Class PK ^Z Q6 Rnnk C 7 7 ^ugltBl) iilcn of betters EDITED BY JOHN MORLEY ADDISON BY W. J. COURTHOPE /■: NEW YORT^ — HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS FRANKLIN SQUARE 1884 ENGLISH 'MEN OF LETTERS. Edited by John Morley. Johnson Leslie Stephen. Gibbon J. C. Morison. Scott R. H. Hutton. Shelley J. A. Symonds. Hume T. H. Huxley. Goldsmith William Black. Defoe William Minto. Burns J. C. Shairp. Spenser R. W. Church. Thackeray Anthony Trollope. Burke John Morley. Milton Mark Pattison. Hawthorne Henry James, Jr. SouTHEY Bt Dowden. Chaucer A. W. Ward. BuNYAN J. A. Froude. CowPER Goldwin Smith. Pope Leslie Stephen. Byron John Nichol. Locke Thomas Fowler. Wordsworth F. Myers. Dryden G. Saintsbury. Landok Sidney Colvin. De Quincey David Masson. Lamb Alfred Ainger. Bentley R. C. Jebb. Dickens A. W. Ward. Gray E. W. Gosse. Swift Leslie Stephen. Sterne H. D. Traill. Macaulay J. Cotter Morison. Fielding Austin Dobson. Sheridan Mrs. Oliphant. Addison W. J. Courthope. i2mo, Cloth, 75 cents per volume. Published by HARPER & BROTHERS, New York. Any of the above -works -will be sent by -mail, postage prepaid, to any part of the United States, on receipt of the price. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. PAGE The State of English Societt and Letters after THE Restoration 1 CHAPTER II. Addison's Family and Education 21 CHAPTER III. Addison on His Travels 38 CHAPTER IV. His Employment in Affairs of Stato . . . . . . 53 CHAPTER V. The "Tatler" and "Spectator" 78 CHAPTER VI. "Cato" 110 CHAPTER VII. Addison's Quarrel with Pope 125 CHAPTER VIII. The Last Years op His Life 139 CHAPTER IX. The Genius op Addison ; 153 ADDISON. CHAPTER I. THE STATE OF ENGLISH SOCIETY AND LETTERS AFTER THE RESTORATION. Of the four English men of letters whose writings most fully embody the spirit of the eighteenth century, the one who provides the biographer with the scantiest materials is Addison. In his Journal to Stella^ his social verses, and his letters to his friends, we have a vivid picture of those relations with women and that protracted suffering which invest with such tragic interest the history of Swift. Pope, by the publication of his own correspondence, has enabled us, in a way that he never intended, to understand the strange moral twist which distorted a nature by no means devoid of noble instincts. Johnson was fortunate in the companionship of perhaps the best biographer who ever lived. But of the real life and character of Addison scarcely any contemporary record remains. The formal narrative prefixed to his works by Tickell is, by that writ- er's own admission, little more than a bibliography. Steele, who might have told us more than any man about his boy- hood and his manner of life in London, had become es- tranged from his old friend before his death. No writer 2 ADDISON. [CHAP. has taken the trouble to preserve any account of the wit and wisdom tliat enlivened the " little senate " at Button's. His own letters are, as a rule, compositions as finished as his papers in the Spectator. Those features in his charac- ter which excite the greatest interest have been delineated by the hand of an enemy — an enemy who possessed an unrivalled power of satirical portrait-painting, and was re- strained by no regard for truth from creating in the pub- lic mind such impressions about others as might serve to heighten the favourable opinion of himself. 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 ex- cited 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 conver- sation, by the admission of his satirist Pope, liad 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 percep- tion of Mandeville he might have seemed no more than " a parson in a tye-wig," can hardly have been deficient in force of character. Nor would it have been possible for a writer distin- guished by mere elegance and refinement to leave a last- ing impress on the literature and society of his country. In one generation after another, men representing oppos- ing elements of rank, class, interest, and taste, have agreed in acknowledging Addison's extraordinary merits. " WJio- I.] LETTERS AFTER THE RESTORATION. 3 ever wishes," says Johnson — at the end of a biography strongly coloured with the prepossessions of a semi-Jacob- ite Tory — "whoever wishes to attain an English style, fa- miliar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison." " Such a mark of national respect," says Macaulay, the best representative of middle-class opinion in the present century, speaking of the statue erected to Addison in West- minster Abbey, " was due to the unsullied statesman, to the accomplished scholar, to the master of pure English eloquence, to the consummate painter of life and manners. It was due, above all, to the great satirist who alone knew how to use ridicule without abusing it;, who, without in- flicting a wound, effected a great social reform, and who reconciled wit and virtue after a long and disastrous sepa- ration, during which wit had been led astray by profligacy, and virtue by fanaticism." This verdict of a great critic is accepted by an age to which the grounds of it are, perhaps, not very apparent. The author of any ideal creation — a poem, a drama, or a novel — has an imprescriptible property in the fame of his work. But to harmonise conflicting social elements, to bring order out of chaos in the sphere of criticism, to form right ways of thinking about questions of morals, taste, and breeding, are operations of which the credit, though it is certainly to be ascribed to particular individuals, is generally absorbed by society itself. Macaulay's eulogy is as just as it is eloquent, but the pages of the Spectator alone will hardly show the reader why Addison should be so highly praised for having reconciled wit with virtue. Nor, looking at him as a critic, will it appear a great achievement to have pointed out to English society the beauties of Paradise Lost, unless it be remembered that 1* 4 ADDISON. [chap. the taste of the preceding generation still influenced Addi- son's conteraporaries, and that in that generation Cowley was accounted a greater poet than Milton. To estimate Addison at his real value we inust regard him as the chief architect of Public Opinion in the eigh- teenth century. But here again we are met by an initial difficulty, because it has become almost a commonplace of contemporary criticism to represent the eighteenth century as a period of sheer destruction. It is tacitly assumed by a school of distinguished philosophical writers that we have arrived at a stage in the world's history in which it is possible to take a positive and scientific view of human affairs. As it is of course necessary that from such a system all belief in the supernatural shall be jealously ex- cluded, it has not seemed impossible to write the history of Thought itself in the eighteenth century. And in tra- cing the course of this supposed continuous stream it is nat- ural that all the great English writers of the period should be described as in one vyay or another helping to pull down, or vainly to strengthen, the theological barriers erected by centuries of bigotry against the irresistible tide of enlight- ened progress. It would be of course entirely out of place to discuss here the merits of this new school of history. Those wh® consider that, whatever glimpses we may obtain of the law and order of the universe, man is, as he always has been and always will be, a mystery to himself, will hardly allow that the operations of the human spirit can be traced in the dissecting-room. But it is, in any case, obvious that to treat the great imaginative writers of any age as if they were only mechanical agents in an evolution of thought is to do them grave injustice. Such writers are, above all things, creative. Their first aim is to " show the very age I.] LETTERS AFTER THE RESTORATION. 5 and body of the time his form and pressure." No work of the eighteenth century, composed in a consciously de- structive spirit, has taken its place among the acknowl- edged classics of the language. Even the Tale of a Tub is to be regarded as a satire upon the aberrations of theo- logians from right reason, not upon the principles of Chris- tianity itself. The Essay on Man has, no doubt, logically a tendency towards Deism, but nobody ever read the poem for the sake of its philosophy ; and it is well known that Pope was much alarmed when it was pointed out to him that his conclusions might be represented as incompatible with the doctrines of revealed religion. The truth indeed seems to be the exact converse of what is alleged by the scientific historians. So far from the eighteenth century in England being an age of destructive analysis, its energies were chiefly devoted to political, so- cial, and literary reconstruction. Whatever revolution in faith and manners the English nation had undergone had been the work of the two preceding centuries, and though the historic foundations of society remained untouched, the whole form of the superstructure had been profoundly modified. " So tenacious are we," said Burke, towards the close of the last century, " of our old ecclesiastical modes and fashions of institution that very little change has been made in them since the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries, adhering in this particular as in all else to our old settled maxim never entirely nor at once to depart from antiquity. We found these institutions on the whole favourable to morality and discipline, and we thought they were susceptible of amendment with- out altering the ground. We thought they were capable of receiving and meliorating, and, above all, of preserving the accessories of sci- ence and literature as the order of Providence should successively produce them. And after all, with this Gothic and monkish educa- tion (for such it is the groundwork), we may put in our claim to as 6 ADDISON. [chap. ample and early a share in all the improvements in science, in arts, and in literature whicli have illuminated the modern world as any other nation in Europe. We think one main cause of tliis improve- ment was our not despising the patrimony of knowledge which was left us by our forefathers." All this is, in substahce, true of our political as well as our ecclesiastical institutions. And yet, when Burke wrote, the great feudal and mediaeval structure of England had been so transformed by the Wars of the Roses, the Refor- mation, the Rebellion, and the Revolution, that its ancient outlines were barely visible. In so far, therefore, as his words seem to iniply that the social evolution he describes was produced by an imperceptible and almost mechanical process of national instinct, the impression they tend to create is entirely erroneous. If we have been hitherto saved from such corruption as undermined the republics of Italy, from the religious wars that so long enfeebled and divided Germany, and from the Revolution that has severed modern France from her an- cient history, thanks for this are due partly, no doubt, to favouring conditions of nature and society, but quite as much to the genius of great individuals who prepared the mind of the nation for the gradual assimilation of new ideas. Thus Langland and Wycliffe and their numerous followers, long before the Reformation, had so familiarised the minds of the people with their ideas of the Christian religion that the Sovereign was able to assume the Head- ship of the Church without the shock of a social convul- sion. Fresh feelings and instincts grew up in the hearts of whole classes of the nation without at first producing any change in outward habits of life, and even without arousing a sense of their logical incongruity. These mixed ideas were constantly brought before the imagination in I.] LETTERS AFTER THE RESTORATION. 1 tlie works of the poets. Shakespeare abounds with pas- sages in which, side by side with the old feudal, monarchi- cal, catholic, and patriotic instincts of Englishmen, we find the sentiments of the Italian Renaissance, Spenser con- veys Puritan doctrines sometimes by the mouth of shep- herds, whose originals he had found in Theocritus and Vir- gil ; sometimes under allegorical forms derived from books of chivalry and the ceremonial of the Catholic Church. Milton, the most rigidly Calvinistic of all the English poets in his opinions, is also the most severely classical in his style. It was the task of Addison to carry on the reconciling traditions of our literature. It is his praise to have ac- complished his task under conditions far more difficult than any that his predecessors had experienced. What they had done was to give instinctive and characteristic expression to the floating ideas of the society about them ; what Addison and his contemporaries did was to found a public opinion by a conscious effort of reason and per- suasion. Before the Civil Wars there had been at least no. visible breach in the principle of Authority in Church and State. At the beginning of the eighteenth century con- stituted authority had been recently overthrown ; one king- had been beheaded, another had been expelled ; the Epis- copalian form of Church Government had been violently displaced in favour of the Presbyterian, and had been with almost equal violence restored. Whole classes of the pop- ulation had been drawn into opposing camps during the Civil War, and still stood confronting each other with' all the harsh antagonism of sentiment inherited from that conflict. Such a bare summary alone is sufficient to in- dicate the nature of the difficulties Addison had to en- counter in his efforts to harmonise public opinion ; but a 8 ADDISON. [chap. more detailed examination of the state of society after the Restoration is required to place in Its full light the extraor- dinary merits of the success that he achieved. There was, to begin with, a vehement opposition be- tween town and country. In the country the old ideas of Feudalism, modified by circumstances, but vigorous and deep-rooted, still prevailed. True, the military system of land-tenure had disappeared with the Restoration, but it was not so with the relations of life, and the habits of thought and feeling which the system had created. The features of surviving Feudalism liave been inimitably pre- served for us in the character of Sir Roger de Coverley. Living in the patriarchal fashion, in the midst of tenants and retainers, who looked up to him as their chief, and for whose welfare and protection he considered himself responsible, the country gentleman valued above all things the principle of Loyalty. To the moneyed classes in the towns he was instinctively opposed; he regarded their interests, both social and commercial, as contrary to his own ; he looked with dislike and suspicion on the eco- nomical principles of government and conduct on which these classes naturally rely. Even the younger sons of county families had in Addison's day abandoned the custom, common enough in the feudal times, of seeking their fortune in trade. Many a Will Wimble now spent his whole life in the country, training dogs for his neigh- bours, fishing their streams, making whips for their young- heirs, and even garters for their wives and daughters.' The country gentlemen were confirmed in these ideas by the difiiculties of communication. During his visit to Sir Roger de Coverley the Si^ectator observed the extreme slowness with which fashions penetrated into the country ; ' Spectator, No. 108. I.J LETTERS AFTER THE RESTORATION. 9 and Le noticed, too, that party spirit was much more vio- lent there than in the towns. The learning of the clergy, many of whom resided with the country squires as chap- lains, was of course enlisted on the Tory side, and supplied it with arguments which the body of the party might per- haps have found it difficult to discover, or at least to ex- press, for themselves. For Tory tastes undoubtedly lay generally rather in the direction of sport than of books. Sir Roger seems to be as much above the average level of his class as Squire Western is certainly below it : perhaps the Tory fox-hunter of the Freeholder, though somewhat satirically painted, is a fair representative of the society which had its headquarters at the October Club, and whose favourite poet was Tom D'Urfey. The commercial and professional classes, from whom the Whigs derived their chief support, of course predominated in the towns, and their larger opportunities of associa- tion gave them an influence in affairs which compensated for their inferiority in numbers. They lacked, however, what the country party possessed, a generous ideal of life. Though many of them were connected with the Presby- terian system, their common sense made them revolt from its rigidity, while at the same time their economical prin- ciples failed to supply them with any standard that could satisfy the imagination. Sir Andrew Freeport excites in us less interest than any member of the Spectator's Club. There was not yet constituted among the upper middle classes that mixed conception of good feeling, good breed- ing, and good taste which we now attach to the name of "gentleman." Two main currents of opinion divided the country, to one of which a man was obliged to surrender himself if he wished to enjoy the pleasures of organised society. One 10 ADDISON. [chap. of these was Puritanism, but this was undoubtedly the less popular, or at least the less fashionable. A protracted ex- perience of Roundhead tyranny under the Long Parliament had inclined the nation to believe that almost any form of Government was preferable to that of the Saints. The Puritan, no longer the mere sectarian, as in the days of Elizabeth and James I., somewhat ridiculous in the extrav- agance of his opinions, but respectable from the constancy with which he maintained them, had ruled over them as a taskmaster, and had forced them, as far as he could by military violence, to practise the asceticism to which monks and nuns had voluntarily submitted themselves. The most innocent as well as the most brutal diversions of the people were sacrificed to his spiritual pride. As Macaulay well says, he hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectator. The tendency of his creed was, in fact, anti-social. Beauty in his eyes was a snare, and pleasure a sin ; the only mode of social intercourse which he approved was a sermon. On the other hand, the habits of the Court, which gave the tone to all polite society, were almost equally distaste- ful to the instincts of the people. It was inevitable that the inclinations of Charles II. should be violently opposed to every sentiment of the Puritans. While he was in the power of the Scots he had been forced into feigned com- pliance with Presbyterian rites ; the Puritans had put his father to death, and had condemned himself to many years of exile and hardship in Catholic countries. He had re- turned to his own land half French in his political and re- ligious sympathies, and entirely so in his literary tastes. To convert and to corrupt those of his subjects who imme- diately surrounded him was an easy matter. " All by the king's example lived and loved." Poets, paiaters,, and t.] LETTERS AFTER THE RESTORATION. 11 actors were forward to promote principles viewed with favour by their sovereign and not at all disagreeable to themselves. An ingenious philosopher elevated Absolu- tism into an intellectual and moral system, the. consequence of which was to encourage the powerful in the indulgence of every selfish instinct. As the Puritans had oppressed the country with a system of inhuman religion and tran- scendental morality, so now, in order to get as far from Puritanism as possible, it seemed necessary for every one aspiring to be thought a gentleman to avow himself an atheist or a debauchee. The ideas of the man in the mode after the Restoration are excellently hit off in one of the fictitious letters in the Spectator : " I am now between fifty and sixty, and had the honour to be well with the first men of taste and gallantry in the joyous reign of Charles the Second. As for yourself, Mr. Spectator, you seem with the utmost arrogance to undermine the very fundamentals upon which we conducted ourselves. It is monstrous to set up for a man of wit and yet deny that honour in a woman is anything but peevish- ness, that inclination is not the best rule of life, or virtue and vice anything else but health and disease. We had no more to do but to put a lady in a good humour, and all we could wish followed of course. Then, again, your Tully and your discourses of another life are the very bane of mirth and good humour. Prythee, don't value thyself on thy reason at that exorbitant rate and the dignity of human nature ; take my word for it, a setting dog has as good reason as any man in England." ^ While opinions, which from different sides struck at the very roots of society, prevailed both in the fashionable and religious portions of the community, it was inevitable that Taste should be hopelessly corrupt. All the artistic and literary forms which the Court favoured were of the ro- 1 Spectator, No. 168. 12 ADDISON. [chap. mantic order, but it was romance from which beauty and vitality had utterly disappeared. Of the two great principles of ancient chivalry, Love and Honour, the last notes of which are heard in the lyrics of Lovelace and Montrose, one was now held to be non-existent, and the other was utterly perverted. The feudal spirit had sur- rounded woman with an atmosphere of mystical devotion, but in the reign of Charles IL the passion of love was sub- jected to the torturing treatment then known as " wit." Cowley and Waller seem to think that when a man is in love, the energy of his feelings is best shown by discover- ing resemblances between his mistress and those objects in nature to which she is apparently most unlike. The ideal of Woman, as she is represented in the Spec- tator, adding grace, charity, and refinement to domestic life, had still to be created. The king himself, the pre- sumed mirror of good taste, was notoriously under the control of his numerous mistresses ; and the highest notion of love which he could conceive was gallantry. French romances were therefore generally in vogue. All the casu- istry of love which had been elaborated by Mademoiselle de Scudery -vvas reproduced with improvements by Mrs. Aphra Behn. At the same time, as usually happens in diseased societies, there was a general longing to cultivate the simplicity of the Golden Age, and the consequence was that no person, even in the lower grades of society, who pretended to any reading, ever thought of making love in his own person. The proper tone of feeling was not acquired till he had invested himself with the pastoral at- tributes of Damon and Celadon, and had addressed his future wife as Amarantha or Phyllis. The tragedies of the period illustrate this general incli- nation to spurious romance. If ever there was a time I.] LETTEES AFTER THE RESTORATION. 13 when the ideal of monarchy was degraded, and the instincts of chivah'ous action discouraged, it w^as in the reign of Charles 11. Absorbed as he was in the pursuit of pleasure, the king scarcely attempted to conceal his weariness when obliged to attend to affairs of State. He allowed the Dutch fleet to approach his capital and to burn his own ships of war on the Thames ; he sold Dunkirk to the French ; hardly any action in his life evinces any sense of patriotism or honour. And yet we have only to glance at Johnson's Life of Dryden to sec how all the tragedies of the time turn on the great characters, the great actions, the great sufferings of princes. The Elizabethan drama had exhibited man in every degree of life and with every variety of character; the playwright of the Restoration seldom descended below such themes as the conquest of Mexico or Granada, the fortunes of the Great Mogul, and the fate of Hannibal. This monotony of subject was doubtless in part the result of policy, for in pitying the fortunes of Montezuma the imagination of the spectator insensibly recalled those of Charles the Second. Everything in these tragedies is unreal, strained, and affected. In order to remove them as far as possible from the language of ordinary life they are written in rhyme, while the astonishment of the audience is raised with big swelling words, which vainly seek to hide the absence of genuine feeling. The heroes tear their passion to tatters because they think it heroic to do so ; their flights into the sublime generally drop into the ridiculous; instead of holding up the mirror to nature, their object is to de- part as far as possible from common sense. Nothing ex- hibits more characteristically the utterly artificial feeling, both of the dramatists and the spectators, than the habit which then prevailed of dismissing the audience after a 14 ADDISON. [chap. tragic play with a witty epilogue. On one occasion, Nell Gwynne, in the character of St. Catherine, was, at the end of the play, left for dead upon the stage. Her body having to be removed, the actress suddenly started to her feet, ex- claiming, " Hold ! are you mad ? you damned confounded dog, I am to rise and speak the epilogue !" ^ By way of compensation, however, the writers of the period poured forth their real feelings without reserve in their comedies. So great, indeed, is the gulf that separates our own manners from theirs, that some critics have en- deavoured to defend the comic dramatists of the Resto- ration against the moralists on the ground that their rep- resentations of Nature are entirely devoid of reality. Charles Lamb, who loved all curiosities, and the Caroline comedi- ans among the number, says of them : " They are a world of themselves almost as much as fairy-land. Take one of their characters, male or female (with few exceptions they are alike), and place it in a modern play, and my virtuous in- dignation shall rise against the profligate wi-etch as warmly as the Catos of the pit could desire, because in a modern play I am to judge of the right and the wrong. The standard of police is the measure oi political justice. The atmosphere will blight it; it cannot live here. It has got into a moral world, where it has no business, from which it must needs fall headlong — as dizzy and incapable of making a stand as a Swedenborgian bad spirit that has wandered unawares into his sphere of Good Men or Angels. But in its own world do we feel the creature is so very bad ? The Fainalls and Mirabels, the Dorimants and Lady Touchwoods, in their own sphere do not offend my moral sense ; in fact, they do not appeal to it at all. They seem engaged in their proper element. They break through no laws or conscientious restraints. They know of none. They have got out of Christendom into the land of — what shall I call it ? — of cuckoldry — 1 Spectator, No. 341. I.] LETTERS AFTER THE RESTORATION. 