connection Steele's journalism owes its rather melancholy variety to two causes. In the first place, Steele, although master of a singularly ready pen, was of course obliged to obtain as much assistance as he could from his friends, and many writers of the time furnished hints and contributions-Swift, Berkeley, Eustace Budgell, and others. The most constant and powerAddison's ful aid was supplied by Addison, who entered warmly with Steele's into the project, and contributed a very considerable, periodicals. and certainly the most valuable proportion of papers, amounting in The Tatler to one-sixth, in The Spectator to nearly one-half, and in The Guardian to one-third of the whole quantity. His contributions to The Spectator are usually signed with one of the letters composing the word Clio. When Steele was deprived of this valuable help, he found the labour Steele's life. of writing alone too great. The second misfortune which befell him was his estrangement from Swift. The most malignant side of Swift's militant Toryism was shown to Steele in his days of Whig pamphleteering, and this drew away a certain amount of support and interest from the struggling writer. When the Whig party came into power at Anne's death, Steele was appointed supervisor of Drury Lane, and was knighted in 1715; but from this time forward his friendly relations with Addison suffered a gradual change until Addison's death in 1719. Steele survived him for ten years. Broken in health and afflicted by numerous personal troubles, he died at Carmarthen in September, 1729. End of Addison's § 3. In 1713 Addison brought out his tragedy of Cato, a solemn, cold, and pompous series of tirades in the French taste, constructed with a scrupulous allegiance to the severest rules of the classical unities. The plot is (1713). totally guiltless of interest or probability, and the characters, including Cato himself, are simply frigid embodiments of rhetorical virtue and patriotism. Their declamation, however, is here and there dignified and noble, and the hero's famous soliloquy on suicide is a passage of great eloquence, if not great dramatic merit. The tragedy, however, enjoyed an enormous popularity, in which its stateliness of style had, doubtless, some share; but its success was principally due to the eminence of its author, and to the avidity with which its political allusions were caught up and applied by furious partisans. Addison had retired from political life on the fall of Anne's Whig ministers; at her death he returned to office with his friends. At the end of 1715 he returned to ournalism for a short time with a political paper, The Freeholder, which lasted until the summer of 1716. In 1716 he His marriage. married the Dowager Countess of Warwick. His married life seems to have been unhappy, or at least irksome. His place was with the frequenters of the coffee-houses and with the wits; as the husband of a fine lady, and the master of one of the finest houses in town, he was out character. of his element. Lady Warwick was, in addition, a haughty and irritable woman. Addison, on the other hand, was diffident and placid. He had never made his name as an orator in the House, or as a man of His personal business in his public offices. The anecdotes which stics. represent him as incapable of writing an ordinary business paper are probably exaggerated; but, at any rate, his invincible timidity prevented him from speaking with effect, while his extraordinary powers of conversation are said to have deserted him in the presence of more than one or two hearers-and these. had to be intimate friends. Το conquer this natural shyness, and to give flow and vivacity to his ideas, he indulged, it is said, in heavy drinking, both with his friends and when he wanted to write. Excessive drinking was the fashion rather than the vice of the age; and this, almost the only fault in Addison's singularly blameless character, must be regarded with leniency. His political conduct. In 1717 Addison became secretary of state in Sunderland's ministry-the highest office which he reached in his political career and in this eminent position he showed the same liberality, modesty, and public spirit that had characterised his whole life. Nothing is more honourable to him than the fact that, in an age when political struggles were carried on with the most unscrupulous perfidy and intolerant violence, he should never have been induced, either by interest or cowardice, to desert his friends of the opposite party. In all his political controversies and the conduct of his journals, he showed a tone of candour, moderation, and good breeding which he was almost the first to introduce into political discussion. He maintained his old personal friendship with Swift, even when the great satirist had deserted his party. But Addison's political career was a mere accident; he was never a partisan. He held his secretaryship about eleven months. In 1718 he retired on an annuity of £1500, and determined to