to exhaust a subject—to write it to the dregs. His sphere is rather that of minor morals, social foibles, and small philosophy. But if he is not deep, he is not trifling; and if he is not exhaustive, he is always interesting.

  Addison’s prose is simple and intelligible, and, although he undoubtedly took great pains to make it finished, and was about the first to regard prose writing as an art, it always appears natural and unaffected.