16 the TJtopia of gallantry, where pleasure is duty and the manners per- fect freedom. It is altogether a speculative scene of things, which has no reference whatever to the world that is." This is a very happy description of the manner in which the plays of Etherege, Shadwell, Wycherley, and Congreve aflfect us to-day ; and it is no doubt superfluous to expend much moral indignation on works which have long since lost their power to charm : comedies in which the reader finds neither the horseplay of Aristophanes, nor the nature of Terence, nor the poetry of Shakespeare ; in which there is not a single character that arouses interest, or a situation that spontaneously provokes laughter ; in which the com- plications of plot are produced by the devices of fine gen- tlemen for making cuckolds of citizens, and the artifices of wives to dupe their husbands ; in which the profuse wit of the dialogue might excite admiration, if it were possible to feel the smallest interest in the occasion that produced it. But to argue that these plays never represented any state of existing society is a paradox which chooses to leave out of account the contemporary attack on the stage made by Jeremy Collier, the admissions of Dryden, and all those valuable glimpses into the manners of our ancestors which are afforded by the prologues of the period. It is sufficient to quote against Lamb the witty and se- vere criticism of Steele in the Spectator, upon Etherege's Man of the Mode : " It cannot be denied but that the negligence of everything which engages the attention of the sober and valuable part of mankind ap- pears very well drawn in this piece. But it is denied that it is nec- essary to the character of a fine gentleman that he should in that manner trample upon all order and decency. As for the character of Dorimant, it is more of a coxcomb than that of Fopling. He says of one of his companions that a good correspondence between them 16 ADDISON. [chap. is their mutual interest. Speaking of that friend, he declares their being much together ' makes the women think the better of his un- derstanding, and judge more favourably of my reputation. It makes him pass upon some for a man of very good sense, and me upon oth- ers for a very civil person.' This whole celebrated piece is a perfect contradiction to good manners, good sense, and common honesty; and as there is nothing in it but what is built upon the ruin of virtue and innocence, according to the notion of virtue in this comedy, I take the shoemaker to be in reality the fine gentleman of the play ; for it seems he is an atheist, if we may depend upon his character as given by the orange-woman, who is herself far from being the lowest in the play. She says of a fine man who is Dorimant's companion, ' there is not such another heathen in the town except the shoemaker.' His pretension to be the hero of the drama appears still moi'e in his own description of his way of living with his lady. ' There is,' says he, ' never a man in the town lives more like a gentleman with his wife than I do. I never mind her motions ; she never inquires into mine. We speak to one another civilly ; hate one another heartily ; and, because it is vulgar to lie and soak together, we have each of us our several settle-beds.' " That of 'soaking together' is as good as if Dorimant had spoken it himself; and I think, since he puts human nature in as ugly a form as the circumstances will bear, and is a staunch unbeliever, he is very much \frronged in having no part of the good fortune bestowed in the last act. To speak plain of this whole work, I think nothing but being lost to a sense of innocence and virtue can make any one see this comedy without observing more frequent occasion to move sorrow and indignation than mirth and laughter. At the same time I allow it to be nature, but it is nature in its utmost corruption and degeneracy." ' The truth is, that the stage after the Restoration reflects only too faithfully the manners and the sentiments of the only society which at that period could boast of anything like organisation. The press, which now enables public opinion to exercise so powerful a control over the manners of the times, had then scarcely an existence. No standard 1 Spectator, No. 65. I.] LETTERS AFTER THE RESTORATIOX. 11 of female honour restrained the license of wit and debauch- ery. If the clergy were shocked at the propagation of ideas so contrary to the whole spirit of Christianity, their natural impulse to reprove them was checked by the fear that an apparent condemnation of the practices of the Court might end in the triumph of their old enemies, the Puritans. All the elements of an old and decaying form of society that tended to atheism, cynicism, and dissolute living, exhibited themselves, therefore, in naked shamelessness on the stage. The audiences in the theatres were equally devoid of good manners and good taste ; they did not hesitate to interrupt the actors in the midst of a serious play, while they loudly applauded their obscene allusions. So gross was the char- acter of comic dialogue that women could not venture to appear at a comedy without masks, and under these cir- cumstances the theatre became the natural centre for assig- nations. In such an atmosphere women readily cast off all modesty and reserve ; indeed, the choicest indecencies of the times are to be found in the epilogues to the plays, which were always assigned to the female actors. It at first sight seems remarkable that a society inveter- ately corrupt should have contained in itself such powers of purification and vitality as to discard the literary gar- bage of the Restoration period in favour of the refined sobriety which characterises the writers of Queen Anne's reign. But, in fact, the spread of the infection was con- fined within certain well-marked limits. The Court moved in a sphere apart, and was altogether too light and frivolous to exert a decided moral influence on the great body of the nation. The country gentlemen, busied on their estates, came seldom to town ; the citizens, the lawyers, and the members of the other professions steadily avoided the the- atre, and regarded with equal contempt the moral and lit- 18 ADDISON. [chap. erary excesses of the courtiers. Among this class, unrep- resented at present in the world of letters, except, perhaps, by antiquarians like Selden, the foundations of sound taste were being silently laid. The readers of the nation had hitherto been almost limited to the nobility. Books were generally published by subscription, and were dependent for their success on the favour with which they were re- ceived by the courtiers. But, after the subsidence of the Civil War, the nation began to make rapid strides in wealth and refinement, and the moneyed classes sought for intellectual amusement in their leisure hours. Authors by degrees found that they might look for readers beyond the select circle of their aristocratic patrons ; and the book-seller, who had hitherto calculated his profits merely by the commission he might obtain on the sale of books, soon perceived that they were becoming valuable as prop- erty. The reign of Charles II. is remarkable not only for the great increase in the number of the licensed printers in London, but for the appearance of the first of the race of modern publishers, Jacob Tonson. The portion of society whose tastes the publishers un- dertook to satisfy was chiefly interested in history, poetry, and criticism. It was this for which Dryden composed his Miscellany, this to which he addressed the admirable crit- ical essays which precede his Translations from the Latin Poets and his Versifications of Chaucer, and this which afterwards gave the main support to the Tatler and the Spectator. Ignorant of the writings of the great classical authors, as well as of the usages of polite society, these men were nevertheless robust and manly in their ideas, and were eager to form for themselves a correct standard of taste by reference to the best authorities. Though they turned with repugnance from the playhouse and from the I.] LETTERS AFTER THE RESTORATION. 19 morals of the Court, they could not avoid being insensibly affected by the tone of grace and elegance which prevailed in Court circles. And in this respect, if in no other, our gratitude is due to the Caroline dramatists, who may justly claim to be the founders of the social prose style in Eng- lish literature. Before them English prose had been em- ployed, no doubt, with music and majesty by many writers ; but the style of these is scarcely representative ; they had used the language for their own elevated purposes, without, however, attempting to give it that balanced fineness and subtlety which makes it a fitting instrument for conveying the complex ideas of an advanced stage of society. Dry- den, Wycherley, and their followers, impelled by the taste of the Court to study the French language, brought to English composition a nicer standard of logic and a more choice selection of language, while the necessity of pleasing their audiences with brilliant dialogue made them careful to give their sentences that well -poised structure which Addison afterwards carried to perfection in the Spectator. By this brief sketch the reader may be enabled to judge of the distracted state of society, both in politics and taste, in the reign of Charles iT, On the one side, the Mo- narchical element in the Constitution was represented by the Court Party, flushed with the recent restoration ; re- taining the old ideas and principles of absolutism which had prevailed under James I., without being able to per- ceive their inapplicability to the existing nature of things ; feeding its imagination alternately on sentiments derived from the decayed spirit of chivalry, and on artistic repre- sentations of fashionable debauchery in its most open form — a party which, while it fortunately preserved the tradi- tions of wit, elegance,- and gaiety of style, seemed unaware that these qualities could be put to any other use than the 2 20 ADDISON. [chap. i. mitigation of an intolerable ennui. On the other side, the rising power of Democracy found its representatives in austere Republicans opposed to all institutions in Church and State that seemed to obstruct their own abstract prin- ciples of government ; gloomy fanatics, who, with an in- tense intellectual appreciation of eternal principles of re- ligion and morality, sought to sacrifice to their system the most permanent and even innocent instincts of human nat- ure. Between the two extreme parties was the unorgan- ised body of the nation, grouped round old customs and institutions, rapidly growing in wealth and numbers, con- scious of the rise in their midst of new social principles, but perplexed how to reconcile these with time-honoured methods of religious, political, and literary thought. To lay the foundations of sound opinion among the people at large; to prove that reconciliation was possible between principles hitherto exhibited only in mutual antagonism ; to show that under the English Constitution monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy might all be harmonised, that humanity was not absolutely incompatible with religion or morality with art, was the task of the statesmen, and still more of the men of letters, of the early part of the eighteenth century. CHAPTER II. Addison's family and education. Joseph Addison was born on the 1st of May, 1672. He was the eldest son of Lancelot Addison, at the time of his birth rector of Milston, near Amesbury, in Wiltshire, and afterwards Dean of Lichfield. His father was a man of character and accomplishments. Educated at Oxford, while that University was under the control of the famous Puritan Visitation, he made no secret of his contempt for principles to which he was forced to submit, or of his preferences for Monarchy and Episcopacy. His boldness was not agreeable to the University authorities, and being forced to leave Oxford, he maintained himself for a time near Petworth, in Sussex, by acting as chaplain or tutor in families attached to the Royalist cause. After the Res- toration he obtained the appointment of chaplain to the garrison of Dunkirk, and when that town was ceded to France in 1662, he was removed in a similar capacity to , Tangier. Here he remained eight years, but, venturing on a visit to England, his post was bestowed upon another, and he would have been left without resources had not one of his friends presented him with the living of Milston, valued at £120 a year. With the courage of his order he thereupon took a wife, Jane, daughter of Dr. Nathaniel Gulston, and sister of William Gulston, Bishop of Bristol, 22 ADDISON. [chap. by ■whom he had six children, three sons and three daugh- ters, all born at Milston. In 1675 he was made a preben- dary of Salisbury Cathedral and Chaplain-in-Ordinary to the King; and in 1683 he was promoted to the Deanery of Lichfield, as a reward for liis services at Tangier, and out of consideration of losses which he had sustained by a fire at Milston. His literary reputation stood high, and it is said that he would have been made a bishop, if his old zeal for legitimacy had not prompted him to manifest in the Convocation of 1689 his hostility to the Revolution. He died in 1703. Lancelot was a writer at once voluminous and lively. In the latter part of his life he produced several treatises on theological subjects, the most popular of which was called An Introduction to the Sacrament. This book passed through many editions. The doctrine it contains leans rather to the Low Church side. But much the most characteristic of his writings were his works on Mahom- medanism and Judaism, the results of his studies during his residence in Barbary. These show not only consider- able industry and research and powers of shrewd observa- tion, but that genuine literary faculty which enables a writer to leave upon a vsubject of a general nature the im- pression of his own character. While there is nothing forced or exaggerated in his historical style, a vein of alle- gory runs through the narrative of the Revolutions of the Kingdoms of Fez nnd Morocco, which must have had a piquant flavour for the orthodox English reader of that day. Recollections of the Protectorate would have taken noth- ing of its vividness from the portrait of the Moorish priest who " began to grow into reputation with the people by reason of his high pretensions to piety and fervent zeal for their law, illustrated by a stubborn rigidity of conversation II.] FAMILY AND EDUCATION. 23 and outward sanctity of life." When the Zeriffe, with am- bitious designs on the throne, sent his sons on a pilgrim- age to Mecca, the religious buffooneries practised by the young men must have recalled to the reader circumstances more recent and personal than those which the author was apparently describing. " Much was the reverence and rep- utation of holiness which they thereby acquired among the superstitious people, who could hardly be kept from kissing their garments and adoring them as saints, while they failed not in their parts, but acted as much devotion as high contemplative looks, deep sighs, tragical gestures, and other passionate interjections of holiness could ex- press. ' Allah, allah !' was their doleful note, their suste- nance the people's alms." And when these impostors had inveigled the King of Fez into a religious war, the descrip- tion of those who " mistrusted their own safety, and began, but too Jate, to repent their approving of an armed hypoc- risy," was not more applicable to the rulers of Barbary than to the people of England. " Puffed up with their successes, they forgot their obedience, and these saints denied the king the fifth part of their spoils. . . . By which it appeared that they took up arms, not out of love for their country and zeal for their religion, but out of desire of rule." There is, indeed, nothing in these utterances which need have prevented the writer from consistently promoting the Revolution of 1688 ; yet his principles seem to have carried him far in the opposite direction ; and it is interesting to remember that the assertor in Convocation of the doctrine of indefeasible hereditary right was the father of the author of the Whig Examiner and the Free- holder. However decidedly Joseph may have dissented from his father's political creed, we know that he enter- tained admiration and respect for his memory, and that 24 ADDISON. [chap. death alone prevented him from completing the monument afterwards erected in Lancelot's honour in Lichfield Cathe- dral. Of Addison's mother nothing of importance is recorded. His second brother, Gulston, became Governor of Fort St. George, 4n the East Indies; and the third, Lancelot, fol- lowed in Joseph's footsteps so far as to obtain a Fellow- ship at Magdalen College, 0.\ford. His sisters, Jane and Anna, died young; but Dorothy was twice married, and Swift records in her honour that she was " a kind of wit, and very like her brother." We may readily believe that a writer so lively as Lancelot would have had clever chil- dren, but Steele was perhaps carried away by the zeal of friendship or the love of epigram when he said, in bis dedi- cation to the Drummer : " Mr. Dean Addison left behind him four children, each of whom, for excellent talents and singular perfections, was as much above the ordinary world as their brother Joseph was above them." But that Steele had a sincere admiration for the whole family is sufficient- ly shown by his using them as an example in one of his early Tatlers : "I remember among all my acquaintance but one man whom I have thought to live with his children with equanimity and a good grace. He had three sons and one daughter, whom he bred with all the care imaginable in a liberal and ingenuous way. I have often heard him say he had the weakness to love one much better than the other, but that he took as much pains to correct that as any other criminal passion that could arise in his mind. His method was to make it the only pretension in his children to his favour to be kind to each other, and he would tell them that he who was the best brother he would reckon the best son. This turned their thoughts into an emulation for the superiority in kind and tender affection towards each other. The boys behaved themselves very early with a manly friendship ; and their sister, instead of the gross familiarities and 11.] FAMILY AND EDUCATION. 25 impertinent freedoms in behaviour usual in other houses, was always t-reated by them with as much complaisance as any other young lady of their acquaintance. It was an unspeakable pleasure to visit or sit at a meal in that family. I have often seen the old man's heart flow at his eyes with joy upon occasions which would appear indiffer- ent to such as were strangers to the turn of his mind ; but a very slight accident, wherein he saw his children's good-will to one an- other, created in him the god- like pleasure of loving them because they loved each other. This great command of himself in hiding his first impulse to partiality at last improved to a steady justice towards them, and that which at first was but an expedient to cor- rect his weakness was afterwards the measure of his virtue." ' This, no doubt, is the set description of a moralist, and to an age in which the liberty of manners has grown into something like license it may savour of formalism and priggishness ; but when we remember that the writer was one of the most warm-hearted of men, and that the subject of his panegyric was himself, full of vivacity and impulse, it must be admitted that the picture which it gives us of the Addison family in the rectory of Milston is a particu- larly amiable one. Though the eighteenth century had little of that feeling for natural beauty which distinguishes our own, a man of Addison's imagination could hardly fail to be impressed by the character of the scenery in which his childhood was passed. No one who has travelled on a summer's day across Salisbury plain, with its vast canopy of sky and its open tracts of undulating dowuland, relieved by no shad- ows except such as are thrown by the passing cloud, the grazing sheep, and the great circle of Stonehenge, will for- get the delightful sense of refreshment and repose pro- duced by the descent into the valley of the Avon. The sounds of human life rising from the villages after the . > Toiler, No. 25. 26 ADDISON. [chap. long solitude of the plain, the shade of the deep woods, the coolness of the river, like all streams rising in the chalk, clear and peaceful, are equally delicious to the sense and the imagination. It was, doubtless, the recollection of these scenes that inspired Addison in his paraphrase of the twenty-third Psalm : " The Lord my pasture shall prepare, And feed me with a shepherd's care. When in the sultry glebe I faint, Or on the thirsty mountain pant, To fertile vales and dewy meads My weary wandering steps he leads, Where peaceful rivers, soft and slow. Amid the verdant landscape flow." At Amesbury he was first sent to school, his master being one Nash ; and here, too, he probably met with the first recorded adventure of his life. It is said that having committed some fault, and being fearful of the conse- quences, he ran away from school, and, taking up his abode in a hollow tree, maintained himself as he could till he was discovered and bronght back to his parents. He was removed from Amesbury to Salisbury, and thence to the Grammar School at Lichfield, where he is said to have been the leader in a " barring out." From Lichfield he passed to the Charter House, then under the charge of Dr. Ellis, a man of taste and scholarship. The Charter House at that period w-as, after AVestminster, the best- known school in England, and here was laid the foundation of that sound classical taste which perfected the style of the essays in the SjJectator. Macaulay labours with much force and ingenuity to prove that Addison's classical acquirements were only II.] FAMILY AND EDUCATION. 27 superficial, and, in liis usual epigrammatic manner, hazard's the opinion that " his knowledge of Greek, though doubt- less such as was, in his time, thought respectable at Oxford, was evidently less than that which many lads now carry away every year from Eton and Rugby." That Addison was not a scholar of the class of Bentley or Porson may be readily admitted. But many scattered allusions in his works prove that his acquaintance with the Greek poets of every period, if cursory, was wide and intelligent : he was sufficiently master of the language thoroughly to un- derstand the spirit of what he read ; he undertook while at Oxford a translation of Herodotus, and one of the pa- pers in the Spectator is a direct imitation of s. jeu d''esprit of Lucian's. The Eton or Rugby boy who, in these days, with a normal appetite for cricket and football, acquired an equal knowledge of Greek literature, would certainly be somewhat of a prodigy. No doubt, however, Addison's knowledge of the Latin poets was, as Macaulay infers, far more extensive and pro- found. It would have been strange had it been otherwise. The influence of the classical side of the Italian Renaissance was now at its height, and wherever those ideas became paramount Latin composition was held in at least as much esteem as poetry in the vernacular. Especially was this the case in England, where certain affinities of character and temperament made it easy for writers to adopt Roman habits of thought. Latin verse composition soon took firm root in the public schools and universities, so that clever bovs of the period were tolerably familiar with most of the minor Roman poets. Pope, in the Fourth Book of the Dunciad, vehemently attacked the tradition as confining the mind to the study of words rather than of things ; but he had himself had no experience of a public school, and 2* 28 ADDISON. [chap. only those who fail to appreciate the influence of Latin verse composition on the style of our own greatest orators, and of poets like Milton and Gray, will be inclined to un- dervalue it as an instrument of social and literary training. Proficiency in this art may at least be said to have laid the foundation of Addison's fortunes. Leaving the Char- ter House in 1687, at the early age of fifteen, he was en- tered at Queen's College, Oxford, and remained a member of that society for two years, when a copy of his Latin verses fell into the hands of Dr. Lancaster, then Fellow and afterwards Provost of the College. Struck with their excellence, Lancaster used his influence to obtain for him a demyship at Magdalen. The subject of this fortunate set of verses was " Liauguratio Regis Gulielmi," from which fact we may reasonably infer that even in his boyhood his mind had acquired a Whig bias. Whatever inclination he may have had in this direction would have been confirmed by the associations of his new college. The fluctuations of opinion in Magdalen had been frequent and extraordi- nary. Towards the close of Elizabeth's reign it was noto- rious for its Calvinism, but under the Chancellorship of Laud it appears to have adopted, with equal ardour, the cause of Arraiuianism, for it was among the colleges that offered the stoutest opposition to the Puritan visitors in 1647-48. The despotic tendencies of James IL, however, again cooled its loyalty, and its spirited resistance to the king's order for the election of a Roman Catholic President had given a mortal blow to the Stuart dynasty. Hough was now President, but in consequence of the dispute with the king there had been no election of demies in 1688, so that twice the usual number was chosen in the following year, and the occasion was distinguished by the name of the " golden election." From Magdalen Addison proceed- II.] FAMILY AND EDUCATION. 29 ed to bis master's degree in 1693 ; the College elected him probationary Fellow in 1697, and actual Fellow the year after. He retained his Fellowship till 1711. Of his tastes, habits, and friendships at Oxford there are few records. Among his acquaintance were Boulter, afterwards Archbishop of Dublin — whose memory is un- enviably perpetuated, in company with Ambrose Phillips, in Pope's Upistle to Arbuthnot, " Does not one table Bavius still admit, Still to one Bishop Phillips seem a wit?" — and possibly the famous Sacheverell.' He is said to have shown in the society of Magdalen some of the shyness that afterwards distinguished him ; he kept late hours, and read chiefly after dinner. The walk under the well-known elms by the Cherwell is still connected with his name. Though he probably acted as tutor in the college, the greater part of his quiet life at the University was doubtless occupied in study. A proof of his early maturity is seen in the fact that, in his nineteenth year, a young man of birth and fortune, Mr. Riishout, who was being educated at Magdalen, was placed under his charge. His reputation as a scholar and a man of taste soon ex- tended itself to the world of letters in London. In 1693, being then in his twenty-second year, he wrote his Account of the Oreateat English Poets ; and about the same time he addressed a short copy of verses to Dryden, compli- ' A note in the edition of Johnson's Lives of the Poets, published in 1801, states, on the authority of a "Lady in Wiltshire," who de- rived her information from a Mr. Stephens, a Fellow of Magdalen and a contemporary of Addison's, that the Henry Sacheverell to whom Addison dedicated his Account of the Greatest Enylish Poets was not the well-known divine, but a personal friend of Addison's, who died young, having written a History of the Isle of Man. 30 ADDISON. [chap. meriting him on the enduring vigour of his poetical facul- ty, as shown in his translations of Virgil and other Latin poets, some of which had recently appeared in Tonson's Miscellany. The old poet appears to have been highly gratified, and to have welcomed the advances thus made to him, for he returned Addison's compliment by bestow- ing high and not unmerited praise on the translation of the Fourth Book of the Georgics, which the latter soon after undertook, and by printing, as a preface to his own translation, a discourse written by Addison on the Georgics, as well as arguments to most of the books of the jEneid. Through Dryden, no doubt, he became acquainted with Jacob Tonson. The father of English publishing had for some time been a well-known figure in the literary world. He had purchased the copyright of Paradise Lost ; he had associated himself with Dryden in publishing before the Revolution two volumes of Miscellanies ; encouraged by the success which these obtained, he put the poet, in 1693, on some translations of Juvenal and Persius, and two new volumes of Miscellanies; while in 1697 he urged him to undertake a translation of the whole of the works of Vir- gil. Observing how strongly the public taste set towards the great classical Avriters, he was anxious to employ men of ability in the work of turning them into English ; and it appears from existing correspondence that he engaged Addison, while the latter was at Oxford, to superintend a translation of Herodotus. He also suggested a transla- tion of Ovid. Addison undertook to procure coadjutors for the work of translating the Greek historian. He him- self actually translated the books called Polymnia and Urania, but for some unexplained reason the work was never published. For Ovid he seems, on the whole, to have had less inclination. At Tonson's instance he trans- n.] FAMILY AXD EDUCATION. 