devote himself, in the evening of his days, to writing an elaborate work on the evidences of Christianity. This, however, was not to be, for in His death (1719). June, 1719, he was carried off by asthma and dropsy. His body was treated with an almost royal respect; he was laid in state in the Jerusalem Chamber, and received a splendid funeral by lamplight in Westminster Abbey. Relations Addison, if he had his devoted friends, made, towards the end of his life, a bitter enemy. Pope's magnificent and terrible indictment of Atticus did not appear in print till 1723, four years after Atticus himself was dead, when the verses between were printed by themselves in a miscellany published Addison and Pope. by Curll. The traditional view of the episode is that the quarrel lay all on the side of Pope's malignity and insincerity; and nobody who knows anything of the two men and their characters can deny that this is very likely. Pope looked on Addison, the head of a literary clique which was very exclusive in its treatment of young authors, with jealousy and suspicion. When Tickell, a member of Addison's inner circle, made the publication of his own version of part of Homer coincide with that of Pope's, one cannot wonder that Pope felt some annoyance. On the other hand, it is easy to dismiss Pope's frivolous suspicion that Addison, in advising him to leave the first sketch of The Rape of the Lock without emendation, was acting disingenuously and masking envy under the disguise of friendly counsel. In the end, of all the accusations which Pope cast at his memory, Addison might plead guilty to none save the venial fault of loving to surround himself with an obsequious circle of literary admirers; the rest must be put down to that spitefulness which was inseparable from Pope's nervous and sensitive temper. Addison's character seems to have approached, as nearly as the frailties Summary of and imperfections of human nature will allow, an Addison's ideal standard. The weaknesses of good men are, however, strongly marked; and, mingled with Addison's modesty and religion, there was not a little of the prig. The story of his sending on his deathbed for Lord Warwick, his stepson and former pupil, and telling him that he had desired his presence to show him how a Christian can die, is a proof of this; and the impression which this object-lesson left on Lord Warwick, if we are to judge from his subsequent career, was the reverse of encouraging. character. Essays. § 4. Of Addison's works, it is the prose portion alone which gives him the right to his very high place in the English literature of the eighteenth century; and, of his prose Addison's writings, almost exclusively those essays which he contributed to The Tatler, Spectator, and Guardian. They deal with an immense variety of subjects. Although we know that Swift may, in some cases, have supplied the original suggestion, yet enough, and more than enough, remains to Their subjects and variety. prove the richness and inventiveness of Addison's own genius; and, even were this not so, their style and treatment would still place them among the masterpieces of fiction and criticism. The essays certainly met the popular demand for daily variety. There are parables like The Vision of Mirza, fancies like the transmigrations of the monkey, feats of imagination like the passage on the judgment of women in Hades; there are calm meditations, astronomical musings, or reflections in Westminster Abbey; there are playful mock-criticisms, descriptions, sometimes mildly satirical, of Mr. Penkethman, the puppet-show, or the Opera; and all these are mingled together with noble appreciations of the half-neglected grandeur of Milton, or of the rude, energetic splendour of Chevy Chase. Nothing is too high and nothing too low to furnish matter for reflection; from the fashions of the day to the fundamental principles of morality and religion, everything is treated with the same sense of fitness and proportion, Addison's "The Spectator" and Addison was long held up to admiration as the finest model of elegant and idiomatic English prose, and, even in later days, when a more florid style became the fashion, his singular clearness and admirably good taste prose style. were still recognised. To compare him with Swift would be useless.; the imagination and methods of the two were so utterly different; but, when it comes to a question of prose style, there is no question that the verdict is on Addison's side. His great distinction is that, with a very serious moral on the end of his pen, he has nevertheless given his prose an ease and lightness which, at first sight, is incompatible with the province of a moral essay. It has just that apparent superficiality which would attract the casual reader, and yet experience reveals in it a depth and colour which, in the prose of Addison's age, are not very familiar. The immortality of The Spectator is, however, due to Sir Roger de Coverley. The age of The Tatler, The