31 lated the Second Book of the Metamorphoses, which was first printed in the volume of Miscellanies that appeared in 1697; but he wrote to the publisher that "Ovid had so many silly stories with his good ones that he was more tedious to translate than a better poet would be." His study of Ovid, however, was of the greatest use in devel- oping his critical faculty ; the excesses and want of judg- ment in that poet forced him to reflect, and his observa- tions on the style of his author anticipate his excellent re- marks on the difference between True and False Wit in the sixty-second number of the Sj^ectator. Whoever, indeed, compares these notes with the Essay on the Georgics, and with the opinions expressed in the Account of the English Poets, will be convinced that the foundations of his critical method were laid at this period (1697). In the Essay on the Georgics he seems to be timid in the presence of Virgil's superiority ; his Account of the English Poets, besides being impregnated with the principles of taste prevalent after the Restoration, shows deficient powers of perception and appreciation. The name of Shakespeare is not mentioned in it, Dryden and Congreve alone being selected to represent the drama. Chaucer is described as " a merry bard," whose humour has become obsolete through time and change ; while the rich pictorial fancy of the Faery Queen is thus de- scribed : " Old Spenser next, warmed with poetic rage, In ancient tales amused a barbarous age— An age that yet uncultivate and rude, Where'er the poet's fancy led pursued, Through pathless fields and unfrequented floods. To dens of dragons and enchanted woods. But now the mystic tale, that pleased of yore, Can charm an understanding age no more ; 32 ADDISON. [chap. The long-spun allegories fulsome grow, While the dull moral lies too plain below." According to Pope — always a suspicious witness where Addison is concerned — lie had not read Spenser when he wrote this criticism on him/ Milton, as a legitimate successor of the classics, is of course appreciated, but not at all after the elaborate fash- ion of the Spectator ; to Dryden. the most distinguished poet of the day, deserved compliments are paid, but their value is lessened by the exaggerated opinion which the writer entertains of Cowley, who is described as a " mighty genius," and is praised for the inexhaustible riches of his imagination. Throughout the poem, in fact, we observe a remarkable confusion of various veins of thought; an unjust depreciation of the Gothic grandeur of the older English poets ; a just admiration for the Greek and Ro- man authors ; a sense of the necessity of good sense and regularity in writings composed for an " understanding age ;" and at the same time a lingering taste for the forced invention and far-fetched conceits that mark the decay of the spirit of mediaeval chivalry. With the judgments expressed in this performance it is instructive to compare such criticisms on Shakespeare as we find in No. 42 of the Spectator, the papers on "Chevy Chase" (73, 74), and particularly the following passage : "As true wit consists in the resemblance of ideas, and false wit in the resemblance of words, according to the foregoing instances, there is another kind of wit which consists partly in the resemblance of ideas and partly in the resemblance of words, which, for distinc- tion's sake, I sliall call mixed wit. This kind of wit is that which abounds in Cowley more than in any author that ever wrote. Mr. ' Spence's Anecdotes, p. 50. II.] FAMILY AND EDUCATION. 33 Waller has Iikewi.=;e a groat deal of it. Mr. Pryden is very sparing in it. Milton has a genius much above it. Speiiser is in the same class with Milton. The Italians even in their epic poetry are full of it. Monsieur Boileau, who formed himself upon the ancient poets, has everywhere rejected it with scorn. If we look after mixed wit among the Greeks, we shall find it nowhere but in the epigramma- tists. There are, indeed, some strokes of it in the little poem as- cribed to Musa3ns, which by that, as well as many other marks, be- trays itself to be a modern composition. If we look into the Latin writers we find none of this mixed wit in Virgil, Lucretius, or Catul- lus ; very little in Horace, but a great deal of it in Ovid, and scarce anything else in Martial." The stepping-stone from the immaturity of the early criticisms in the Accoicnt of the Greatest English Poets to the finished case of the Spectator is to be found in the notes to the translation of Ovid.' The time came when he was obliged to form a decision affecting the entire course of liis life. Tonson, who had a wide acquaintance, no doubt introduced him to Congrcve and the leading men of letters in London, and through them he was presented to Sonicrs and Montague. Those ministers perhaps persuaded' him, as a point of etiquette, to write, in 1695, his Address to King William, a poem composed in a vein of orthodox hyperbole, all of which must have been completely thrown away on that most unpoetical of monarchs. Yet in spite of those seductions Addison lingered at Oxford. To retain his Fellowship it was necessary for him to take orders. Had he done so, there can be no doubt that his literary skill and his value as a political partizan would have opened for him a road to the highest preferment. At that time the clergy were ' Compare the Notes on the Metamorphoses, Fab. v. (Tickell's edi- tion, vol. vi. p. 183), where the substance of the above passage is found in embryo. 34 ADDISON. [chap. far from thinking it unbecoming to their cloth to fight in the political arena or to take part in journalism. Swift would have been advanced to a bishopric, as a reward for his political services, if it had not been for the prejudice entertained towards him by Queen Anne ; Boulter, rector of St. Saviour's, Southwark, having made himself conspic- uous by editing a paper called the Freethinker, was raised to the Primacy of Ireland ; Hoadley, the notorious Bishop of Bangor, edited the London Journal ; the honours that were awarded to two men of such second-rate intellectual capacity would hardly have been denied to Addison. He was inclined in this direction by the example and advice of his father, who was noW Dean of Lichfield, and who was urgent on his son to rid himself of the pecuniary em- barrassments in which he was involved by embracing the Church as a profession. A few years before he had him- self seemed to look upon the Church as his future sphere. In his Account of the Greatest English Poets he says : " I leave the arts of poetry and verse To them that practise them with more success. Of greater truths I'll now propose to tell, And so at once, dear friend and muse, farewell." Had he followed up his intention we might have known the name of Addison as that of an artful controversial- ist, and perhaps as a famous writer of sermons ; but we should, in all probability, have never heard of the Spec- tator. Fortunately for English letters, other influences pre- vailed to give a different direction to his fortunes. It is true that Tickell, Addison's earliest biographer, states that his determination not to take orders was the result of his own habitual self-distrust, and of a fear of the responsibil- ities which the clerical ofiace would involve. But Steele, II.] FAMILY AND EDUCATION. 35 who was better acquainted with his friend's private his- tory, on reading Tickell's Memoir addressed a letter to Congreve on the s-ubject, in which he says : "These, you know very well, were not the reasons which made Mr. Addison turn his thoughts to the civil world ; and, as you were the instrumerft of his becoming acquainted with Lord Halifax, I doubt not but you remember the warm instances that noble lord made to the head of the College not to insist upon Mr. Addison's going into orders. His arguments were founded upon the general pravity and corruption of men of business, who wanted libei'al edu- cation. And I remember, as if I had read the letter yesterday, that my lord ended with a compliment that, however he might be repre- sented as a friend to the Church, he never would do it any other in- jury than keeping Mr. Addison out of it." No doubt the real motive of the interest in Addison shown by Lord Halifax, at that time known as Charles Montague, was an anxiety which he shared with all the leading statesmen of the period, and of which more will be said presently, to secure for his party the services of the ablest writers. Finding his protege as yet hardly quali- fied to transact affairs of State, he joined with Lord Som- ers, who had also fixed his eyes on Addison, in soliciting for him from the Crown, in 1699, a pension of £300 a year, which might enable him .to supplement his literary accomplishments with the practical experience of travel. Addison naturally embraced the offer. He looked forward to studying the political institutions of foreign countries, to seeing the spots of which he had read in his favourite classical authors, and to meeting the most famous men of letters on the Continent. It is characteristic both of his own tastes and of his age that he seems to have thought his best passport to intel- lectual society abroad would be his Latin poems. His 36 ADDISON. [chap. verses on the Peace of Rysiokk, written in 1697 and dedi- cated to Montague, had already procured him great repu- tation, and had been praised by Edmund Smith — a high authority — as "the best Latin poem since the ^neid.'''' This gave him the opportunity of collecting his various compositions of the same kind, and in 1699 he published from the Sheldonian Press a second volume of the Musce Anglicance — the first having appeared in 1691 — containing poems by various Oxford scholars. Among the contrib- utors were Hannes, one of the many scholarly physicians of the period ; J. Philips, the author of the Sjylendid Shil- ling ; and Alsop, a prominent antagonist of Bentley, whose Horatian humour is celebrated by Pope in the Dunciad.^ But the most interesting of the names in the volume is that of the once celebrated Edmond, commonly called " Rag," Smith, author of the Ode on the Death of Dr. Do- cock, who seems to have been among Addison's intimate acquaintance, and deserves to be recollected in connection with him on account of a certain similarity in their genius and the extraordinary difference in their fortunes. " Rag " was a man of fine accomplishments and graceful humour, but, like other scholars of the same class, indolent and licentious. In spite of great indulgence extended to him by the authorities of Christ Church, he was expelled from the University in consequence of his irregularities. His friends stood by him, and, through the interest of Addi- son, a proposal was made to him to undertake a history of the Revolution, which, however, from political scruples he felt himself obliged to decline. Like Addison, he wrote a tragedy modelled on classical lines ; but, as it had no po- litical significance, it only pleased the critics, without, like " Cato," interesting the public. Like Addison, too, he had ' Dunciad, Book iv. 224. II.J FAMILY AND EDUCATION. SI an opportunity of profiting by the patronage of Halifax, but laziness or whim prevented him from keeping an ap- pointment which the latter had made with him, and caused him to miss a place worth £300 a year. Addison, by his own exertions, rose to posts of honour and profit, and to- wards the close of his life became Secretary of State, Smith envied his advancement, and, ignoring the fact that his own failure was entirely due to himself, murmured at fortune for leaving him in poverty. Yet he estimated his wants at £600 a year, and died of indulgence when he can scarcely have been more than forty years of age. Addison's compositions in the Musce Anglicance are eight in number. All of them are distinguished by the ease and flow of the versification, but they are generally wanting in originality. The best of them is the PygmcBO- Gerano-Machia, which is also interesting as showing traces of that rich vein of humour which Addison worked out in the Tatler and SjJectator. The mock-heroic style in prose and verse was sedulously cultivated in England through- out the eighteenth century. Swift, Pope, Arbuthnot, and Fielding, developed it in various forms ; but Addison's Latin poem is perhaps the first composition in which the fine fancy and invention afterwards shown in the Hape of the Lock and Gulllver^s Travels conspicuously displayed itself. A literary success of this kind at that epoch gave a writer a wider reputation than he could gain by composi- tions in his own language. Armed, therefore, with copies of the Musce Anglicance for presentation to scholars, and with Halifax's recommendatory letters to men of political distinction, Addison started for the Continent. CHAPTER III. ADDISON ON HIS TRAVELS. Travelling in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries involved an amount of thought and precaution which would have seemed inconvenient to the tourist accustomed to abandon himself to the authority of guide-boots, cou- riers, and railway companies. By ardent spirits like Rod- erick Random it was regarded as the sphere of enterprise and fortune, and not without reason, in days when advent- ures were to be met with on almost every road in the coun- try, and in the streets and inns of the towns. The graver portion of society, on the other hand, considered it as part of the regular course of education through which every young man of position ought to pass before entering into active life. French was the universally recognised lan- guage of diplomacy. French manners and conversation were considered to be the best school for politeness, while Italy was held in the highest respect by the northern na- tions as the source of revived art and letters. Some of the most distinguished Englishmen of the time looked, it is true, with little favour on this fashionable training. " Lord dowper," says Spence, on the information of Dr. Cony- beare, " on his death-bed ordered that his son should never travel (it is by the absolute desire of the Queen that he CHAP. III.] HIS TRAVELS. 39 does). He ordered this from a good deal of observation on its effects ; he had found that there was little to be hoped, and much to be feared, from travelling. Atwell, who is the j'oung lord's tutor abroad, gives but a very dis- couraging account of it, too, in his letters, and seems to think that people are sent out too young, and are too hasty to find any great good from it." On some of the stronger and more enthusiastic minds the chief effect of the grand tour was to produce a violent hatred of all foreign manners. Dennis, the critic, for in- stance, who, after leaving Cambridge, spent some time on the Continent, returned with a confirmed dislike to the French, and ostentatiously displayed in his writings how much he held " dragoons and wooden shoes in scorn ;" and it is amusing to find Addison at a later date making his Tory fox-hunter declare this anti-Gallican temper to be the main fruits of foreign travel. But, in general, what was intended to be a school for manners and political instruction proved rather a source of unsettlement and dissipation ; and the vigorous and glowing lines in which Pope makes the tutor describe to Dullness the doings of the "young ^neas" abroad, may be taken as a faithful picture of the travelled pupil of the period : " Intrepid then o'er seas and land he flew ; Europe he saw, and Europe saw him too. There all thy gifts and graces we display, Thou, only thou, directing all our way ! To where the Seine, obsequious as she runs, Pours at great Bourbon's feet her silken sons ; Or Tyber, now no longer Roman, rolls, Vain of Italian arts, Italian souls : To happy convents bosomed deep in vines. Where slumber abbots purple as their wines : 40 ADDISON. [chap. To isles of fragrance, lily-silvered vales, Diffusing languor in the panting gales : To lands of singing or of dancing slaves, Love-whispering woods, and lute-resounding waves. But chief her shrine where naked Venus keeps, And Cupids ride the lion of the deeps ; Where, eased of fleets, the Adriatic main Wafts the smooth eunuch and enamoured swain. Led by my hand, he sauntered Europe round, And gathered every vice on Christian ground ; Saw every court, heard every king declare His royal sense of operas or the fair ; The stews and palace equally explored, Intrigued with glory, and with spirit whored ; Tried all ho7-s-d^ceuvres, all liqueurs defined. Judicious drank, and greatly daring dined ; Dropped the dull lumber of the Latin store, Spoiled his own language, and acquired no more ; All classic learning lost on classic ground; And last turned air, the echo of a sound." It is needless to say that Addison's experiences of travel were of a very different kind. He left England in his twenty-eighth year, with a mind well equipped from a study of the best authors, and with the intention of quali- fying himself for political employment at home, after fa- miliarising himself with the languages and manners of foreign countries. His sojourn abroad extended over four years, and his experience was more than usually varied and comprehensive. Crossing from Dover to Calais, some time in the summer of 1699, he spent nearly eighteen months in France making himself master of the language. In De- cember, 1700, he embarked at Marseilles for a tour in It- aly, and visited in succession the following places : Monaco, Genoa, Pavia, Milan, Brescia, Verona, Padua, Venice, Fer- rara, Ravenna, Rimini, S. Marino, Pesaro, Fano, Sinigaglia, iii.j HIS TRAVELS. 41 Ancona, Loreto, Rome (where, as it was his intention to re- turn, he only visited St. Peter's and the Pantheon), Naples, Capri, whence he came back to Rome by sea, the various towns in the neighbourhood of Rome, Siena, Leghorn, Pisa,- Lucca, Florence, Bologna, Modena, Parma, and Turin. Thus, in the course of this journey, which lasted exactly a twelvemonth, he twice crossed the Apennines, and made acquaintance with all the more important cities in the northern part of the Peninsula. In December, I'TOl, he passed over Mont Cenis to Geneva, proceeding then by Fribourg, Berne, Soleure, Zurich, St. Gall, Linden, Insbruck, Hall, to Vienna, where he arrived in the autumn of 1702. After making a brief stay in the Austrian capital he turned his face homewards, and having visited the Protestant cities of Germany, and made a rather longer stay in Ham- burg than in any other, he reached Holland in the spring of 1703, and remained in that country till his return to England, some time in the autumn of the same year. During his journey he made notes for his Remarks on Itahj, which he published immediately on his return home, and he amused himself, while crossing Mont Cenis, with composing his Letter to Lord Halifax, which contains, perhaps, the best verses he ever wrote. Though the ground over which he passed was well trodden, and though he possessed none of the special knowledge which gives value to the observations of travellers like Arthur Young, yet his remarks on the people and places he saw are the product of an original mind, and his illustrations of his route from the Latin poets are remarkably happy and graceful. It is interesting, also, to observe how many of the thoughts and suggestions which occurred to him on the road are afterwards worked up into papers for the Spectator. 42 ADDISON. [cHiP. When Addison landed in France, in 1699, the power of Louis XIV., so long the determined enemy of the English Revolution of 1688, had passed its climax. The Peace of Rysvvick, by which the hopes of the Jacobites were finally demolished, was two years old. The king, disap- pointed in his dreams of boundless military glory, had fallen into a fit of devotion, and Addison, arriving from England with a very imperfect knowledge of the language, was astonished to find the whole of French literature sat- urated with the royal taste. " As for the state of learn- ing," says he, in a letter to Montague, dated August, 1699, "there is no book comes out at present that has not some- thing in it of an air of devotion. Dacier has bin forced to prove his Plato a very good Christian before he vent- ures upon his translation, and has so far comply'd with y® tast of the age that his whole book is overrun with texts of Scripture, and y® notion of pra3-existence, supposed to be stolen from two verses of y® prophets. Nay, y® hu- mour is grown so universal that it is got among y® poets, who are every day publishing Lives of Saints and Legends in Rhime." Finding, perhaps, that the conversation at the capital was not very congenial to his taste, he seems to have hur- ried on to Blois, a town then noted for the purity with which its inhabitants spoke the French language, and where he had determined to make his temporary abode. His only record of his first impressions of Paris is a casual criticism of " y® King's Statue that is lately set up in the Place Vendome." He visited, however, both Versailles and Fontainebleau, and the preference which he gives to the latter (in a letter to Congreve) is interesting, as anticipat- ing that taste for natural as opposed to artificial beauty which he afterwards expressed in the Spectator. III.] HIS TRAVELS. 43 " I don't believe, as good a poet as you are, that you can make finer Lanskips than those about tho King's houses, or with all yo"" descrip- tions build a more magnificent palace than Versailles. I am, how- ever, so singular as to prefer Fontainebleau to the rest. It is situ- ated among rocks and woods that give you a fine variety of Savage prospects. The King has Humoured the Genius of the place, and only made of so much art as is necessary to Help and regulate Nat- ure, without reforming her too much. The Cascades seem to break through the Clefts and Cracks of Rocks that are covered over with Moss, and look as if they were piled upon one another by Accident. There is an artificial wildness in the Meadows, Walks, and Canals, and y^ Garden, instead of a Wall, is Fenced on the Lower End by a Natural Mound of Rock-work that strikes the eye very agreeably. For my part, I think there is something more charming in these rude heaps of Stone than in so many Statues, and wou'd as soon see a River winding through Woods and Meadows as when it is tossed up in such a variety of figures at Versailles." ' Here and there, too, his correspondence exhibits traces of that delicate vein of ridicule in which he is without a rival, as in the following inimitable description of Le Brun's paintings at Versailles : " The painter has represented his most Xtian Majesty under y* fig- ure of Jupiter throwing thunderbolts all about the ceiling, and strik- ing terror into y^ Danube and Rhine, that lie astonished and blasted a little above the Cornice." Of his life at Blois a very slight sketch has been pre- served by the Abbe Philippeaux, one of the many gossip- ping informants from whom Spence collected his anec- dotes : " Mr. Addison stayed above a year at Blois. He would rise as * Compare Spectator, 414. " I do not know whether I am singular in my opinion, but for my part I would rather look upon a tree in all its luxuriancy and diffusion of boughs and branches, rather than when it is thus cut and trimmed into a mathematical figure ; and cannot but fancy that an orchard in flower looks infinitely more delightful -*han all the little labyrinths of the finished parterre." 3 44 ADDISON. [chap. early as between two and three in summer, and lie abed till between eleven and twelve in the depth of winter. He was untalkative while here, and often thoughtful ; sometimes so lost in thought that I have come into his room and have stayed five minutes there before he has known anything of it. He had 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." The following characteristic letter to a gentleman of Blois, with whom he seems to have had an altercation, is interesting as showing the mixture of coolness and dignity, the "blood and judgment well commingled" which Hamlet praised in Horatio, and which are conspicuous in all Addi- son's actions as well as in his writings : " Sir, — I am always as slow in making an Enemy as a Friend, and am therefore very ready to come to an Accommodation with you ; but as for any satisfaction, I don't think it is due on either side when y^ Affront is mutual. You know very well that according to y* opinion of y^ world a man would as soon be called a Knave as a Fool, and I believe most people w* be rather thought to want Legs than Brains. But I suppose whatever we said in y« heat of discourse is not y^ real opinion we have of each other, since otherwise you would have scorned to subscribe yourself as I do at present, S"", y' very, etc. A. Mons' L'Espagnol, Blois, 10>"- 1699." The length of Addison's sojourn at Blois seems to have been partly caused by the difficulty he experienced, owing to the defectiveness of his memory, in mastering the lan- guage. Finding himself at last able to converse easily, he returned to Paris some time in the autumn of 1700, in order to see a little of polite society there before starting on his travels in Italy. He found the best company in the capital among the men of letters, and he makes especial mention of Malebranche, whom he describes as solicitous III.] HIS TRAVELS. 45 about the adequate rendering of his works into English; and of Boileau, who, having now survived almost all his literary friends, seems, in his conversation with Addison, to have been even more than usually splenetic in his judg- ments on his contemporaries. The old poet and critic was, however, propitiated with the present of the Miisce Anglicanoe ; and, according to Tickell, said " that he did not question there were excellent compositions in the na- tive language of a country that possessed the Roman genius in so eminent a degree." In general, Addison's remarks on the French character are not complimentary. He found the vanity of the people so elated by the elevation of the Duke of Anjou to the throne of Spain that they were insupportable, and he felt no reluctance to quit France for Italy. His observations on the national manners, as seen at Blois, are character- istic : " Truly, by what I have yet seen, they are the Happiest nation in the world. 'Tis not in the pow'r of Want or Slavery to make 'em miserable. There is nothing to be met with in the Country but Mirth and Poverty. Ev'ry one sings, laughs, and starves. Their Conver- sation is generally Agreeable ; for if they have any Wit or Sense they are sure to show it. They never mend upon a Second meeting, but use all the freedom and familiarity at first Sight that a long Intimacy or Abundance of wine can scarce draw from an Englishman. Their Women are perfect Mistresses in this Art of showing themselves to the best Advantage. They are always gay and sprightly, and set off y« worst faces in Europe with y^ best airs. Ev'ry one knows how to give herself as charming a look and posture as S"" Godfrey Kneller c^ draw her in." ' He embarked from Marseilles for Genoa in December, IVOO, having as his companion Edward Wortley Montague, ' Letter to the Right Honourable Charles Montague, Esq., Blois, lO""- 1699. 46 ADDISON. [chap. whom Pope satirises under the various names of Shylock, Worldly, and Avidien. It is unnecessary to follow him step by step in bis travels, but the reader of his Letter to Lord Halifax may still enjoy the delight and enthusiasm to which he gives utterance on finding himself among the scenes de- scribed in his favourite authors : " Poetic fields encompass me around, And still I seem to tread on classic ground ; For here the Muse so oft her harp has strung, That not a mountain I'ears its head unsung ; Renowned in verse each shady thicket grows, And every stream in heavenly numbers flows." ' The phrase " classic ground," which has become proverbial, is first used in these verses, and, as will have been observed. Pope repeats it with evident reference to the above passage in his satire on the travels of the " young ^neas." Addi- son seems to have carried the Latin poets with him, and his quotations from them are abundant and apposite. When he is driven into the harbour at Monaco, he remembers Lucan's description of its safety and shelter ; as he passes under Monte Circeo, he feels that Virgil's description of JEneas's voyage by the same spot can never be siiflSciently admired ; he recalls, as he crosses the Apennines, the fine lines of Claudian recording the march of Honorius from Ravenna to Rome ; and he delights to think that at the falls of the Velino he can still see the " angry goddess " of the ^neid (Alecto) " thus sinking, as it were, in a tempest, and plunging herself into Ilell " amidst such a scene of horror and confusion. His enthusiastic appreciation of the classics, which caused him in judging any work of art to look, in the first place, for regularity of design and simplicity of effect, shows it- ' Letter from Italy to Lord Halifax. III.J HIS TRAVELS. 47 self characteristically in his remarks on the Lombard and German styles of architecture in Italy. Of Milan Cathe- dral he speaks without much admiration, but he was im- pressed with the wonders of the Certosa near Pavia. " I saw," says he, " between Pavia and Milan the convent of the Carthusians, which is very spacious and beautiful. Their church is very fine and curiously adorned, but of a Gothic structure." His most interesting criticism, how- ever, is that on the Duomo at Siena : " When a man sees the prodigious pains and expense that our forefathers have been at in these barbarous buildings, one cannot but fancy to himself what miracles of architecture they would have left us had they only been instructed in the right way ; for, when the devotion of those ages was much warmer than that of the pres- ent, and the riches of the people much more at the disposal of the priests, there was so much money consumed on these Gothic cathe- drals as would have finished a greater variety of noble buildings than have been raised either before or since that time. One would wonder to see the vast labour that has been laid out on this single cathedral. The very spouts are loaden with ornaments, the Avindows are formed like so many scenes of perspective, with a multitude of little pillars retiring behind one another, the great columns are finely engraven with fruits and foliage, that run twisting about them from the very top to the bottom ; the whole body of the church is cheq- uered with different lays of black and white marble, the pavement curiously cut out in designs and Scripture stories, and the front cov- ered with such a variety of figures, and overrun with so many mazes and little labyrinths of sculpture, that nothing in the world can make a prettier show to those who prefer false beauties and affected ornaments to a noble and majestic simplicity." ' Addison had not reached that large liberality in criti- cism afterwards attained by Sir Joshua Reynolds, who, while insisting that in all art there was but one true style, nevertheless allowed very high merit to what he called the ' Addison's Wo7'ks (Tickell's edition), vol. v. p. 301. 48 ADDISON. [chap. characteristic styles. Sir Joshua would never have fallen into the error of imputing affectation to such simple and honest workmen as the early architects of Northern Italy. The effects of Addison's classical training are also very visible in his descriptions of natural scenery. There is in these nothing of that craving melancholy produced by a sense of the infinity of nature which came into vogue after the French Revolution ; no projection of the feelings of the spectator into the external scene on which he gazes ; nor, on the other hand, is there any attempt to rival the art of the painter by presenting a landscape in words in- stead of in colours. He looks on nature with the same clear sight as the Greek and Roman writers, and in de- scribing a scene he selects those particulars in it which he thinks best adapted to arouse pleasurable images in the mind of the reader. Take, for instance, the following ex- cellent description of his passage over the Apennines : " The fatigue of our crossing the Apennines, and of our whole journey from Loretto to Rome, was very agreeably relieved by the variety of scenes we passed through. For, not to mention the rude prospect of rocks rising one above another, of the deep gutters worn in the sides of them by torrents of rain and snow-water, or the long channels of sand winding about their bottoms that are sometimes filled with so many rivers, we saw in six days' travelling the sev' eral seasons of the year in their beauty and perfection. We were sometimes shivering on the top of a bleak mountain, and a little while afterwards basking in a warm valley, covered with violets and almond -trees in blossom, the bees already swarming over them, though but in the month of February. Sometimes our road led us through groves of olives, or by gardens of oranges, or into several hollow apartments among the rocks and mountains, that look like so many natural greenhouses, as being always shaded with a great variety of trees and shrubs that never lose their verdure." ' ' Addison's Works (Tickell's edition), vol. v. p. 213. I III.] HIB TRAVELS. 1^^^^^""' ^^ Though his thoughts during his travels were largely occupied with objects chiefly interesting to his taste and imagination, and though he busied himself with such com- positions as the Epistle from Italy, the Dialogue on Med- als, and the first four acts of Cato, he did not forget that his experience was intended to qualify him for taking part in the affairs of State. And when he reached Geneva, in December, 1701, the door to a political career seemed to be on the point of opening. He there learned, as Tickell informs us, that he had been selected to attend the army under Prince Eugene as secretary from the King. He accordingly waited in the city for oflScial confirmation of this intelligence ; but his hopes were doomed to disap- pointment. William HI. died in March, 1702; Halifax, on whom Addison's prospects chiefly depended, was struck off the Privy Council by Queen Anne ; and the travelling pension ceased with the life of the sovereign who had granted it. Henceforth he had to trust to his own re- sources ; and though the loss of his pension does not seem to have compelled him at once to turn homewards, as he continued on his route to Vienna, yet an incident that occurred towards the close of his travels shows that he was prepared to eke out his income by undertaking work that would have been naturally irksome to him. At Rotterdam, on his return towards England, he met with Jacob Tonson, the bookseller, for whom, as has been said, he had already done some work as a translator. Tonson was one of the founders of the Kit-Kat Club, and in that capacity was brought into frequent and intimate connection with the Whig magnates of the day. Among these was the Duke of Somerset, who, through his wife, then high in Queen Anne's favour, exercised considerable influence on the course of affairs. The Duke required a 50 ADDISON. . [cuAP. tutor for his son, Lord Hertford, and Tonson recommend- ed Addison. On tlie Duke's approval of the recommen- dation, the bookseller seems to have communicated with Addison, who expressed himself, in general terms, as will- ing to undertake the charge of Lord Hertford, but desired to know more particulars about his engagement. These were furnished by the Duke in a letter to Tonson, and they are certainly a very curious illustration of the man- ners of the period. " I ought," says his Grace, " to enter into that affair more freely and more plainly, and tell yon what I propose, and what I hope he will comply with — viz., I desire he may be more on the account of a com- panion in my son's travels than as a governor, and that as such I shall account him : my meaning is, that neither lodging, travelling, nor diet shall cost him sixpence, and over and above that my son shall present him at the year's end with a hundred guineas, as long as he is pleased to continue in that service to my son, by his personal at- tendance and advice, in what he finds necessary during his time of travelling." To this not very tempting proposal Addison replied : "I have lately received one or two advantageous offers of y® same nature, but as I should be very ambitious of ex- ecuting any of your Grace's commands, so I can't think of taking y® like employ from any other hands. As for y® recompense that is proposed to me, I must take the liberty to assure your Grace that I should not see my ac- count in it, but in y^ hope that I have to recommend my- self to your Grace's favour and approbation," This reply proved highly offensive to the Duke, who seems to have considered his own offer a magnificent one. " Your letter of the 16th," he writes to Tonson, on June 22, 1703, " with one from Mr. Addison, came safe to me. You say iir.] HIS TRAVELS. 51 he will give me an account of his readiness of complying with my proposal. I Avill set down his own words, which are thus: *As for the recompense that is proposed to me, I must confess I can by no means see my account in it,' etc. All the other parts of his letter are compliments to me, which he thought he was bound in good breeding to write, and as such I have taken them, and no otherwise ; and now I leave you to judge how ready he is to comply with my proposal. Therefore, I have wrote by this first post to prevent his coming to England on my account, and have told him plainly that I must look for another, which I cannot be long a-finding." Addison's principal biographer. Miss Aikin, expresses great contempt for the niggardliness of the Duke, and says that, "Addison must often have congratulated himself in the sequel on that exertion of proper spirit by which he had escaped from wasting, in an attendance little better than servile, three precious years, which he found means of employing so much more to his own honour and satis- faction, and to the advantage of the public." Mean as the Duke's offer was, it is nevertheless plain that Addison re- ally intended to accept it, and, this being so, he can scarce- ly be congratulated on having on this occasion displayed his usual tact and felicity. Two courses appear to have been open to him. He might either have simply declined the offer " as not finding his account in it," or he might have accepted it in view of the future advantages which he hoped to derive from the Duke's " favour and approba- tion ;" in which case he should have said nothing about finding the " recompense " proposed insufficient. By the course that he took he contrived to miss an appointment which he seems to have made up his mind to accept, and 3* 52 ADDISON. [chap. hi. lie oSended an influential statesman wliose favour lie was anxious to secure. To his pecuniary embarrassments was soon added do- mestic loss. At Amsterdam he received news of his fa- ther's death, and it may be supposed that the private business in which he must have been involved in conse- quence of this event brought him to England, where he arrive^ some time in the autumn of 1703. CHAPTER IV. HI3 EMPLOYMENT IN AFFAIRS OF STATE. Addison's fortunes were now at their lowest ebb. The party from which he had looked for preferment was out of office ; his chief political patron was in particular dis- credit at Court ; his means were so reduced that he was forced to adopt a style of living not much more splendid than that of the poorest inhabitants of Grub Street. Yet within three years of his return to England he was pro- moted to be an Under-Secretary of State — a post from which he mounted to one position of honour after another till his final retirement from political life. That he was able to take advantage of the opportunity that offered it- self was owing to his own genius and capacity ; the op- portunity was the fruit of circumstances which had pro- duced an entire revolution in the position of English men of letters. Through the greater part of Charles II.'s reign the pro- fession of literature was miserably degraded. It is true that the King himself, a man of wit and taste, was not slow in his appreciation of art ; but he was by his charac- ter insensible to what was serious or elevated, and the poetry of gallantry, which he preferred, was quite within reach of the courtiers by whom he was surrounded. Roch- ester, Buckingham, Sedley, and Dorset are among the 54 ADDISOX. [chap. principal poetical names of the period ; all of them being well qualified to shine in verse, the chief requirements of which were a certain grace of manner, an air of fashiona- ble breeding, and a complete disregard of the laws of de- cency. Besides these " songs by persons of quality," the principal entertainment was provided by the drama. But the stage, seldom a lucrative profession, was then crowd- ed with writers whose fertile, if not very lofty, invention tept down the price of plays. Otway, the most success- ful dramatist of his time, died in a state of indigence, and as some say, almost of starvation, while playwrights of less ability, if the house was ill-attended on the third night, when the poet received all tlie profits of the performance, were forced, as Oldham says, " to starve or live in tatters all the year.'" Periodical literature, in the shape of journals and maga- zines, had as yet no existence ; nor could the satirical poet or the pamphleteer find his remuneration in controver- sial writing, the' strong reaction against Puritanism having raised the monarchy to a position in which it was practi- cally secure against the assaults of all its enemies. The author of the most brilliant satire of the period, who had used all the powers of a rich imagination to discredit the Puritan and Republican cause, was paid with nothing more solid than admiration, and died neglected and in want. " The wretch, at summing up his misspent days, Found nothing left but poverty and praise ! Of all his gains by verse he could not save Enough to purchase flannel and a grave ! Reduced to want he in due time fell sick, Was fain to die, and be interred on tick ; ' Oldham's Satire Dissuading from Poetry. IT.] HIS EMPLOYMENT IN AFFAIRS OF STATE. 56 And well might bless the fever that was sent I) To rid him hence, and his worse fate prevent." * In the latter part of this reign, however, a new com- bination of circumstances produced a great change in the character of English literature and in the position of its professors. The struggle of Parties recommenced. Wearied with the intolerable rule of the Saints, the nation had been at first glad to leave its newly-restored King to bis pleasures, but, as the memories of the Commonwealth became fainter, the people watched with a growing feel- ing of disgust the selfishness and extravagance of the Court, while the scandalous sale of Dunkirk and the sight of the Dutch fleet on the Thames made them think of the patriotic energies which Cromwell had succeeded in arousing. At the same time the thinly-disguised inclina- tion of the King to Popery, and the avowed opinions of his brother, raised a general feeling of alarm for the Protestant liberties of the nation. On the other hand, the Puritans, taught moderation by adversity,- exhibited the really religious side of their character, and attracted towards themselves a considerable portion of the aristoc- racy, as well as of the commercial and professional class- es in the metropolis — a combination of interests which helped to form the nucleus of the Whig party. The clergy and the landed proprietors, who had been the chief sufferers from Parliamentary rule, naturally adhered to the Court, and were nicknamed by their opponents Tories. Violent party conflicts ensued, marked by such incidents as the Test Act, the Exclusion Bill, the intrigues of Mon- mouth, the Popish Plot, and the trial and acquittal of Shaftesbury on the charge of high treason. Finding his position no longer so easy as at his restora- ' Qldharo's Satire Dismadinff from Poetry. 56 ADDISON. [chap. fion, Charles naturally bethought him of calling literature to his assistance. The stage, being completely under his control, seemed the readiest instrument for his purpose; the order went forth, and an astonishing display of mo- narchical fervour in all the chief dramatists of the time — Otway, Dryden, Lee, and Crowne — was the result. Shadwell, who was himself inclined to the Whig interest, laments the change : " The stage, like old Rump pulpits, is become The scene of News, a furious Party's drum." But tlie political influence of the drama and the audience to which it appealed being necessarily limited, the King sought for more powerful literary artillery, and he found it in the serviceable genius of Dryden, whose satirical and controversial poems date from this period. The wide popularity of Absalom and Achitophel, written against Monmouth and Shaftesbury ; of The Medal, satirising the acquittal of Shaftesbury ; of The Hind and Panther, com- posed to advance the Romanising projects of James II. ; points to the vast influence exercised by literature in the party struggle. Nevertheless, in spite of all that Dryden had done for the Royal cause, in spite of the fact that he himself had more than once appealed to the poet for assistance, the ingratitude or levity of Charles was so in- veterate that he let the poet's services go almost unre- quited. Dryden, it is true, held the posts of Laureate and Royal Historiographer, but his salary was always in arrears, and the letter which he addressed to Rochester, First Lord of the Treasury, asking for six months' pay- ment of what was due to him, tells its own story. James II. cared nothing for literature, and was probably too dull of apprehension to understand the incalculable IV.] HIS EMPLOYMENT IN AFFAIRS OF STATE. 57 service that Dryden had rendered to his cause. He showed his appreciation of the Poet-Laureate's genius by deducting £100 from the salary which his brother had promised him, and by cutting off from the emoluments of the office the time-honoured butt of canary ! Under William III. the complexion of affairs again al- tered. The Court, in the old sense of the word, ceased to be a paramount influence in literature. William III. de- rived his authority from Parliament ; he knew that he must support it mainly by his sword and his statesman- ship. A stranger to England, its manners and its lan- guage, he showed little disposition to encourage letters. Pope, indeed, maliciously suggests that he had the bad taste to admire the poetry of Blackmore, whom he knighted ; but, as a matter of fact, the honour was con- ferred on the worthy Sir Richard in consequence of his distinction in medicine, and he himself bears witness to William's contempt for poetry. " Reverse of Louis he, example rare, Loved to deserve the praise he could not bear. He shunned the acclamations of the throng, And always coldly heard the poet's song. Hence the great King the Muses did neglect, And the mere poet met with small respect." ' Such political verse as we find in this reign generally consists, like Halifax's Epistle to Lord Dorset, or Addi- son's own Address to King WiUiam, of hyperbolical flat- tery. Opposition was extinct, for both parties had for the moment united to promote the Revolution, and the only discordant notes amid the chorus of adulation pro- ceeded from Jacobite writers concealed in the garrets and cellars of Grub Street. Such an atmosphere was not fa- ' Blackmore, The Kit-Kats. 58 ADDISON. [chap. vorable to the production of literature of an elevated or even of a characteristic order. Addison's return to England coincided most happily with another remarkable turn of the tide. Leaning de- cidedly to the Tory party, who were now strongly leavened with the Jacobite element, Anne had not long succeeded to the throne before she seized an opportunity for dis- missing the Whig Ministry whom she found in possession of office. The Whigs, equally alarmed at the influence acquired by their rivals, and at the danger which threat- ened the Protestant succession, neglected no effort to counterbalance the loss of their sovereign's favour by strengthening their credit with the people. Having been trained in a school which had at least qualified them to appreciate the influence of style, the aristocratic leaders of the party wei'e well aware of the advantages they would derive by attracting to themselves the services of the ablest writei's of the day. Hence they made it their policy to mingle with men of letters on an equal footing, and to hold out to them an expectation of a share in the advan- tages to be reaped from the overthrow of theii- rivals. The result of this union of forces was a great increase in the number of literary - political clubs. In its half- aristocratic, half-democratic constitution the club was the natural product of enlarged political freedom, and helped to extend the organisation of polite opinion beyond the narrow orbit of Court society. Addison himself, in his simple style, points out the nature of the fundamental principle of Association which he observed in operation all around him. " When a set of men find themselves agree in any particular, though never so trivial, they estab- lish themselves into a kind of fraternity, and meet onoe or twice a week upon the account of such a fantastic resem-' iv.J HIS EMPLOYMENT IN AFFAIRS OF STATE. 59 blance." ' Among these societies, in the first years of the eighteenth century, the most celebrated was, perhaps, the Kit-Kat Chib. It consisted of thirty -nine of the lead- ing men of the Whig party ; and, though many of these were of the highest rank, it is a characteristic fact that the founder of the club should have been the bookseller Jacob Tonson. It was probably through his influence, joined to that of Halifax, that Addison was elected a member of the society soon after his return to England. Among its prominent members was the Duke of Somerset, the first meeting between whom and Addison, after the correspond- ence that had passed between them, must have been some- what embarrassing. The club assembled at one Christopher Catt's, a pastry-cook, who gave his name both to the society and the mutton-pies which were its ordinary entertainment. Each member was compelled to select a lady as his toast, and the verses which he composed in her honour were en- graved on the wine-glasses belonging to the club. Addi- son chose the Countess of Manchester, whose acquaintance he had made in Paris, and complimented her in the follow- ing lines : " While haughty Gallia's dames, that spread O'er their pale cheeks an artful red, Beheld this beauteous stranger there, In native charms divinely fair, Confusion in their looks they showed, And with unborrowed blushes glowed." Circumstances seemed now to be conspiring in favour of the Whigs. The Tories, whose strength lay mainly in ^ the Jacobite element, were jealous of Marlborough's ascen- dency over the Queen ; on the other hand, the Duchess of Marlborough, who was rapidly acquiring the chief place ' Spectator, No. 9. 60 ADDISON. [chap., in Anne's affections, intrigued in favour of the opposite faction. In spite, too, of her Tory predilections, the Queen, finding her throne menaced by the ambition of Louis XIV., was compelled in self-defence to look for sup- port to the party which had most vigorously identified itself with the principles of the Revolution. She bestowed her unreserved confidence on Marlborough, and he, in order to counterbalance the influence of the Jacobites, threw him- self into the arms of the Whigs; Being named Captain- General in 1704, he undertook the campaign which he brought to so glorious a conclusion on the 2d of August in that year at the battle of Blenheim. Godolphin, who, in the absence of Marlborough, occupied 'the chief place in the Ministry, moved perhaps by patriotic feeling, and no doubt also by a sense of the advantage which his party would derive from this great victory, was anxious that it should be commemorated in adequate verse. He accordingly applied to Halifax as the person to whom the sacer votes required for the occasion would probably be known. Halifax has had the misfortune to have his character transmitted to posterity by two poets who hated him either on public or private grounds. Swift describes him as the would - be " Maecenas of the nation," but in- sinuates that he neglected the wants of the poets whom he patronised: / " Himself as rich as fifty Jews, Was easy though they wanted shoes." Pope also satirises the vanity and meanness of his disposi- tion in the well-known character of Bufo. Such portraits, though they are justified to some extent by evidence com- ing from other quarters, are not to be too strictly examined as if they bore the stamp of historic truth. It is, at any IV.] HIS EMPLOYMENT IN AFFAIRS OF STATE. 61 rate, certain that Halifax always proved himself a warm and zealous friend to Addison, and when Godolphin ap- plied to him for a poet to celebrate Blenheim, he answered that, though acquainted with a person who possessed every qualification for the task, he could not ask him to under- take it. Being pressed for his reasons, he replied "that while too many fools and blockheads were maintained in their pride and luxury at the public expense, such men as were really an honour to their age and country were shame- fully suffered to languish in obscurity ; that, for his own share, he would never desire any gentleman of parts and learning to employ his time in celebrating a Ministry who had neither the justice nor the generosity to make it worth his while." In answer to this the Lord Treasurer assured Halifax that any person whom he might name as equal to the required task, should have no cause to repent of hav- ing rendered his assistance ; whereupon Halifax mentioned Addison, but stipulated that all advances to the latter must come from Godolphin himself. Accordingly, Boyle, Chancellor of the Exchequer, afterwards Lord Carleton, was despatched on the embassy, and, if Pope is to be trusted, found Addison lodged up three pair of stairs over a small shop. He opened to him the subject, and informed him that, in return for the service that was expected of him, he was instructed to offer him a Commissionership of Appeal in the Excise, as a pledge of more considerable ad- vancement in the future. The fruits of this negotiation were The Campaign. Warton disposes of the merits of The Cam2Mign with the cavalier criticism, so often since repeated, that it is merely " a gazette in rhyme." In one sense the judgment is no doubt just. As a poem. The Campaign shows neither loftiness of invention nor enthusiasm of personal feeling, 62 ADDISON. [chap. and it cannot therefore be ranked with sucli an ode as Horace's Qualem ministrum, or "vvith Pope's very fine Epistle to the Earl of Oxford after his disgrace. Its me- thodical narrative style is scarcely misrepresented by War- ton's sarcastic description of it; but it should be remem- bered that this style was adopted by Addison with delib- erate intention. " Thus," says he, in the conclusion of the poem, " Thus would I fain Britanuia's wars rehearse In the smooth records of a faithful verse ; That, if such numbers can o'er time prevail, May tell posterity the wondrous tale. When actions unadorned are faint and weak Cities and countries must be taught to speak ; Gods may descend in factions from the skies, And rivers from their oozy beds arise ; Fiction may deck the truth with spurious rays, And round the hero cast a borrowed blaze. Marlbro's exploits appear divinely bright, And proudly shine in their own native light ; Raised in themselves their genuine charms they boast. And those that paint them truest praise them most." 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 in- finite tact, declares that the highest compliment that can be paid to the hero is to recite his actions in their una- dorned grandeur. This happy turn of flattery shows how far he had advanced in literary skill since he wrote his ad- dress To the King. He had then excused himself for the inadequate celebration of William's deeds on the plea that, great though these might be, they were too near the poet's own time to be seen in proper focus. A thousand yeara IT.] HIS EMPLOYMENT IN AFFAIRS OF STATE. 63 hence, he suggests, some Homer may be inspired by the theme, " and Boyne be sung when it has ceased to flow." This could not have been very consolatory to a mortal craving for contemporary applause, and the apology of- fered in The Campaign for the prosaic treatment of the subject is far more dexterous. Bearing in mind the fact that it was written to order, and that the poet deliberately declined to avail himself of the aid of fiction, we must al- low that the construction of the poem exhibits both art and dignity. The allusion to the vast slaughter at Blen- heim, in the opening paragraph — " Rivers of blood I see and hills of slain, An Iliad rising out of one campaign" — is not very fortunate ; but the lines describing the ambi- tion of Louis XIV. are weighty and dignified, and the couplet indicating, througb the single image of the Dan- ube, the vast extent of the French encroachments, shows how thoroughly Addison was imbued with the spirit of classical poetry: " The rising Danube its long race began, And half its course through the new conquests ran." With equal felicity he describes the position and interven- tion of England, seizing at the same time the opportunity for a panegyric on her free institutions : "Thrice happy Britain, from the kingdoms rent To sit the guardian of the Continent ! That sees her bravest sons advanced so high And flourishing so near her prince's eye ; Thy favourites grow not up by fortune's sport, Or from the crimes and follies of a court : On the firm basis of desert they rise, From long-tried faith and friendship's holy ties, 64 ADDISON. [chap. Their sovereign's well-distinguished smiles they share, Her ornaments in peace, her strength in war ; The nation thanks them with a public voice, By showers of blessings Heaven approves their choice ; Envy itself is dumb, in wonder lost. And factions strive who shall applaud them most." He proceeds in a stream of calm and equal verse, enlivened by dexterous allusions and occasional happy turns of ex- pression, to describe the scenery of the Moselle ; the march between the Maese and the Danube ; the heat to which the army was exposed ; the arrival on the Neckar ; and the track of devastation left by the French armies. The meet- ing between Marlborough and Eugene inspires him again to raise his style : " Great souls by instinct to each other turn, Demand alliance, and in friendship burn, A sudden friendship, while with outstretched rays They meet each other mingling blaze with blaze. Polished in courts, and hardened in the field, Renowned for conquest, and in council skilled. Their courage dwells not in a troubled flood Of mounting spirits and fermenting blood ; Lodged in the soul, with virtue overruled. Inflamed by reason, and by reason cooled. In hours of peace content to be unknown. And only in the field of battle shown : To souls like these in mutual friendship joined Heaven dares entrust the cause of human kind." The celebrated passage describing Marlborough's conduct at Blenheim is certainly the finest in the poem : " 'Twas then great Marlborough's mighty soul was proved That in the shock of charging hosts unmoved, Amidst confusion, horror, and despair, Examined all the dreadful scenes of war ; IV.] HIS EMPLOYMENT IN AFFAIRS OF STATE. 