Spectator, and The Guardian, was the age of clubs in England. Steele also, in order to give his journals a vivacity and individuality of their own, ascribed them to some Sir Roger fictitious editor, the philosophic spectator of the de Coverley. gaieties and follies of society-Isaac Bickerstaff, or the shortfaced gentleman. None of these inventions are very memorable, save one. Mr. Spectator, the short-faced gentleman himself, with his somewhat satirical but good-humoured interest in all that goes on round him, introduces himself as connected with an imaginary club, consisting of representatives of the chief classes in town and rural society. Sir Andrew Freeport is the type of the merchant, Captain Sentry of the soldier, Sir Roger de Coverley of the old-fashioned country gentleman, Will Honeycomb of the man of fashion and pleasure--all linked together by Mr. Spectator. Steele was probably the inventor of these types; and, for the most part, the impression which they leave is merely the pleasure to be derived from a chapter of excellent and fluent prose. Sir Roger de Coverley, however, with his adventures and surroundings, forms a perfectly finished picture, in form forecasting Sir Walter Scott, in its humour recalling Cervantes himself. Indeed, the lovable combination of virtues and foibles in the old squire is an instance of humour in its highest and most delicate perfection. Sir Roger's visit to London, his conduct at the club, his expedition by water to Westminster Abbey, his remarks on the statues and curiosities which he saw there, are all treated with the same caressing touch. Even better known than this is Mr. Spectator's visit to the old knight's Gothic mansion, Sir Roger's exhibition of his picture-gallery, his behaviour in church and upon the bench of the quorum, his long-standing amour with the widow. These traits of character, with the inimitable sketches of the dependents, the chaplain, the butler, and Will Wimble, the poor relation, must place Addison very high among the great observers and painters of human nature. Addison's poetry. § 5. Addison's poetry, although rated very highly in his own time, has suffered the usual fate of contemporary success. In Latin verse, he wrote with an elegance and classic purity of style which has seldom been reached by other scholars. Nevertheless, like all modern writers of Latin poetry, with the exception of Milton and Vincent Bourne, Addison is merely the compiler of a skilful cento, and reproduces thought with a barrenness which is the fatal accompaniment of work in a foreign language. The English songs in Rosamond are very pleasing and musical; and, had he continued to write opera, he would undoubtedly have left something which rival authors would have found it difficult to surpass. Perhaps the sacred portion of his verse is likely to be remembered longest. His hymns, with their His hymns. lofty, contemplative piety, and the fine, simple severity of their style, are certainly, for the early part of the eighteenth century, remarkable productions. The majestic version of Psalm xix, beginning "The spacious firmament on high," is one of the finest hymns in English; and a lyric tuned to a lower key, "When all Thy mercies, O my God, my rising soul surveys," has enjoyed a long popularity, due, perhaps, less to its literary merit than to its tone of sincere devotion. Addison's earlier and more ambitious poems, even including the once popular Campaign, have little to distinguish them from the vast mass of regular, frigid, irreproachable verse which was poured forth under the influence of Pope and the classical school. Pope, by virtue of his great genius and its perfect adaptability to this style of poetry, stands apart from the rest; but Addison, with his artificially polished metres, is the very type of a refined mediocrity attained by mechanical means. Of course, such purely automatic address was fatal to any vigour or originality of invention. Lifelessness of his heroic poems. § 6. The name of SIR WILLIAM TEMPLE really belongs to an earlier generation than that of Pope or Addison, and he was dead nearly three years before Anne began to reign; SIR WILLIAM but his connection with the literature of his day TEMPLE allies him with the great wits of the century whose (1628-1699). beginning he did not live to see. Swift was his relative and dependent; his own name is linked, not very much to its credit, with Bentley's; and, finally, these accidents of his later life are really all that is definitely interesting about him. He wrote no book that made his name-simply a number of desultory tracts and essays and a bundle of charming loveletters. He was the son of Sir John Temple, Master of the Rolls in Ireland; he was at Emmanuel College, Cambridge; and, after a long and trying courtship, in which he displayed great affection and constancy, he married Dorothy Osborne, the daughter of a Royalist knight. Although he himself was nominally a Puritan, he went over to the King's side after the |