65 In peaceful thought the field of death surveyed, To fainting squadrons sent the timely aid, Inspired repulsed battalions to engage. And taught the doubtful battle where to rage. So when an angel by divine command With rising tempests shakes a guilty land. Such as of late o'er pale Britannia past, Calm and serene he drives the furious blast; And pleased th' Almighty's orders to perform. Rides in the whirlwind and directs the storm." Johnson makes some cliaracteristic criticisms on this sim- ile, which indeed, he maintains, is not a simile, but " an exemplification." He says : " Marlborough is so like the angel in the poem that the action of both is almost the same, and performed by both in the same manner. Marl- borough ' teaches the battle to rage ;' the angel ' directs the storm;' Marlborough is 'unmoved in peaceful thought;' the angel is ' calm and serene ;' Marlborough stands ' un- moved amid the shock of hosts;' the angel rides 'calm in the whirlwind.' The lines on Marlborough are just and noble ; but the simile gives almost the same images a sec- ond time." This judgment would be unimpeachable if the force of the simile lay solely in the likeness between Marlborough and the angel, but it is evident that equal stress is to be laid on the resemblance between the battle and the storm. It was Addison's intention to raise in the mind of the reader the noblest possible idea of composure and design in the midst of confusion : to do this he selected an angel as the minister of the divine purpose, and a storm as the symbol of fury and devastation ; and, in order to heighten his effect, he recalls with true art the violence of the par- ticular tempest which had recently ravaged the country. Johnson has noticed the close similarity between the per- 66 ADDISON. [chap. sons of Marlborongli and the angel ; but he has exagger- ated the resemblance between the actions in which they are severally engaged. The Campaign completely fulfilled the purpose for which it was written. It strengthened the position of the Whig Ministry, and secured for its author the advancement that had been promised him. Early in 1706 Addison, on the recommendation of Lord Godolphin, was promoted from the Commissionership of Appeals in Excise to be Under- Secretary of State to Sir Charles Hedges. The latter was one of the few Tories who had retained their position in the Ministry since the restoration of the Whigs to the fa- vour of their sovereign, and he, too, shortly vanished from the stage like his more distinguished friends, making way for the Earl of Sunderland, a staunch Whig, and son-in- law to the Duke of Marlborough. Addison's duties as Under-Secretary were probably not particularly arduous. In 1705 he was permitted to at- tend Lord Halifax to the Court of Hanover, whither the latter was sent to carry the Act for the Naturalisation of the Electress Sophia. The mission also included Van- brugh, who, as Clarencieux King-at-Arms, was charged to invest the Elector with the Order of the Garter ; the party thus constituted affording a remarkable illustration of the influence exercised by literature over the politics of the period. Addison must have obtained during this jour- ney considerable insight into the nature of England's foreign policy, as, besides establishing the closest re- lations with Hanover, Halifax was also instructed to form an alliance with the United Provinces for securing the succession of the House of Brunswick to the English throne. In the meantime his imagination was not idle. After IV.] HIS EMPLOYMENT IN AFFAIRS OF STATE. 67 helping Steele in the composition of his Tender Husband, which was acted in 1705, he found time for engaging in a fresh literary enterprise of his own. The principles of operatic music, which had long been developed in Italy, had been slow in making their way to this country. Their introduction had been delayed partly by the French prej- udices of Charles II., but more, perhaps, by the strong insular tastes of the people, and by the vigorous forms of the native drama. What the untutored English audience liked best to hear was a well-marked tune, sung in a fine natural way : the kind of music which was in vogue on the stage till the end of the seventeenth century was sim- ply the regular drama interspersed with airs ; recitative was unknown ; and there was no attempt to cultivate the voice according to the methods practised in the Italian schools. But with the increase of wealth and travel more exacting tastes began to prevail ; Italian singers appeared on the stage and exhibited to the audience capacities of voice of which they had hitherto had no experience. In 1705 was acted at the Hayraarket Arsinoe, the first opera constructed in England on avowedly Italian principles. The words were still in English, but the dialogue was throughout in recitative. The composer was Thomas Clay- ton, who, though a man entirely devoid of genius, had travelled in Italy, and was eager to turn to account the experience which he had acquired. In spite of its bad- ness Arsinoe greatly impressed the public taste ; and it was soon followed by Camilla, a version of an opera by Bononcini, portions of which were sung in Italian, and portions in English — an absurdity on which Addison just- ly comments in a number of the Spectator. His remarks on the consequences of translating the Italian operas are equally humorous and just. 4 68 ADDISON. [chap. " As there was no great danger," says he, " of hurting the sense of these extraordinary pieces, our authors would often make words of their own which were entirely foreign to the meaning of the pas- sages they pretended to translate ; their chief care being to make the numbers of the English verse answer to those of the Italian, that both of them might go to the same tune. Thus the famous song in Camilla, ' Barbara si t'intendo,' etc. ' Barbarous woman, yes, I know your meauing," which expresses the resentment of an angry lover, was translated into that English lamentation, ' Frail are a lover's hopes,' etc. And it was pleasant enough to see the most refined persons of the British nation dying away and languishing to notes that were filled with the spirit of rage and indignation. It happened also very fre- quently where the sense was rightly translated ; the necessary trans- position of words, which were drawn out of the phrase of one tongue into that of another, made the music appear very absurd in one tongue that was very natural in the other. I remember an Italian verse that ran thus, word for word : ' And turned my rage into pity,' which the English, for rhyme's sake, translated, ' Aud into pity turned my rage.' By this means the soft notes that were adapted to pity in the Ital- ian fell upon the word ' rage ' in the English ; and the angry sounds that were turned to rage in the original were made to express pity in the translation. It oftentimes happened likewise that the finest notes in the air fell upon the most insignificant word in the sentence. I have known the word ' and ' pursued through the whole gamut ; have been entertained with many a melodious ' the ;' and have heard the most beautiful graces, quavers, and divisions bestowed upon ' then,' ' for,' and ' from,' to the eternal honour of our English par- ticles." > Perceiving these radical defects, Addison seems to have been ambitious of showing by example bow they might ' Spectator, No. 18. IV.] HIS EMPLOYMENT IN AFFAIRS OF STATE. 69 be remedied. " The great success this opera {A^'sinoe) met with produced," says he, " some attempts of form- ing pieces upon Italian plans, which should give a more natural and reasonable entertainment than what can be met with in the elaborate trifles of that nation. This alarmed the poetasters and fiddlers of the town, who were used to deal in a more ordinary kind cf ware, and there- fore laid down an established rule, which is received as such to this day, * That nothing is capable of being well set to music that is not nonsense.' " ' The allusion to the failure of the writer's own opera of Rosamond is un- mistakable. The piece was performed on the 2d of April, 1706, but was coldly received, and after two or three rep- resentations was withdrawn. The reasons which the Spectator assigns for the catas- trophe betray rather the self-love of the author than the clear perception of the critic. Rosamond failed because, in the first place, it was very bad as a musical composi- tion. Misled by the favour with which Arsinoe was re- ceived, Addison seems to have regarded Clayton as a great musician, and he put his poem into the hands of the lat- ter, thinking that his score would be as superior to that of Arisinoe as his own poetry was to the words of that opera. Clayton, however, had no genius, and only suc- ceeded in producing what Sir John Hawkins, quoting with approbation the words of another critic, calls " a confused chaos of music, the only merit of which is its shortness.'"^ But it may be doubted whether in any case the most skilful composer could have produced music of a high order adapted to the poetry of Rosamond. The play is neither a tragedy, a comedy, nor a melodrama. It seems ' Spectator, No. 18. ' Sir John Hawkins' History of Music, vol. v. p. 137. 10 ADDISON. [chap. that Eleanor did not really poison Fair Rosamond, but only administered to her a sleeping potion, and, as she takes care to explain to the King, " The bowl with drowsy juices filled, From cold Egyptian drugs distilled, lu borrowed death has closed her eyes." This information proves highly satisfactory to the King, not only because he is gratified to find that Rosamond is not dead, but also because, even before discovering her supposed dead body, he had resolved, in consequence of a dream sent to him by his guardian angel, to terminate the relations existing between them. The Queen and he accordingly arrange, in a business-like manner, that Rosa- mond shall be quietly removed in her trance to a nunnery;- a reconciliation is then effected between the husband and wife, who, as we are led to suppose, live happily ever after. The main motive of the opera in Addison's mind ap- pears to have been the desire of complimenting the Marl- borough family. It is dedicated to the Duchess ; the war- like character of Henry naturally recalls the prowess of the great modern captain ; and the King is consoled by his guardian angel for the loss of Fair Rosamond with a vision of the future glories of Blenheim : " To calm thy grief and lull thy cares, Look up and see What, after long revolving years, Thy bower shall be ! When time its beauties shall deface. And only with its ruins grace The future prospect of the place ! Behold the glorious pile ascending, Columns swelling, arches bending, Domes in awful pomp arising, Art in curious strokes surprising, IV.] HIS EMPLOYMENT IN AFFAIRS OF STATE. 11 Foes in figured fights contending, Behold the glorious pile ascending." This is graceful enough, but it scarcely offers material for music of a serious kind. Nor can the Court have been greatly impressed by the compliment paid to its morality, as contrasted with that of Charles II., conveyed as it was by the mouth of Grideline, one of the comic characters in the piece — " Since conjugal passion Is come into fashion, And marriage so blest on the throne is, Like a Venus I'll shine. Be fond and be fine. And Sir Trusty shall be my Adonis." The ill success of Rosamond confirmed Addison's dis- like to the Italian opera, which he displayed both in bis grave and humorous papers on the subject in the Specta- tor. The disquisition upon the various actors of the lion in Hydaspes is one of his happiest inspirations ; but his serious criticisms are, as a rule, only just in so far as they are directed against the dramatic absurdities of the Ital- ian opera. As to his technical qualifications as a critic of music, it will be sufficient to cite the opinion of Dr. Bur- ney : " To judges of music nothing more need be said of Mr. Addison's abilities to decide concerning the compara- tive degrees of national excellence in the art, and the merit of particular masters, than his predilection for the produc tions of Clayton, and insensibility to the force and origi- nality of Handel's compositions in Rinaldoy * In December, 1708, the Earl of Sunderland was displaced to make room for the Tory Lord Dartmouth, and Addison, as Under-Secretary, following the fortunes of his superior, • Barney's History of Music, vol. iv. p. 203. 72 ADDISON. [chap. found himself again wiihout employment. Fortunately for liim the Earl of Wharton was almost immediately afterwards made Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, and offered him the lucrative post of Secretary. The Earl, who was subsequently created a Marquis, was the father of the famous Duke satirised in Pope's first Moral Essay ; he was in every respect the opposite of Addison — a vehement Republican, a sceptic, unprincipled in his morals, venal in his methods of Government. He was nevertheless a man of the finest talents, and seems to have possessed the power of gaining personal ascendency over his companions by a profound knowledge of character. An acquaintance with Addison, doubtless commencing at the Kit-Kat Club, of which both were members, had convinced him that the latter had eminent qualifications for the task, which the Secretary's post would involve, of dealing with men of very various conditions. Of the feelings with which Addison on his side regarded the Earl we have no record. "It is reasonable to suppose," says Johnson, " that he counter- acted, as far as he was able, the malignant and blasting in- fluence of the Lieutenant ; and that, at least, by his inter- vention some good was done and some mischief prevented." Not a sh'adow of an imputation, at any rate, rests upon his own conduct as Secretary. He appears to have acted strictly on that conception of public duty which he defines in one of his papers in the Spectator. Speaking of the marks of a corrupt official, " Such an one," he declares, " is the man who, upon any pretence whatsoever, receives more than what is the stated and unquestioned fee of his office. Gratifications, tokens of thankfulness, despatch money, and the like specious terms, are the pretences under which cor- ruption very frequently shelters itself. An honest man will, however, look on all these methods as unjustifiable, IV.] HIS EMPLOYMENT IN AFFAIRS OF STATE. V3 and will enjoy himself better in a moderate fortune, that is gained with honour and reputation, than in an overgrown estate that is cankered with the acquisitions of rapine and exaction. Were all our offices discharged with such an inflexible integrity, we should not see men in all ages, who grow up to exorbitant wealth, with the abilities which are to be met with in an ordinary mechanic." ' His friends perhaps considered that his impartiality was somewhat overstrained, since he always declined to remit the custom- ary fees in their favour. " For," said he, " I may have forty friends, whose fees may be two guineas a-piece ; then I lose eighty guineas, and my friends gain but two a-piece." He took with him as his own Secretary, Eustace Bud- gell, who was related to him, and for whom he seems to have felt a warm affection. Budgell was a man of consid- erable literary ability, and was the writer of the various papers in the Spectator signed "X," some of which suc- ceed happily in imitating Addison's style. While he was under his friend's guidance his career was fairly successful, but his temper was violent, and when, at a later period of his life, he served in Ireland under a new Lieutenant and another Secretary, he became involved in disputes which led to his dismissal. A furious pamphlet against the Lord- Lieutenant, the Duke of Bolton, published by him in spite of Addison's remonstrances, only complicated his position, and from this period his fortunes steadily declined. He lost largely in the South Sea Scheme ; spent considerable sums in a vain endeavour to obtain a seat in Parliament ; and at last came under the influence of his kinsman, Tin- dal, the well-known deist, whose will he is accused of hav- ing falsified. With his usual infelicity he happened to rouse the resentment of Pope, and was treated in conse- ' Spectator, No. 469. '74 ADDISON. [chap. queuce to one of the deadly couplets with which that great poet was in the habit of repaying real or supposed injuries : " Let Budgell charge low Grub Street on his quill, And write whate'er he pleased — except his will." The lines were memorable, and were doubtless often quot- ed, and the wretched man finding his life insupportable, ended it by drowning himself in the Thames, During his residence in Ireland Addison firmly ce- mented his friendship with Swift, whose acquaintance he had probably made after The Campaign had given him a leading position in the Whig party, on the side of which the sympathies of both were then enlisted. Swift's admiration for Addison was warm and generous. Wben the latter was on the point of embarking on his new duties, Swift wrote to a common friend, Colonel Hunter, " Mr. Addison is hurrying away for Ireland, and I pray too much business may not spoil le plus honnete homme du mondey To Archbishop King he wrote : " Mr. Addison, who goes over our first secretary, is a most excellent person, and being my intimate friend I shall use all my credit to set him right in his notions of persons and things." Addison's duties took him occasionally to Eng- land, and during one of his visits Swift writes to him from Ireland: "I am convinced that whatever Govern- ment come over you will find all marks of kindness from any parliament here with respect to your employment, the Tories contending with the Whigs which should speak best of you. In short, if you will come over again when you are at leisure we will raise an army and make you King of Ireland. Can you think so meanly of a kingdom as not to be pleased that every creature in it, IV.] HIS EMPLOYMENT IN AFFAIRS OF STATE. 75 who bath one grain of worth, has a veneration for you ?" In his Journal to Stella he says, under date of October 12, 1710: "Mr. Addison's election has passed easy and undisputed ; and I beheve if he had a mind to be chosen king he would hardly be refused." On his side Addison's feelings were equally warm. He presented Swift with a copy of his Remarks on Several Parts of Italy, inscrib- ing it — " To the most agreeable companion, the truest friend, and the greatest genius of his age." This friendship, founded on mutual respect, was des- tined to be impaired by political differences. In 1710 the credit of the Whig Ministry had been greatly under- mined by the combined craft of Harley and Mrs. Masham, and Swift, who was anxious as to his position, on coming over to England to press his claims on Somers and Halifax, found that they were unable to help him. He appears to have considered that their want of power proceeded from want of will ; at any rate, he made ad- vances to Harley, which were of course gladly received. The Ministry were at this time being hard pressed by the Uxa7niner, under the conduct of Prior, and at their instance Addison started the Whig Examiner in their defence. Though this paper was written effectively and with admirable temper, party polemics were little to the taste of its author, and, after five numbers, it ceased to exist on the 8th of October. Swift, now eager for the triumph of the Tories, expresses his delight to Stella by informing her, in the words of a Tory song, that " it was down among the dead men." He himself wrote the first of his Examiners on the 2d of the following Novem- ber, and the crushing blows with which he followed it up did much to hasten the downfall of the Ministry. As was natural, Addison was somewhat displeased at his 4* 16 ADDISO^\ [chap. friend's defection. In December Swift writes to Stella, " Mr. Addison and I are as different as black and white, and I believe our friendship will go off by this d busi- ness of party. He cannot bear seeing me fall in so with the Ministry ; but I love him still as much as ever, though we seldom meet." In January, 1710-11, he says: "I called at the coffee-house, where I had not been in a week, and talked coldly awhile with Mr. Addison ; all our friend- ship and dearness are off ; we are civil acquaintance, talk words, of course, of when we shall meet, and that's all. Is it not odd ?" Many similar entries follow ; but on June 26, 1711, the record is : " Mr. Addison and I talked as usual, and as if we had seen one another yesterday," And on September 14, he observes: "This evening I met Addison and pastoral Philips in the Park, and supped with them in Addison's lodgings. We were very good company, and I yet know no man half so agreeable to me as he is. I sat with them till twelve." It was perhaps through the influence of Swift, who spoke warmly with the Tory Ministry on behalf of Addi- son, that the latter, on the downfall of the Whigs in the autumn of 1710, was for some time suffered to retain the Keepership of the Records in Berraingham's Tower, an Irish place which had been bestowed upon him by the Queen as a special mark of the esteem with which she regarded him, and which appears to have been worth £400 a year.^ In other respects his fortunes were greatly altered by the change of Ministry. " I have within this twelvemonth," he writes to Wortley on the 21st of July, 1711, "lost a place of £2000 per ann., an estate in the Indies worth £14,000, and, what is worse than all the ^ Fourth Drapier's Letter. IF.] HIS EMPLOYMENT IN ATE AIRS OF STATE. 11 rest, my mistress.' Hear this and wonder at my philoso- phy ! I find they are going to take away my Irish place from me too ; to which I must add that I have just re- signed my fellowship, and that stocks sink every day." In spite of these losses his circumstances were materially different from those in which he found himself after the fall of the previous Whig Ministry in 1702. Before the close of the year 1711 he was able to buy the estate of Bilton, near Rugby, for £10,000. Part of the purchase money was probably provided from what he had saved while he was Irish Secretary, and had invested in the funds ; and part was, no doubt, made up from the profits of the Tatler and the Spectator. Miss Aikin says that a portion was advanced by his brother Gulston ; but this seems to be an error. Two years before, the Governor of Fort St. George had died, leaving him his executor and residuary legatee. This is no doubt "the estate in the Indies " to which he refers in his letter to Wortley, but he had as yet derived no benefit from it. His brother had left his affairs in great confusion ; the trustees were careless or dishonest ; and though about £600 was remitted to him in the shape of diamonds in 1713, the liquidation was not complete till 1716, when only a small moiety of the sum bequeathed to him came into his hands.* ' Who the " mistress " was cannot be certainly ascertained. See, however, p. 146. « Egerton MSS., British Museum (1972). CHAPTER V. THE TATLER AND SPECTATOR. The career of Addison, as described in the preceding chapters, has exemplified the great change effected in the position of men of letters in England by the Restoration and the Revolution ; it is now time to exhibit him in his most characteristic light, and to show the remarkable ser- vice the eighteenth century essayists performed for Eng- lish society in creating an organised public opinion. It is difficult for ourselves, who look on the action of the periodical press as part of the regular machinery of life, to appreciate the magnitude of the task accomplished by Addison and Steele in the pages of the Tatler and S2^ec- tator. Every day, week, month, and quarter now sees the issue of a vast munber of journals and magazines intended to form the opinion of every order and section of society ; but in the reign of Queen Anne the only centres of soci- ety that existed were the Court, with the aristocracy that revolved about it, and the clubs and coffee-houses, in which the commercial and professional classes met to ''dis- cuss matters of general interest. The Tatler and Sjyec- tator were the first organs in which an attempt was made to give form and consistency to the opinion arising out of this social contact. Bat we should form a very erro- neous idea of the character of these publications if we CHAP, v.] TEE TATLEE AND SPEC TA TOE. 79 regarded them as the sudden productions of individual genius, written in satisfaction of a mere temporary taste. Like all masterpieces in art and literature, they mark the final stage of a long and painful journey, and the merit of their inventors consists largely in the judgment with which they profited by the experience of many predeces- sors. The first newspaper published in Europe was the Gaz- zetta of Ycnice, which was written in manuscript, ^nd read aloud at certain places in the city, to supply information to the people during the war with the Turks in 1536. In England it was not till the reign of Elizabeth that the increased facilities of communication and the growth of wealth caused the purveyance of news to become a profit- able employment. Towards the end of the sixteenth cen- tury newsmongers began to issue little pamphlets report- ing extraordinary intelligence, but not issued at regular periods. The titles of these publications, which are all of them that survive, show that the arts with which the framers of the placards of our own newspapers endeavour to attract attention are of venerable antiquity : " Wonder- ful and Strange newes out of Suffolke and Essex, where it rained wheat the space of six or seven miles" (1583); " Lamentable newes out of Monmouthshire, containinge the wonderfull and fearfuU accounts of the great overflow- ing of the waters in the said countrye" (1607).' In 1622 one Nathaniel Butter began to publish a news- paper bearing a fixed title and appearing at stated inter- vals. It was called the Weeklt/ Newes from Italy and Germanie, etc., and was said to be printed for Mercurius Britannicus. This novelty provided much food for mer- riment to the poets, and Ben Jonson in his Staple of News ' Andrews' History of British Journalism. 80 ADDISON. [chap. satirises Butter, under tlie name of Nathaniel, in a pas- sage which the curious reader will do well to consult, as it shows the low estimation in which newspapers were then held,' Though it might appear from Jonson's dialogue that the newspapers of that day contained many items of do- mestic intelligence, such was scarcely the case. Butter and his contemporaries, as was natural to men who confined themselves to the publication of news without attempting to form opinion, obtained their materials almost entirely from abroad, whereby they at once aroused more vividly the imagination of their readers, and doubtless gave more scope to their own invention. Besides, they were not at liberty to retail home news of that political kind which would have been of the greatest interest to the public. For a long time the evanescent character of the newspaper allowed it to escape the attention of the licenser, but the growing demand for this sort of reading at last brought it under supervision, and so strict was the control exercised over even the reports of foreign intelligence that its week- ly appearance was frequently interrupted. In 1641, however, the Star-chamber was abolished, and the heated political atmosphere of the times generated a new species of journal, in which we find the first attempt to influence opinion through the periodical press. This was the newspaper known under the generic title of Mer- cury. Many weekly publications of this name appeared during the Civil Wars on the side of both King and Par- liament, Mercurius Anlicus being the representative organ of the Royalist cause, and Mercurius Pragmaticus and Mer- curius Politicus of the Republicans. Party animosities were thus kept alive, and proved so inconvenient to the ■ Staple of News, Act I. Scene 2. v.] THE TATLER AND SPECTATOR. 81 Government that the Parliament interfered to curtail the liberty of the press. In 1647 an ordinance passed the House of Lords, prohibiting any person from " making, writing, printing, selling, publishing, or uttering, or caus- ing to be made, any book, sheet, or sheets of news what- soever, except the same be licensed by both or either House of Parliament, with the name of the author, printer, and licenser affixed." In spite of this prohibition, which was renewed by Act of Parliament in 1662, many unlicensed periodicals continued to appear, till in 1663 the Govern- ment, finding their repressive measures insufficient, re- solved to grapple with the difficulty by monopolising the right to publish news. The author of this new project was the well-known Rog^r L'Estrange, who in 1663 obtained a patent assign- ing to him " all the sole privilege of writing, printing, and publishing all Narratives, Advertisements, Mercuries, In- telligencers, Diurnals, and other books of public intelli- gence." L'Estrange's journal was called the Public Intelli- gencer; it was published once a week, and in its form was a rude anticipation of the modern newspaper, containing as it did an obituary, reports of the proceedings in Parlia- ment and in the Court of Claims, a list of the circuits of the judges, of sheriffs, Lent preachers, etc. After being continued for two years it gave place first, in 1665, to the Oxford Gazette, published at Oxford, whither the Court had retired during the plague ; and in 1666 to the London Gazette, which was under the immediate control of an Under-Secretary of State. The office of Gazetteer became henceforth a regular ministerial appointment, and was viewed with different eyes according as men were affected towards the Government. Steele, who held it, says of it : "My next appearance as a writer was in the quality of the 82 ADDISON. [chap. lowest Minister of State — to wit, in the office of Gazetteer; where I worked faithfully according to order, without ever erring against the rule observed by all Ministers, to keep that paper very innocent and very insipid." Pope, on the other hand, who regarded it as an organ published to in- fluence opinion in favour of the Government, is constant in his attacks upon it, and has immortalised it in the mem- orable lines in the Dunciad beginning, " Next plunged a feeble but a desperate pack," etc. In 1679 the Licensing Act passed in 1662 expired, and the Parliament declined to renew it. The Court was thus left without protection against the expression of public- opinion, which was daily becoming more bold and out- spoken. In his extremity the King fell back on the ser- vility of the judges, and, having procured from them an opinion that the publishing of any printed matter without license was contrary to the common law, he issued his fa- mous Proclamation (in 1680) "to prohibit and forbid all persons whatsoever to print or publish any news, book, or pamphlets of news, not licensed by his Majesty's author- ity." Disregard of the proclamation was treated as a breach of the peace, and many persons were punished accordingly. This severity produced the effect intended. The voice of the periodical press was stifled, and the London Gazette was left almost in exclusive possession of the field of news. When Monmouth landed in 1685 the King managed to obtain from Parliament a renewal of the Licensing Act for seven years, and even after the Revolution of 1688 several attempts were made by the Ministerial Whigs to prolong or to renew the operation of the Act. In spite, however, of the violence of the organs of " Grub Street," which had grown up under it, these attempts were unsuccessful ; it v.] THE TATLER AND SPECTATOR. 83 was justly felt that it was wiser to leave falsehood and scurrility to be gradually corrected by public opinion, as speaking through an unfettered press, than to attack them by a law which they had proved themselves able to defy. From 1682 the freedom of the press may therefore be said to date, and the lapse of the Licensing Act was the signal for a remarkable outburst of journalistic enterprise and in- vention. Not only did the newspapers devoted to the re- port of foreign intelligence reappear in greatly increased numbers, but, whereas the old Mercuries had never been published more than once in the same week, the new comers made their appearance twice and sometimes even three times. In 1702 was printed the first daily newspa- per. The Daily Courant. It could only at starting provide material to cover one side of a half sheet of paper ; but the other side was very soon covered with printed matter, in which form its existence was prolonged till 1735. The development of party government of course encour- aged the controversial capacities of the journalist, and many notorious, and some famous names are now found among the combatants in the political arena. On the side of the Whigs the most redoubtable champions were Dan- iel Defoe, of the Review, who was twice imprisoned and once set in the pillory for his political writings ; John Tut- chin, of the Ohservator ; and Ridpath, of the Flying Post — all of whom have obtained places in the Dunciad. The old Tories appear to have been satisfied during the early part of Queen Anne's reign with prosecuting the newspa- pers that attacked them ; but Harley, who understood the power of the press, engaged Prior to harass the Whigs in the Examiner, and was afterwards dexterous enough to se- cure the invaluable assistance of Swift for the same paper. In opposition to the Examiner in its early days the Whigs, 84 ADDISON. [chap. as ha*- been said, started the Whiff Examiner, under the auspices of Addison, so that the two great historical par- ties had their cases stated by the two greatest prose-writers of the first half of the eighteenth century. Beside the Quidnunc and the party politician, another class of reader now appeared demanding aliment in the press. Men of active and curious minds, with a little lei- sure and a large love of discussion, loungers at Will's or at the Grecian Coffee-Houses, were anxious to have their doubts on all subjects resolved by a printed oracle. Their tastes were gratified by the ingenuity of John Dunton, whose strange account of his Life and Errors throws a strong light on the literary history of this period. In 1690 Dunton published his Athenian Gazette, the name of which he afterwards altered to the Athenian Mercury. The object of this paper was to answer questions put to the editor by the public. These were of all kinds — on re- . ligion, casuistry, love, literature, and manners — no question being too subtle or absurd to extract a reply from the con- ductor of the paper. The Athenian Mercury seems to have been read, by as many distinguished men of the pe- riod as Notes and Queries in our own time, and there can be no doubt that the quaint humours it originated gave the first hint to the inventors of the Tatler and the Spec- tator. Advertisements were inserted in the newspapers at a comparatively early period of their existence. The editor acted as middleman between the advertiser and the public, and made his announcements in a style of easy frankness which will appear to the modern reader extremely re- freshing. Thus, in the "Collection for the Improve- ment of Husbandry and Trade" (1682), there are the fol- lowing : v.] TRE T A TLER K-^D SPECTATOR. 85 " If I can meet with a sober man that has a counter-tenc voice, I can help him to a place worth thirty pound the year or more. "If any noble or other gentleman wants a porter that is very lusty, comely, and six foot high and two inches, I can help. " I want a complete young man that will wear a livery, to wait on a very valuable gentleman ; but he must know how to play on a vio- lin or flute. " I want a genteel footman that can play on the violin, to wait on a person of honour." * Everytliing was now prepared for the production of a class of newspaper designed to form and direct public opin- ion on rational principles. The press was emancipated from State control ; a reading public had constituted itself out of the habitues of the coffee-houses and clubs; nothing was wanted but an inventive genius to adapt the materials at his disposal to the circumstances of the time. The required hero was not long in making his appearance. Richard Steele, the son of an official under the Irish Gov- ernment, was, above all things, " a creature of ebullient heart." Impulse and sentiment were with him always far stronger motives of action than reason, principle, or even interest. He left Oxford, without taking a degree, from an ardent desire to serve in the army, thereby sacrificing his prospect of succeeding to a family estate ; his extrav- agance and dissipation while serving in the cavahy were notorious ; yet this did not dull the clearness of his moral perceptions, for it was while his excesses were at their height that he dedicated to his commanding officer, Lord Cutts, his Christian Hero. Vehement in his political, as in all other feelings, he did not hesitate to resign the office he held under the Tory Government in 1711 in order to ' Andrews' History of British Journalism. 86 ADDISON. [chap. attack it for what he considered its treachery to the coun- try; but he was equally outspoten, and with equal disad- vantage to himself, when he found himself at a later period in disagreement with the Whigs. He had great fertility of invention, strong natural humour, true though unculti- vated taste, and inexhaustible human sympath3\ His varied experience had made him well acquainted with life and character, and in his office of Gazetteer he had had an opportunity of watching the eccentricities of the public taste, which, now emancipated from restraint, began vaguely to feel after new ideals. That, under such circumstances, he should have formed the design of treating current events from a humorous point of view was only natural, but he was indebted for the form of his newspaper to the most original genius of the age. Swift had early in the eigh- teenth century exercised his ironical vein by treating the everyday occurrences of life in a mock-heroic style. Among his pieces of this kind that were" most successful in. catch- ing the public taste were the humorous predictions of the death of Partridge, the astrologer, signed with the name of Isaac BickerstafE. Steele, seizing on the name and char- acter of Partridge's fictitious rival, turned him with much pleasantry into the editor of a new journal, the design of which he makes Isaac describe as follows : " The state of conversation and business in this town having long been perplexed with Pretenders in both kinds, in order to open men's minds against such abuses, it appeared no unprofitable undertaking to publish a Paper, which should observe upon the manners of the pleasurable, as well as the busy part of mankind. To make this gen- erally read, it seemed the most proper method to form it by way of a Letter of Intelligence, consisting of such parts as might gratify the curiosity of persons of all conditions and of each sex. . . . The gen- eral purposes of this Paper is to expose the false arts of life, to pull off the disguises of cunning, vanity, and affectation, and to recom- v.] THE TATLER AND SPECTATOR. 87 mend a general simplicity in our dress, our discourse, and our be- haviour." ' The name of the Taller, Isaac informs us, was " invented in honour of the fair sex," for whose entertainment the new paper was largely designed. Tt appeared three times a week, and its price was a penny, though it seems that the first number, published April 12, 1709, was distributed gratis as an advertisement. In order to make the contents of the paper varied it was divided into five portions, of which the editor gives the following account : " All accounts of Gallantry, Pleasure, and Entertainment, shall be under the article of White's Chocolate-House ; Poetry under that of Will's Coffee-House ; Learning under the title of Grecian ; Foreign and Domestic News you will have from Saint James' Coffee-House ; and what else I have to offer on any other subject shall be dated from my own apartment." ^ In this division we see the importance of the coffee- bouses as the natural centres of intelligence and opinion. Of the four houses mentioned, St. James' and White's, both of them in St. James' Street, were the chief haunts of statesmen and men of fashion, and the latter bad acquired an infamous notoriety for the ruinous gambling of its ha- hitues. Will's, in Russell Street, Covent Garden, kept up the reputation which it had procured in Dryden's time as the favourite meeting - place of men of letters ; while the Grecian, in Devereux Court in the Strand, which was the oldest coffee-house in London, afforded a convenient rendez- vous for the learned Templars. At starting, the design an- nounced in the first number was adhered to with tolerable fidelity. The paper dated from St. James' Coffee - House was always devoted to the recital of foreign news ; that from Will's either criticised the current dramas, or con- » Taller, No. 1. * Hid. 88 ADDISON. [chap. tained a copy of verses from some author of repute, or a piece of general literary criticism ; the latest gossip at White's was reproduced in a fictitious form and with added colour. Advertisements were also inserted ; and half a sheet of the paper was left blank, in order that at the last moment the most recent intelligence might be added in manuscript, after the manner of the contemporary news- letters. In all these respects the character of the news- paper was preserved ; but in the method of treating news adopted by the editor there was a constant tendency to subordinate matter of fact to the elements of humour, fic- tion, and sentiment. In his survey of the manners of the time, Isaac, as an astrologer, was assisted by a familiar spirit, named Pacolet, who revealed to him the motives and secrets of men ; his sister, Mrs. Jenny DistafE, was occasion- ally deputed to produce the paper from the wizard's " own apartment;" and Kidney, the waiter at St. James' Coffee- House, was humorously represented as the chief authority in all matters of foreign intelligence. The mottoes assumed by the Taller at different periods of its existence mark the stages of its development. On its first appearance, when Steele seems to have intended it to be little more than a lively record of news, the motto placed at the head of each paper was " Quidquid agunt homines, nostri est farrago libelli." It soon became evident, however, that its true function was not merely to report the actions of men, but to discuss the propriety of their actions ; and by the time that sufla- cient material had accumulated to constitute a volume, the essayists felt themselves justified in appropriating the words used by Pliny in the preface to his Natural History : v.] THE TATLER AND SPECTATOR. 89 "Nemo apud nos qui idem tentaverit: equidem sentio peculiarem in studiis causam eonim esse, qui difficultatibus victis, utilitatem ju- vandi, protulerunt gratiae placendi. Res ardua vetustis novitatem dare, novis auctoritatem, obsoletis nitorem, fastidiis gratiam, dubiis fidem, omnibus vero naturam, et naturae sute omnia. Itaque non as- SECUTis voluisse, abunde pulclirum atque magnificum est." The disguise of the mock astrologer proved very useful to Steele in his character of moralist. It enabled him to give free utterance to his better feelings, without the risk of incurring the charge of inconsistency or hypocrisy, and noth- ing can be more honourable to him than the open manner in which he acknowledges his own unfitness for the position of a moralist : " I shall not carry my humility so far," says he, " as to call myself a vicious man, but at the same time must confess my life is at best but pardonable. With no greater character than this, a man would make but an indifferent progress in attacking prevailing and fashionable vices, which Mr. Bickerstaff has done with a freedom of spirit that would have lost both its beauty and eflBcacy had it been pretended to by Mr. Steele." ' As Steele cannot claim the sole merit of having invented the form of the Tatler, so, too, it must be remembered that he could never have addressed society ifi the high moral tone assumed by Bickerstaff if the road had not been pre- pared for him by others. One name among his predeces- sors stands out with a special title to honourable record. Since the Restoration the chief school of manners had been the stage, and the flagrant example of immorality set by the Court had been bettered by the invention of the comic dramatists of the period. Indecency was the fash- ion ; religion and sobriety were identified by the polite world with Puritanism and hypocrisy. Even the Church ' Tb^fer. No. 271. 90 ADDISON. [chap. had not yet ventured to say a word in behalf of virtue against the prevailing taste, and when at last a clergyman raised his voice on behalf of the principles which he pro- fessed, the blow which he dealt to his antagonists was the more damaging because it was entirely unexpected. Jer- emy Collier was not only a Tory but a Jacobite, not only a High Churchman but a Nonjuror, who had been out- lawed for his fidelity to the principles of Legitimism ; and that such a man should have published the Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage, re- flecting, as the book did, in the strongest manner on the manners of the fallen dynasty, was as astounding as thun- der from a clear sky. Collier, however, was a man of sin- cere piety, whose mind was for the moment occupied only by the overwhelming danger of the evil which he proposed to attack. It is true that his method of attack was cum- brous, and that his conclusions w^ere far too sweeping and often unjust ; nevertheless, the general truth of his criti- cisms was felt to be irresistible. Congreve and Vanbrugh each attempted an apology for their profession; both, how- ever, showed their perception of the weakness of their po- sition by correcting or recasting scenes in their comedies to which Collier had objected. Dryden accepted the re- proof in a nobler spirit. Even while he had pandered to the tastes of the times, he had been conscious of his treachery to the cause of true art, and had broken out in a fine passage in his Ode to the Memory of Mrs. Kil- ligreto : " gracious God ! how far have we Profaned thy heavenly gift of poesy ! Made prostitute and profligate the Muse, Debased to each obscene and impious use ! T.] THE TATLER AND SPECTATOR. 91 " wretched we ! why were we hurried down This lubrique and adulterous age (Nay, added fat pollutions of our own) To increase the streaming ordure of the stage ?" When Collier attacked hira he bent his head in submission. "In many things," says he, "he has taxed me justly, and I have pleaded guilty to all thought and expressions of mine which can be truly argued of obscenity, profaneness, or immorality, and retract them. If he be my enemy, let hira triumph ; if he be my friend, as I have given him no personal occasion to be otherwise, he will be glad of my repentance." ' The first blow against fashionable immorality having been boldly struck, was followed up systematically. In 1690 was founded "The Society for the Reformation of Manners," which published every year an account of the progress made in suppressing profaneness and debauchery by its means. It continued its operations till 1*738, and during its existence prosecuted, according to its own cal- culations, 101,683 persons. William III. showed himself prompt to encourage the movement which his subjects had begun. The London Gazette of 27th February, 1698-99, contains a report of the following remarkable order : "His Majesty being informed, That, notwithstanding an order made the 4th of June, 1697, by the Earl of Sunderland, then Lord Chamberlain of His Majesty's Household, to prevent the Prophane- ness and Immorality of the Stage, several Plays have been lately acted containing expressions contrary to Religion and Good Man- ners : and whereas the Master of the Revels has represented, That, in contempt of the said order, the actors do often neglect to leave out such Prophane and Indecent expressions as he has thought proper to be omitted. These are therefore to signifie his Majesty's ' Preface to the Fablea. 92 ADDISON. [chap. pleasure, that you do not hereafter presume to act anything in any play contrary to Religion and Good Manners as you shall answer it at your utmost peril. Given under my Hand this 18th of February, 1698. In the eleventh year of his Majesty's reign." It is difficult to realise, in reading the terms of this or- der, that only thirteen years had elapsed since the death of Charles II., and undoubtedly a very large share of the credit due for such a revolution in the public taste is to be assigned to Collier, Collier, however, did nothing in a literary or artistic sense to improve the character of Eng- lish literature. His severity, uncompromising as that of the Puritans, inspired Vice with terror, but could not plead with persuasion on behalf of Virtue ; his sweeping conclu- sions struck at the roots of Art as well as of Immorality. He sought to destroy the drama and kindred pleasures of the Imagination, not to reform them. What the age needed was a waiter to satisfy its natural desires for healthy and rational amusement, and Steele, with his strongly-de- veloped twofold character, was the man of all others to bridge over the chasm between irreligious licentiousness and Puritanical rigidity. Driven headlong on one side of his nature towards all the tastes and pleasures which ab- sorbed the Court of Charles II., his heart in the midst of his dissipation never ceased to approve of whatever was great, noble, and generous. He has described himself with much feeling in his disquisition on the Rake, a character which he says many men are desirous of assuming without any natural qualifications for supporting it : "A Rake," says he, "is a man always to be pitied ; and if he lives one day is certainly reclaimed ; for his faults proceed not from choice or inclination, but from strong passions and appetites, which are in youth too violent for the curb of reason, good sense, good manners, and good nature; all which he must have by nature and education V.J THE TA TLER AND SPECTA TOR. 93 before he can be allowed to be or to have been of this order. . . . His desires run away with him through the strength and force of a lively imagination, which hurries him on to unlawful pleasures before rea- son has power to come in to his rescue." That impulsiveness of feeling wbicli is here described, and whicb was tbe cause of so many of Steele's failings in real life, made him tbe most powerful and persuasive advocate of Virtue in fiction. Of all tbe imaginative English essayists be is tbe most truly natural. His large heart seems to rush out in sympathy with any tale of sorrow or exhibition of magnanimity ; and even in criti- cism, bis true natural instinct, joined to his constitu- tional enthusiasm, often raises his judgments to a level with those of Addison himself, as in bis excellent essay in the Spectator on Raphael's cartoons. Examples of these characteristics in his style are to be found in the Story of Unnion and Valentine,^ and in the fine paper describing two tragedies of real life ; * in the series of papers on duelling, occasioned by a duel into which he was himself forced against bis own inclination ; ' and in tbe sound advice which Isaac gives to bis half - sister Jenny on tbe morrow of her marriage.* Perhaps, bow- ever, tbe chivalry and generosity of feeling which make Steele's writings -so attractive ^are most apparent in tbe delightful paper containing the letter of Serjeant Hall from tbe camp before Mons. After pointing out to bis readers the admirable features in the Serjeant's simple letter, Steele concludes as follows : " If we consider the heap of an army, utterly out of all prospect of rising and preferment, as they certainly are, and such great things ' Tatler, No. 5. "^ lb., No. 82. 3 lb., Nos. 25, 26, 28, 29, 38, 39. * lb.. No. 85. 94 ^ ADDISON. [chap. executed by them, it is hard to account for the motive of their gal- lantry. But to me, who was a cadet at the battle of Coldstream, in Scotland, when Monk charged at the head of the regiment now called Coldstream, from the victory of that day — I remember it as well as if it were yesterday ; I stood on the left of old West, who I believe is now at Chelsea — I say to me, who know very well this part of man- kind, I take the gallantry of private soldiers to proceed from the same, if not from a nobler, impulse than that of gentlemen and offi- cers. They have the same taste of being acceptable to their friends, and go through the difficulties of that profession by the same irre- sistible charm of fellowship and the communication of joys and sor- rows which quickens the relish of pleasure and abates the anguish of pain. Add to this that they have the same regard to fame, though they do not expect so great a share as men above them hope for ; but I will engage Serjeant Hall would die ten thousand deaths rather than that a word should be spoken at the Red Lettice, or any part of the Butcher Row, in prejudice to his courage or honesty. If you will have my opinion, then, of the Serjeant's letter, I pronounce the style to be mixed, but truly epistolary ; the sentiment relating to his own wound in the sublime; the postscript of Pegg Hartwell in the gay ; and the whole the picture of the bravest sort of men, that is to say, a man of great courage and small hopes." ' With such excellences of style and sentiment it is no wonder that the Tatler rapidly established itself in public favour. It was a novel experience for the general reader to be provided three times a week with entertainment that pleased his imagination without offending his sense of decency or his religious instincts. But a new hand shortly appeared in the Tatlei\ which was destined to carry the art of periodical essay-writing to a perfection beside which even the humour of Steele appears rude and unpolished. Addison and Steele had been friends since boyhood. They had been contemporaries at the Charter House, and, as we have seen, Steele had sometimes spent his holidays in the parsonage of Addison's father. He ' Tadfer, No. 87. T.] THE TATLER AND SPECTATOR. 95 was a postmaster at Merton about the same time that his friend was a Fellow of Magdalen. The admiration which he conceived for the hero of his boyhood lasted, as so often happens, through life ; he exhibited his veneration for him in all places, and even when Addison indulged his humour at his expense he showed no resentment. Addison, on his side, seems to have treated Steele with a kind of gracious condescension. The latter was one of the few intimate friends to whom he unbent in conver- sation ; and while he was Under-Secretary of State he aided him in the production of The Tender Husband, which was dedicated to him by the author. Of this play Steele afterwards declared with characteristic impulse that many of the most admired passages were the work of his friend, and that he " thought very meanly of himself that he had never publicly avowed it." The authorship of the Taller was at first kept secret to all the world. It is said .that the hand of Steele dis- covered itself to Addison on reading in the fifth number a remark which he remembered to have himself made to Steele on the judgment of Virgil, as shown in the appel- lation of "Dux Trojanus," which the Latin poet assigns to ^neas, when describing his adventure with Dido in the cave, in the place of the usual epithet of "pius" or " pater." Thereupon he offered his services as a con- tributor, and these were of course gladly accepted. The first paper sent by Addison to the Taller was No. 18, wherein is displayed that inimitable art which makes a man appear infinitely ridiculous by the ironical commenda- tion of his offences against right, reason, and good taste. The subject is the approaching peace with France, and it is noticeable that the article of foreign news, which had been treated in previous Tatlers with complete serious- 96 ADDISON. [chap. nesp, is here for the first time invested with an air of pleasantry. The distress of the news-writers at the pros- pect of peace is thus described : " There is another sort of gentlemen whom I am much more con- cerned for, and that is the ingenious fraternity of which I have the honour to be an unworthy member ; I mean the news-writers of Great Britain, whether Post-men or Post-boys, or by what other name or title soever dignified or distinguished. The case of these gentle- men is, I think, more hard than that of the soldiers, considering that they have taken more towns and fought more battles. They have been upon parties and skirmishes when our armies have lain still, and given the general assault to many a place when the besiegers were quiet in their trenches. They have made us masters of several strong towns many weeks before our generals could do it, and com- pleted victories when our greatest captains have been glad to come off with a drawn battle. Where Prince Eugene has slain his thou- sands Boyer has slain his ten thousands. This gentleman can in- deed be never enough commended for his courage and intrepidity during this whole war : he has laid about him with an inexpressible fury, and, like offended Marius of ancient Rome, made such havoc among his countrymen as must be the work of two or three ages to repair. ... It is impossible for this ingenious sort of men to subsist after a peace: every one remembers tlie shifts they were driven to in the reign of King Charles the Second, when they could not furnish out a single paper of news without ligliting up a comet in Germany or a fire in Moscow. There scarce appeared a letter without a para- graph on an earthquake. Prodigies were grown so familiar that they had lost their name, as a great poet of that age has it. I re- member Mr. Dyer, who is justly looked upon by all the foxhunters in the nation as the greatest statesman our country has produced, was particularly famous for dealing in whales, in so much that in five months' time (for I had the curiosity to examine his letters on that occasion) he brought three into the mouth of the river Thames, be- sides two porpusses and a sturgeon." The appearance of Addison as a regular contributor to the Taller gradually brought about a revolution in the v.] THE TATLER AND SPECTATOR. 97 character of tlie paper. For some time longer, indeed, articles continued to be dated from the different coffee- houses, but only slight efforts were made to distinguish the materials furnished from White's, Will's, or Isaac's own apartment. When the hundredth number was reached a fresh address is given at Shere Lane, where the astrol- oger lived, and henceforward the papers from White's and Will's grow extremely rare ; those from the Grecian may be said to disappear ; and the foreign intelligence, dated from St. James', whenever it is inserted, which is seldom, is as often as not made the text of a literary disquisition. Allegories become frequent, and the letters sent, or sup- posed to be sent, to Isaac at his home address furnish the material for many numbers. The Essay, in fact, or that part of the newspaper which goes to form public opinion, preponderates greatly over that portion which is devoted to the report of news. Spence quotes from a Mr. Chute : " I have heard Sir Richard Steele say that, though he had a greater share in the Tatlers than in the Spectators, he thought the news article in the first of these was what contributed much to their success.'" Chute, however, seems to speak with a certain grudge against Addison, and the statement ascribed by him to Steele is intrinsi- cally improbable. It is not very likely that, as the propri- etor of the Tatler, he would have dispensed with any ele- ment in it that contributed to its popularity, yet after No. 100 the news articles are seldom found. The truth is that Steele recognised the superiority of Addison's style, and with his usual quickness accommodated the form of his journal to the genius of the new contributor. " I have only one gentleman," says he, in the preface to the Toiler, ^ Spence's Anecdotes, p. 325. 98 ADDISON. [chap. " who will be nameless, to thank for any frequent assistance to me, which indeed it would have been barbarous in him to have denied to one with whom he has lived in intimacy from childhood, considering the great ease with which he is able to despatch the most entertain- ing pieces of this nature. This good office he pei'formed with such force of genius, humour, wit, and learning that I fared like a dis- tressed prince who calls in a powerful neighbour to his aid ; I was undone by my own auxiliary ; when I had once called him in I could not subsist without dependence on him." With his usual enthusiastic generosity, Steele, in this passage, unduly depreciates his own merits to exalt the genius of his friend. A comparison of the amount of material furnished to the Tatler by Addison and Steele respectively shows that out of 271 numbers the latter con- tributed 188 and the former only 42. Nor is the dispar- ity in quantity entirely balanced by the superior quality of Addison's papers. Though it was, doubtless, his fine workmanship and admirable method which carried to per- fection the style of writing initiated in the Tatler, yet there is scarcely a department of essay-writing developed in the Spectator which does not trace its origin to Steele. It is Steele who first ventures to raise his voice against the prevailing dramatic taste of the age on behalf of the superior morality and art of Shakespeare's plays. " Of all men living," says he, in the eighth Tatler, " I pity players (who must be men of good understanding to be capable of being such) that they are obliged to repeat and assume proper gestures for representing things of which their reason must be ashamed, and which they must disdain their audience for approving. The amend- ment of these low gratifications is only to be made by people of con- dition, by encouraging the noble representation of the noble charac- ters drawn by Shakespeare and others, from whence it is impossible to return without strong impressions of honour and humanity. On these occasions distress is laid before us with all its causes and con- sequences, and our resentment placed according to the merit of the v.] THE TATLER AND SPECTATOR. 99 person afflicted. Were dramas of this nature more acceptable to the taste of the town, men who have genius would bend their stud- ies to excel in them." Steele, too, it was who attacked, with all the vigour of which he was capable, the fashionable vice of gambling. So severe were his comments on this subject in the Tatler that he raised against himself the fierce resentment of the whole community of sharpers, though he was fortunate enough at the same time to enlist the sympathies of the better part of society. " Lord Forbes," says Mr. Nichols, the antiquary, in his notes to the Tatler, " happened to be in company with the two military gentlemen just men- tioned" (Major-General Davenport and Brigadier Bisset) "in St. James' Coffee -House when two or three well- dressed men, all unknown to his lordship or his company, came into the room, and in a public, outrageous manner abused Captain Steele as the author of the Tatler. One of them, with great audacity and vehemence, swore that he would cut Steele's throat or teach him better manners. 'In this country,' said Lord Forbes, 'you will find it easier to cut a purse than to cut a throat.' His brother officers instantly joined with his lordship and turned the cut- throats out of the coffee-house with every mark of dis- grace." ' The practice of duelling, also, which had hitherto passed unreproved, was censured by Steele in a series of papers in the Tatler, which seemed to have been written on an occasion when, having been forced to fight much against his will, he had the misfortune dangerously to wound his antagonist.'' The sketches of character studied from life, and the letters from fictitious correspondents, both of • Tatler, vol. iv. p. 545 (Nichols' edition). 2 See p. 93, note 3. 5* 100 ADDISON. [chap. which form so noticeable a feature in the Spectator, ap- pear roughly, but yet distinctly, drafted in the Tatler. Even the papers of literary criticism, afterwards so fully elaborated by Addison, are anticipated by his friend, who may fairly claim the honour to have been the first to speak with adequate respect of the genius of Milton.' In a word, whatever was perfected by Addison was begun by Steele ; if the one has for ever associated his name with the S2)ectator, the other may justly appropriate the credit of the Tatler, a work which bears to its successor the same kind of relation that the frescoes of Masaccio bear, in point of dramatic feeling and style, to those of Raphael ; the later productions deserving honour for fin- ish of execution, the earlier for priority of invention. The Tatler was published till the 2d of January, I7l0- 11, and was discontinued, according to Steele's own ac- count, because the public had penetrated his disguise, and he was therefore no longer able to preach with effect in the person of Bickerstaff. - It may be doubted whether this was his real motive for abandoning the paper. He had been long known as its conductor; and that bis read- ers had shown no disinclination to listen to him is proved, not only by the large circulation of each number of the Tatler, but by the extensive sale of the successive volumes of the collected papers at the high price of a guinea apiece, He was, in all probability, led to drop the publication by finding that the political element that the paper contained was a source of embarrassment to him. His sympathies were vehemently Whig ; the Tatler from the beginning had celebrated the virtues of Marlborough and his friends, both directly and under cover of fiction ; and he had been rewarded for his services with a commissionership of the ' Tatler, No. 6. Y.] THE TATLER AND SPECTATOR. 101 Stamp-office. When the Whig Ministry fell in 1710, Har- ley, setting a just value on the abilities of Steele, left hira in the enjoyment of his office and expressed his desire to serve him in any other way. Under these circumstances, Steele no doubt felt it incumbent on him to discontinue a paper which, both from its design and its traditions, would have tempted him into the expression of his political par- tialities. For two months, therefore, " the censorship of Great Britain," as he himself expressed it, " remained in commis- sion," until Addison and he once more returned to dis- charge the duties of the office in the Spectator, the first number of which was published on the 1st of March, 1710-11. The Tatler had only been issued three times a week, but the conductors of the new paper were now so confident in their own resources and in the favour of the public that they undertook to bring out one number daily. The new paper at once exhibited the impress of Addison's genius, which had gradually transformed the character of the Tatler itself. The latter was originally, in every sense of the word, a newspaper, but the Spectator from the first indulged his humour at the expense of the clubs of Quid- " There is," says he, " another set of men that I must likewise lay a claim to as being altogether unfurnished with ideas till the busi- ness and conversation of the day has supplied them. I have often considered these poor souls with an eye of great commiseration when I have heard them asking the first man they have met with whether there was any news stirring, and by that means gathering together materials for thinking. These needy persons do not know what to talk of till about twelve o'clock in the morning ; for by that time they are pretty good Judges of the weather, know which way the wind sets, and whether the Dutch mail be come in. As they lie at the mercy of the first man they meet, and are grave or impertinent 102 ADDISON. [chap. all the day long, according to the notions which they have imbibed in the morning, I would earnestly entreat them not to stir out of their chambers till they have read this paper ; and do promise them that I will daily instil into them such sound and wholesome senti- ments as shall have a good effect on their conversation for the en- suing twelve hours." ^ For these, and other men of leisure, a kind of paper differing from the Tatler, which proposed only to retail the various species of gossip in the coffee-houses, was re- quired, and the new entertainment was provided by the original design of an imaginary club, consisting of several ideal types of character grouped round the central figure of the Spectator. They represent considerable classes or sections of the community, and are, as a rule, men of strongly marked opinions, prejudices, and foibles, which furnish inexhaustible matter of comment to the Spectator himself, who delivers the judgments of reason and com- mon-sense. Sir Roger de Coverley, with his simplicity, his high sense of honour, and his old-world reminiscences, reflects the country gentleman of the best kind ; Sir An- drew Freeport expresses the opinions of the enterprising, hard-headed, and rather hard-hearted moneyed interest ; Captain Sentry speaks for the army ; the Templar for the world of taste and learning; the clergyman for theology and philosophy ; while AVill Honeycomb, the elderly man of fashion, gives the Spectator many opportunities for crit- icising the traditions of morality and breeding surviving from the days of the Eestoration. Thus, instead of the division of places which determined the arrangement of the Tatler, the different subjects treated in the Spectator are distributed among a variety of persons: the Templar is substituted for the Grecian Coffee-House and AVill's ; ' Spectator, No. 10. v] TEE TA TIER AKD SPECTATOR 103 Will Honeycomb takes the place of White's; and Captain Sentry, whose appearances are rare, stands fur the more voluminous article on foreign intelligence published in the old periodical, under the head of St. James's. The Spec- tator himself finds a natural prototype in Isaac Bickerstaflf, but his character is drawn with a far greater finish and delicacy, and is much more essential to the design of the paper which he conducts, than was that of the old astrol- oger. y The aim of the Spectator was to establish a rational standard of conduct in morals, manners, art, and literature. " Since," says he in one of his early numbers, " I have raised to myself so great an audience, I shall spare no pains to make their in- struction agreeable and their diversion useful. For which reason I shall endeavour to enliven morality with wit, and to temper wit with morality, that my readers may, if possible, both ways find their ac- count in the speculation of the day. And to the end that their virtue and discretion may not be short, transient, intermitting starts of thought, I have resolved to refresh their memories from day to day till I have recovered them out of that desperate state of vice and folly into which the age has fallen. The mind that lies fallow but a single day sprouts up in follies that are only to be killed by a con- stant and assiduous culture. It was said of Socrates that he brought Philosophy down from heaven to inhabit among men ; and I shall be ambitious to have it said of me that I have brought Philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and in coffee-houses." ' Johnson, in his Life of Addison, says that the task un- dertaken in the S^jectator was "first attempted by Casa in his book oi Manners, and Castiglione in his Courtier; two books yet celebrated in Italy for purity and elegance, and which, if they are now less read, are neglected only because they have effected that reformation which their ' Spectator, Xo. 1 0. 104 ADDISON. [chap. authors intended, and their precepts now are no longer wanted." He afterwards praises the Tatler and Spectator by saying that they "adjusted, like Casa, the unsettled practice of daily intercourse by propriety and politeness, and, like La Bruyere, exhibited the characters and man- ners of the age." This commendation scarcely does jus- tice to the work of Addison and Steele. Casa, a man equally distinguished for profligacy and politeness, merely codified in his Galateo the laws of good manners which prevailed in his age. He is the Lord Chesterfield of Italy. Castiglione gives instructions to the young courtier how to behave in such a manner as to make himself agreeable to his prince. La Bruyere's characters are no doubt the literary models, of those which appear in the Spectator. But La Bruyere merely described what he saw, with ad- mirable wit, urbanity, and scholarship, but without any of the earnestness of a moral reformer. Jle could never have conceived the character of Sir Roger de Coverley ; and, though he was ready enough to satirise the follies of so- ciety as an observer from the outside, to bring " philoso- phy out of closets and libraries, to dwell in clubs and as- semblies," was far from being his ambition. He would probably have thought the publication of a. newspaper scarcely consistent with his position as a gerjjLleman. A very lai-ge portion of the Spectator is devoted to re- flections on the manners of women. Addison saw clearly how important a part the female sex was destined to play in the formation of English taste and manners. Removed from the pedestal of enthusiastic devotion on which they had been placed during the feudal ages, women were treated under the Restoration as mere playthings and luxuries. As manners became more decent they found themselves secured in their emancipated position but destitute of se- v.] TW£. TATLER A^T) SPECTATOR. 105 rious and rational employment. It was Addison's object, therefore, to enlist the aid of female genius in softening, refining, and moderating the gross and conflicting tastes of a half -civilised society. " There are none," he says, " to whom this paper will be more useful than to the female world. I have often thought there has not been sufficient pains taken in finding out proper employments and diversions for the fair ones. Their amusements seem contrived for them, rather as they are women than as they are reasonable creatures, and are more adapted to the sex than to the species. The toilet is" their great scene of business, and the right adjustment of their hair the principal employment of their lives. The sorting of a suit of ribands is reckoned a very good morning's work ; and if they make an excursion to a mercer's or a toy shop, so great a fa- tigue makes them unfit for anything else all the day after. Their more serious occupations are sewing and embroidery, and their great- est drudgery the preparations of jellies and sweetmeats. This, I say, is the state of ordinary women, though I know there are multitudes of those of a more elevated life and conversation that move in %n exalted sphere of knowledge and virtue, that join all the beauties of the mind to the ornaments of dress, and inspire a kind of awe and respect, as well as of love, into their male beholders. I hope to in- crease the number of these by publishing this daily paper, which I ehall always endeavour to make an innocent, if not an improving entertainment, and by that means, at least, divert the minds of my female readers from greater trifles." ^ To some of the vigorous spirits of the age the mild and social character of the Sjiectator'' s satire did not commend itself. Swift, who had contributed several papers to the Taller while it was in its infancy, found it too feminine for his taste. " I will not meddle with the Spectator^'' says he in his Journal to Stella, " let him fair sex it to the world's end." Personal pique, however, may have done as much as a differing taste to depreciate the S2)ec- * Spectator, No. 10. 106 ADDISON. [chap. tator in the eyes of the author of the Tale of a Tub, for he elsewhere acknowledges its merits. " The Spectator,^'' he writes to Stella, " is written by Steele, with Addison's help ; it is often very pretty .... But I never see him (Steele) or Addison." That part of the public to whom the paper was specially addressed read it with keen relish. In the ninety-second number a correspondent, signing her- self " Leonora," ' writes : " Mr. Spectator, — Your paper is a part of my tea-equipage ; and my servant iinows my humour so well that, calling for my breakfast this morning (it being past my usual hour), she answered, the Spec- tator was not yet come in, but the tea-kettle boiled, and she expected it every moment." In a subsequent number "Thomas Trusty" writes: " I constantly peruse your paper as I smoke my morning's pipe (though I can't forbear reading the motto before 1 fill and light), and really it gives a grateful relish to every whiff ; each paragraph is fraught either with useful or delightful notions, and I never fail of being highly diverted or improved. The variety of your subjects surprises me as much as a box of pictures did formerly, in which there was only one face, that by pulling some pieces of isinglass over it was changed into a grave senator or a merry-andrew, a pol- ished lady or a nun, a beau or a blackamoor, a prude or a coquette, a country squire or a conjuror, with many other different represen- tations very entertaining (as you are), though still the same at the bottom." ^ The Spectator was read in all parts of the country. " I must confess," says Addison, as his task was drawing to an end, " that I am not a little gratified and obliged by that concern which appears in this great city upon my present design of laying down this paper. It is likewise with much satisfaction that I find some of the most outlying parts of the kingdom alarmed upon this ' The writer was a Miss Shepherd. 2 Spectator, 'So. 134. T.] THE TATLER AND SPECTATOR. 107 occasion, having received letters to expostulate with me about it from several of my readers of the remotest boroughs of Great Brit- ain." 1 With how keen an interest the public entered into the humour of the paper is shown by the following letter, signed " Philo-Spec :" "I was this morning in a company of your well-wishers, when we read over, with great satisfaction, TuUy's observations on action ad- apted to the British theatre, though, by the way, we were very sorry to find that you have disposed of another member of your club. Poor Sir Roger is dead, and the worthy clergyman dying; Captain Sentry has taken possession of a fair estate ; Will Honeycomb has married a farmer's daughter; and the Templar withdraws himself into the business of his own profession." ^ It is no wonder that readers anticipated with regret the dissolution of a society that had provided them with so much delicate entertainment. Admirably as the club was designed for maintaining that variety of treatment on which Mr. Trusty comments in the letter quoted above, the exe- cution of the design is deserving of even greater admira- tion. The skill with which the grave speculations of the Spectator are contrasted with the lively observations of Will Honeycomb on the fashions of the age, and these again are diversified with papers descriptive of character or adorned with fiction, while the letters from the public outside form a running commentary on the conduct of the paper, cannot be justly appreciated without a certain effort of thought. But it may safely be said that, to have provided society day after day, for more than two years, with a species of entertainment which, nearly two centuries later, retains all its old power to interest and delight, is an achievement unique in the history of literature. Even apart from the exquisite art displayed in their grouping, the matter of many • Spectator, No. 553. '■' Ibid., No. 542. 108 ADDISON. [chap. of tlie essays in the Spectator is still valuable. The vivid descriptions of contemporary manners, the inimitable series of sketches of Sir Roger de Coverley, the criticisms in the papers on True and False Wit and Milton's Paradise Lost, have scarcely less significance for ourselves than for the so- ciety for which they were immediately written. Addison's own papers were 274 in number, as against 236 contributed by Steele. They were, as a rule, signed with one of the four letters C. L. I. 0., either because, as Tickell seems to hint in bis Elegy, they composed the name of one of the Muses, or, as later scholars have conjectured, because they were respectively written from four different localities — viz., Chelsea, London, Islington, and the Office. The sale of the Si^ectator was doubtless very large rela- tively to the number of readers in Queen Anne's reign. Johnson, indeed, computes the number sold daily to have been only sixteen hundred and eighty, but he seems to have overlooked what Addison himself says on the subject very shortly after the paper had been started : " My publisher tells me that there are already three thousand of them distrib- uted every day." ' This number must have gone on increas- ing with the growing reputation of the Spectator. When the Preface of the Four Sermo7is of Dr. Fleetwood, Bishop of Llandaff, was suppressed by order of the House of Com- mons, the Spectator printed it in its 384th number, thus con- veying, as the Bishop said in a letter to Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury, "fourteen thousand copies of the condemned preface into people's hands that would otherwise have never seen or heard of it." Making allowance for the extraor- dinary character of the number, it is not unreasonable to conclude that the usual daily issue of the Spectator to readers in all parts of the kingdom would, towards the close of its career, have reached ten thousand copies. The sep- » Spectator, No. 10. v.] THE TATLER AND SPECTATOR. 109 arate papers were afterwards collected into octavo volumes, which were sold, like the volumes of the Taller, for a guinea apiece. Steele tells us that more than nine thousand copies of each volume were sold off/ Nothing could have been better timed than the appear- ance of the Spectator ; it may indeed be doubted whether it could have been produced with success at any' other pe- riod. Had it been projected earlier, while Addison was still in office, his thoughts would have been diverted to other subjects, and he would have been unlikely to survey the world with quite impartial eyes ; had the publication been delayed it would have come before the public when the balance of all minds was disturbed by the dangers of the political situation. The diflSculty of preserving neutrality under such circumstances was soon shown by the fate of the Guardian. Shortly after the Spectator was discontin- ued this new paper was designed by the fertile invention of Steele, with every intention of keeping it, like its pred- ecessor, free from the entanglements of party. But it had not proceeded beyond the forty -first number when the vehement partizanship of Steele was excited by the Tory Examiner ; in the 128th number appeared a letter, signed "An English Tory," calling for the demolition of Dunkirk, while soon afterwards, finding that his political feelings were hampered by the design on which the Guardian was conducted, he dropped it and replaced it with a paper called the Englishman. Addison himself, who had been a frequent contributor to the Guardian, did not aid in the Englishman, of the violent party tone of which he strongly disapproved. A few years afterwards the old friends and coadjutors in the Tatler and Spectator found themselves maintaining an angry controversy in the opposing pages of the Old Whig and the Plebeian. ' Spectator, No. 555. CHAPTER VI. CATO. It is a peculiarity in Addison's life that Fortune, as if con- spiring with the happiness of his genius, constantly fur- nished him with favourable opportunities for the exercise of his powers. The pension granted him by Halifax en- abled him, while he was yet a young man, to add to his knowledge of classical literature an intimate acquaintance with the languages and governments of the chief European states. When his fortunes were at the lowest ebb on his return from bis travels, his introduction to Godolphin by Halifax, the consequence of which was The Campaign, pro- cured him at once celebrity and advancement. The ap- pearance of the Tatler, though due entirely to the inven- tion of Steele, prepared the way for /d'evelopment of the genius that prevailed in the Spectato?'. But the climax of Addison's good fortune was certainly the successful pro- duction of Cato, a play which, on its own merits, might have been read with interest by the scholars of the time, but which could scarcely have succeeded on the stage if it had not been appropriated and made part of our national life by the violence of political passion. Addison had not the genius of a dramatist. The grace, the irony, the fastidious refinement which give him such an unrivalled capacity in describing and criticising the hu- CHAP. VI.] CATO. Ill monrs of men as a spectator did not qualify bira for imag- inative sympathy with their actions and passions. But, like most men of ability in that period, bis thoughts were drawn towards the stage, and even in Dryden's lifetime he had sent bira a play in manuscript, asking him to use bis interest to obtain its performance. The old poet returned it, we are told, " with many commendations, but with an expression of his opinion that on the stage it would not meet with its deserved success." Addison, nevertheless, persevered in his attempts, and during his travels he wrote four acts of the tragedy of Cato, the design of which, ac- cording to Tickell, he bad formed while be was at Oxford, though he certainly borrowed many incidents in the play from a tragedy on the same subject which be saw per- formed at Venice.' It is characteristic, however, of the undramatic mood in which be executed bis task that the last act was not written till shortly before the performance of the play, many years later. As early as 1703 the drama was shown to Gibber by Steele, who said that " whatever spirit Mr. Addison bad shown in bis writing it, be doubted that he would ever have courage enough to let bis 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." He seems to have remained of the same opinion on the very eve of the performance of the play. " When Mr. Addison," says Pope, as reported by Spence, "had finished bis Cato be brought it to me, desired to have my sincere opinion of it, and left it with me for three or four days. I gave him my opinion of it sincerely, which was, ' that I thought be bad better not act it, and that be would get reputation enough by only print- ing it.' This I said as thinking the lines well written, but ' See Addison's Works (Tickell's edition), vol. v. p. 187. 112 ADDISON. [chap. the piece not theatrical enough. Some time after Mr. Ad- dison said 'that his own opinion was the same with mine, but that some particular friends of his, whom he could not disoblige, insisted on its being acted.' " ' Undoubtedly, Pope was right in principle, and anybody who reads the thirty-ninth paper in the S2Jectator may see not only that Addison was out of sympathy with the tra- ditions of the English stage, but that his whole turn of thought disqualified him from comprehending the motives of dramatic composition. " The modern drama," says he, " excels that of Greece and Rome in the intricacy and dis- position of the fable — but, what a Christian writer would be ashamed to own, falls infinitely short of it in the moral part of the performance." And the entire drift of the crit- icism that follows relates to the thought, the sentiment, and the expression of the modern drama, rather than to the really essential question, the nature of the action. It is false criticism to say that the greatest dramas of Shake- speare fail in morality as compared with those of the Greek tragedians. That the manner in which the moral is con- veyed is different in each case is of course true, since the subjects of Greek tragedy were selected from Greek my- thology, and were treated by ^schylus and Sophocles, at all events, in a religious spirit, whereas the plays of Shake- speare are only indirectly Christian, and produce their ef- fect by an appeal to the individual conscience. None the less is it the case that 3Iacbeth, Hamlet, and Lear have for modern audiences a far deeper moral meaning than the Agamemnon or the CEdipiis Tyrannus. The tragic motive in Greek tragedy is the impotence of man in the face of moral law or necessity ; in Shakespeare's tragedies it is the corruption of the will, some sin of the individual against 1 Spence's Anecdotes, p. 196. VI.] CATO. 113 the law of God, which brings its own punisljinent. There was nothing in tliis principle of which a Cliristian drama- tist need have been ashamed ; and as regards Shakespeare, at any rate, it is evident that Addison's criticism is unjust. It is, however, by no means undeserved in its applica- tion to the class of plays which grew up after the Resto- ration, Under that regime the moral spirit of the Shake- sperian drama entirely disappears. The king, whose tem- per was averse to tragedy, and whose taste had been formed on French models, desired to see every play end happily, " I am going to end a piece," writes Roger, Earl of Orrery, to a friend, " in the French style, because I have heard the King declare that he preferred their manner to our own," The greatest tragedies of the Elizabethan age were trans- formed to suit this new fashion ; even King Lear obtained a happy deliverance from his sufferings in satisfaction of the requirements of an effeminate Court. Addison very ■wittily ridicules this false taste in the fortieth number of the Spectator. He is not less felicitous in his remarks on the sentiments and the style of the Caroline drama, though he does not sufficiently discriminate his censure, which he bestows equally on the dramatists of the Restoration and on Shakespeare. Two main characteristics appear in all the productions of the former epoch — the monarchical spirit and the fashion of gallantry. The names of the plays speak for themselves : on the one hand. The Indian Emperor, Aurengzebe, The Indian Queen, The Conquest of Granada, The Fate of Hannibal ; on the other. Secret Love, Tyrannic Love, Love and Vengeance, The Rival Queens, Theodosius, or the Power of Love, and number- less others of the same kind. In the one set of dramas the poet sought to arouse the passion of pity by exhibit- ing the downfall of persons of high estate ; in the other IH ADDISON. [chap. he appealed to the sentiment of romantic passion. Such were the fruits of that taste for French romance which was encouraged by Charles II., and which sought to dis- guise the absence of genuine emotion by the turgid bom- bast of its sentiment and the epigrammatic declamation of its rhymed verse. At the same time, the taste of the nation having been once turned into French channels, a remedy for these de- fects was naturally sought for from French sources ; and just as the school of Racine and Boileau set its face against the extravagances of the romantic coteries, so Addison and his English followers, adopting the principles of the French classicists, applied them to the reformation of the English theatre. Hence arose a great revival of respect for the po- etical doctrines of Aristotle, regard for the unities of time and place, attention to the proprieties of sentiment and diction — in a word, for all those characteristics of style afterwards summed up in the phrase " correctness." This habit of thought, useful as an antidote to extrava- gance, was not fertile as a motive of dramatic production. Addison worked with strict and conscious attention to his critical principles : the consequence is that his Cato, though superficially " correct," is a passionless and me- chanical play. He had combated with reason the " ridic- ulous doctrine in modern criticism, that writers of trag- edy are obliged to an equal distribution of rewards and punishments, and an impartial execution of poetical jus- tice." ' But his reasoning led him on to deny that the idea of justice is an essential element in tragedy. " We find," says he, *' that good and evil happen alike to all men on this side the grave ; and, as the principal design of tragedy is to raise commiseration and terror in the ' Spectator, No. 40. Ti.] CATO. 115 minds of the audience, we shall defeat this great end if we always make virtue and innocence happy and success- ful. . . . The ancient writers of tragedy treated men in their plays as they are dealt with in the world, by making virtue sometimes happy and sometimes miserable, as they found it in the fable which they made choice of, or as it might affect their audience in the most agreeable man- ner." * But it is certain that the fable which the two greatest of the Greek tragedians "made choice of" was always of a religious nature, and that the idea of Justice was never absent from it ; it is also certain that Retribu- tion is a vital element in all the tragedies of Shakespeare. The notion that the essence of tragedy consists in the spec- tacle of a good man struggling with adversity is a concep- tion derived through the French from the Roman Stoics ; it is not found in the works of the greatest tragic poets. This, however, was Addison's central motive, and this is what Pope, in his famous Prologue, assigns to him as his chief praise : " Our author shuns by vulgar springs to move The hero's glory or the virgin's love ; In pitying love we but our weakness show, And wild ambition well deserves its woe. Here tears shall flow from a more generous cause, Such tears as patriots shed for dying laws : He bids your breasts with ancient ardour rise, And calls forth Roman drops from British eyes. Virtue confessed in human shape he draws — What Plato thought, and godlike Cato was : No common object to your sight displays, But what with pleasure heav'n itself surveys ; A brave man struggling in the storms of fate, And greatly falling with a falling state." ' Spectator, No. 40. 116 ADDISON. [chap. A falling state offers a tragic spectacle to the thouglit and the reason, but not one that can be represented on the stage so as to move the passions of the spectators. The character of Cato, as exhibited by Addison, is an abstraction, round which a number of other lay figures are skilfully grouped for the delivery of lofty and appro- priate sentiments. Juba, the virtuous young prince of Nuraidia, the admirer of Cato's virtue, Fortius and Mar- cus, Cato's virtuous sons, and Marcia, his virtuous daugh- ter, are all equally admirable and equally lifeless. John- son's criticism of the play leaves little to be said : "About things," he observes, " on which the public thinlis long it commonly attains to think right ; and of Cato it has not been un- justly 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 pos- sible in human life. Nothing here ' excites or assuages emotion ;' here is 'no magical power of raising fantastic terror or wild anxiety.' The events are expected without solicitude, and are remembered with- out joy or sorrow. Of the agents we have no care ; we consider not what they are doing or what they are suffering; we wish only to know what they have to say. Cato is a being above our solicitude ; a man of whom the gods take care, and whom we leave to their care with heedless confidence. To the rest neither gods nor men can have much attention, for there is not one among them that strongly at- tracts either affection or esteem. But they are made the vehicles of such sentiments and such expressions that there is scarcely a scene in the play which the reader does not wish to impress upon his memory." To this it may be added that, from the essentially undramatic bent of Addison's genius, whenever he con- trives a train of incident he manages to make it a little absurd. Dennis has pointed out with considerable hu- mour the consequences of his conscientious adherence to the unity of place, whereby every species of action in the Ti.] CATO. Ill play — love-making, conspiracy, debating, and fighting — is made to take place in the " large hall in the govern- or's palace of Utica." It is strange that Addison's keen sense of the ridiculous, which inspired so happily his criti- cisms on the allegorical paintings at Versailles,' should not have shown him the incongruities which Dennis dis- cerned ; but, in truth, they pervade the atmosphere of the whole play. All the actors — the distracted lovers, the good young man, Juba, and the blundering conspirator, Sempronius — seem to be oppressed with an uneasy con- sciousness that they have a character to sustain, and are not confident of coming up to what is expected of them. This is especially the case with Fortius, a pragmatic young Roman, whose praiseworthy but futile attempts to unite the qualities of Stoical fortitude, romantic passion, and fraternal loyalty, exhibit him in a position of almost comic embarrassment. According to Pope, " the love part was flung in after, to comply with the popular taste ;" but the removal of these scenes would make the play so remark- ably barren of incident that it is a little difficult to credit the statement. The deficiencies of Cato as an acting play were, however, more than counterbalanced by the violence of party spirit, which insisted on investing the comparatively tame senti- ments assigned to the Roman champions of liberty with a pointed modern application. In 1713 tire rage of the con- tending factions was at its highest point. The Tories were suspected, not without reason, of designs against the Act of Settlement ; the Whigs, on the other hand, were still suffering in public opinion from the charge of having, for their own advantage, protracted the war with Louis XIV. Marlborough had been accused in 1711 of receiving bribes • See p. 43. 118 ADDISON. [chap. while commander-in-chief, and had been dismissed from all his employments. Disappointment, envy, revenge, and no doubt a genuine apprehension for the public safety, inspired the attacks of the Whigs upon their rivals ; and when it was known that Addison had in his drawers an unfinished play on so promising a subject as Cato, great pressure was put upon him by his friends to complete it for the stage. Somewhat unwillingly, apparently, he roused himself to the task. So small, indeed, was his inclination for it, that he is said in the first instance to have asked Hughes, after- wards author of the Sieffe of Damascus, to write a fifth act for him. Hughes undertook to do so, but on returning a few days afterwards with his own performance, he found that Addison had himself finished the play. In spite of the judgment of the critics, Cato was quickly hurried oflE for rehearsal, doubtless with many fears on the part of the author. His anxieties during this period must have been great " I was this morning," writes Swift to Stella on the 6th of April, " at ten, at the rehearsal of Mr. Addison's play, called Cato, which is to be acted on Friday. There was not half a score of us to see it. We stood on the stage, and it was foolish enough to see the actors prompt- ed every moment, and the poet directing them, and the drab that acts Cato's daughter (Mrs. Oldfield) out in the midst of a passionate part, and then calling out, 'What's next ?' " Mrs. Oldfield not only occasionally forgot the poet's text, she also criticised it. She seems to have objected to the original draft of a speech of Fortius in the second scene of the third act ; and Pope, whose advice Addison appears to have frequently asked, suggested the present reading : " Fixt in astonishment, I gaze upon thee Like one just blasted by a stroke from heaven VI.] CATO. 119 Who pants for breath, and stiffens, yet alive, In dreadful looks : a monument of wrath." ' Pope also proposed the alteration of the last line in the play from " And oh, 'twas this that ended Cato's life," to " And robs the guilty world of Cato's life ;" and he was generally the cause of many modifications. " I believe," said he to Spence, " Mr. Addison did not leave a word unchanged that I objected to in his CatoP " On the 13th of April the play was ready for performance, and contemporary accounts give a vivid picture of the eager- ness of the public, the excitement of parties, and the ap- prehensions of the author. " On our first night of acting it," says Gibber, in his Apology, speaking of the subsequent representation at Oxford, " our house was, in a manner, in- vested, and entrance demanded by twelve o'clock at noon; and before one it was not wide enough for many who came too late for their places. The same crowds continued for three days together — an uncommon curiosity in that place ; and the death of Cato triumphed over the injuries of Caesar everywhere." The prologue — a very fine one — was con- tributed by Pope ; the epilogue — written, according to the execrable taste fashionable after the Restoration, in a comic vein — by Garth. As to the performance itself, a very lively record of the effect it produced remains in Pope's letter to Trumbull of the 30th April, 1713: " 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 had been used to make it thought a party play, yet what the author ' Spence's Anecdotes, p. 151. ' lUd. 120 ADDISON. [chat. said of another may the most properly be applied to him on this occasion : 'Envy itself Is dumb, in wonder lost, And factious 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 ap- plause proceeding more from the hand than the head. This was the case, too, with the Prologue-writer, who was clapped into a staunch Whig at the end of evei-y 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 per- petual dictator. The Whigs are unwilling to be distanced this way, 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." The Queen herself partook, or feigned to partake, of the general entliusiasra, and expressed a wish that the play should be dedicated to her. This honour had, however, been al- ready designed by the poet for the Duchess of Marlborough, so that, finding himself unable under the circumstances to fulfil his intentions, he decided to leave the play without any dedication. Cato ran for the then unprecedented period of thirty-five nights. Addison appears to have behaved with great liberality to the actors, and, at Oxford, to have handed over to them all the profits of the first night's per- formance; while they in return. Gibber tells us, thought themselves " obliged to spare no pains in the proper deco- rations " of the piece. The fame of Cato spread from England to the Continent. It was twice translated into Italian, twice into French, and ■ These lines are to be found in The Campaign, see p. 66. VI.] CATO. 121 once into Latin ; a French and a German imitation of it were also published. Voltaire, to whom Shakespeare ap- peared no better than an inspired barbarian, praises it in the highest terras. " The first English writer who com- posed a regular tragedy and infused a spirit of elegance through every part of it was," says he, " the illustrious Mr. Addison. His Cato is a masterpiece, both with regard to the diction and the harmony and beauty of the numbers. The character of Cato is, in my opinion, greatly superior to that of Cornelia in the PomjHy of Corneille, for Cato is great without anything of fustian, and Cornelia, who besides is not a necessary character, tends sometimes to bombast." Even he, however, could not put up with the love-scenes : "Addison I'a deji tente; C'etoit le poete des sages, Mais 11 etoit trop concerte, Et dans son Caton si vante Les deux filles en verite, Sont d'insipides personages. Imitez du grand Addison Seulement ce qu'll a de bon." There were, of course, not wanting voices of detraction. A graduate of Oxford attacked Cato in a pamphlet entitled Mr. Addison turned Tory, in which the party spirit of the play was censured. Dr. Sewell, a well-known physician of the day — afterwards satirised by Pope as " Sanguine Sew- ell" — undertook Addison's defence, and showed that he owed his success to the poetical, and not to the political, merits of his drama. A much more formidable critic ap- peared in John Dennis, a specimen of whose criticism on Cato is preserved in Johnson's Life, and who, it must be owned, went a great deal nearer the mark in his judgment than did Voltaire. Dennis had many of the qualities of 122 ADDISON. [chap. a good critic. Though his judgment was often overborne by his passion, he generally contrived to fasten on the weak points of the works which he criticised, and he at once detected the undramatic character of Cato. His rid- icule of the absurdities arising out of Addison's rigid ob- servance of the unity of place is extremely humorous and quite unanswerable. But, as usual, he spoiled his case by the violence and want of discrimination in his censure, which betrayed too plainly the personal feelings of the writer. It is said that Dennis was offended with Addison for not having adequately exhibited his talents in the Spectator when mention was made of his works ; and he certainly did complain in a published letter that Addison had chosen to quote a couplet from his translation of Boi- leau in preference to another from a poem on the battle of Ramilies, which he himself thought better of. But the fact seems to have been overlooked that Dennis had other grounds for resentment. In the 40th number of the Si^ec- tator the waiter speaks of " a ridiculous doctrine of mod- ern criticism, that they (tragic writers) are obliged to an equal distribution of rewards and punishments, and an impartial execution of poetical justice." This Avas a plain stroke at Dennis, who was a well-known advocate of the doctrine; and a considerable portion of the critic's gall was therefore expended on Addison's violation of the sup- posed rule in Cato. 'Looking at Cato from Voltaire's point of view — which was Addison's own — and having regard to the spirit of elegance infused through every part of it, there is much to admire in the play. It is full of pointed sentences, such as — " 'Tis not in mortals to command success, But we'll do more, Semprouius, we'll deserve it." VI.] CATO. 123 It has also many fine descriptive passages, tlie best of which, perhaps, occurs in the dialogue between Syphax and Juba respecting civilised and barbarian virtues : "Believe me, prince, there's not an African That traverses our vast Numidian deserts In quest of prey, and lives upon his bow, But better practises these boasted virtues. Coarse are his meals, the fortune of the chase ; Amidst the running streams he slakes his thirst. Toils all the day, and at th' approach of night On the first friendly bank he throws him down, Or rests his head upon a rock till morn — Then rises fresh, pursues his wonted game. And if the following day he chance to find A new repast, or an untasted spring, Blesses his stars, and thinks it luxury." But in all those parts of the poem where action and not ornament is demanded, we seem to perceive the work of a poet who was constantly thinking of what his characters ought to say in the situation, rather than of one who was actually living with them in the situation itself. Take Sempronius' speech to Syphax, describing the horrors of the conspirator's position : " Remember, Syphax, we must work in haste : Oh think what anxious moments pass between The birth of plots and their last fatal period. Oh ! 'tis a dreadful interval of time. Filled up with horror all, and big with death ! Destruction hangs on every word we speak, On every thought, till the concluding stroke Determines all, and closes our design." Compare with this the language of real tragedy, the solil- oquy of Brutus in Julius Ccesar, on which Addison appar- ently meant to improve : 0* 124 ADDISON. [chap.vi. "Since Cassius first did whet me against Caesar I have not slept. Between the acting of a dreadful thing And the first motion, all the interim is Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream : The genms and the mortal instruments Are then in council ; and the state of man, Like to a little kingdom, suffers then The nature of an insurrection." These two passages are good examples of the French and English ideals of dramatic diction, though the lines from Cato are more figurative than is usual in that play. Addison deliberately aimed at this French manner. " I must observe," says he, " that when our thoughts are great and just they are often obscured by the sounding phrases, hard metaphors, and forced expressions in which they are clothed. Shakespeare is often very faulty in this particu- lar." * Certainly he is ; but who does not see that, in spite of his metaphoric style, the speech of Brutus just quoted is far simpler and more natural than the elegant " correct- ness " of Sempronius. ' Spectator, No. 39. CHAPTER VII. Addison's quarrel with pope. It has been said that with Cato the good fortune of Ad- dison reached its climax. After his triumph in the thea- tre, though he filled great offices in the State and wedded "a noble wife," his political success was marred by dis- agreements with one of his oldest friends; while with. the Countess of Warwick, if we are to believe Pope, he " mar- ried discord." Added to which he was unlucky enough to incur the enmity of the most poignant and vindictive of satiric poets, and a certain shadow has been for ever thrown over his character by the famous verses on " Atti- cus." It will be convenient in this chapter to investigate, as far as is possible, the truth as to the quarrel between Pope and Addison. The latter has hitherto been at a cer- tain disadvantage with the public, since the facts of the case were entirely furnished by Pope, and, though his ac- count was dissected with great acuteness by Blackstone in the Biographia Britannica, the partizans of the poet were still able to plead that his uncontradicted statements could not be disposed of by mere considerations of probability. Pope's account of his final rupture with Addison is re- ported by Spence as follows : " Philips seems to have been encouraged to abuse me in coffee-houses and conver- sations. Gildon wrote a thing about Wycherley in which 126 ADDISON. [chap. he had 'abused both me and my relations very grossly. Lord Warwick himself told me one day ' that it was in vain for me to endeavour to be well with Mr. Addison ; that his jealous temper would never admit of a settled friendship between us ; and, to convince me of what he had said, assured me that Addison had encouraged Gildon to publish those scandals, and had given him ten guineas after they were published.' The next day, while I was heated with what I had heard, I wrote a letter to Mr. Ad- dison to let him know ' that I was not unacquainted with this behaviour of his; that, if I was to speak severely of him in return for it, it should not be in such a dirty way ; that I would rather tell him himself fairly of his faults and allow his good qualities ; and that it should be something in the following manner.' I then subjoined the first sketch of what has since been called my satire on Addison. He used me very civilly ever after; and never did me any in- justice, that I know of, from that time to his death, which was about three years after." ^ Such was the story told by Pope in his own defence against the charge that he had written and circulated the lines on Addison after the latter's death. In confirmation of his evidence, and in proof of his own good feeling for and open dealing with Addison, he inserted in the so-called authorised edition of his correspondence in 1737 several letters written apparently to Addison, while in what he pretended to be the surreptitious edition of 1735 appeared a letter to Craggs, written in July, 1715, which, as it con- tained many of the phrases and expressions used in the character of Atticus, created an impression in the mind of the public that both letter and verses were written about the same time. No suspicion as to the genuineness of this ' Spence's Anecdotes, pp. 148, 149. Til.] QUARREL WITH POPE. 127 correspondence was raised till the discovery of the Caryll letters, which first revealed the fact that most of the pre- tended letters to Addison had been really addressed to Caryll ; that there had been, in fact, no correspondence between Pope and Addison ; and that, therefore, in all probability, the letter to Craggs was also a fictitious com- position, inserted in the so-called surreptitious volume of 1735 to establish the credit of Pope's own story. We must accordingly put aside, as undeserving of cre- dence, the poet's ingeniously constructed charge, at any rate in the particular shape in which it is preferred, and must endeavour to form for ourselves such a judgment as is rendered probable by the acknowledged facts of the case. What is indisputable is that in 1715 a rupture took place between Addison and Pope, in consequence of the injury which the translator of the Iliad conceived himself to have suffered from the countenance given to Tickell's rival performance; and that in 1723 we find the first men- tion of the satire upon Addison in a letter from Atterbury to Pope. The question is, what blame attaches to Addi- son for his conduct in the matter of .the two translations ; and what is 1