Or he divides his discourse into Firstly, Secondly, Thirdly, Fourthly, Fifthly, Sixthly, and goes with damnable iteration through a series of propositions formally announced in the opening paragraph. Addison's essays, then, stand between the letter and the sermon, sometimes leaning to the one and sometimes to the other, as the subject is more or less grave and sustained. But his natural tendency is toward the sermon. He is ambitious to have it said of him that he has brought Philosophy out of closets, and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and in coffee-houses. But, like the little boys in the verses of Horace, we love the elementa prima less than the crustula; and Addison best recommends his doctrine to an indifferent world when he delivers it with a smiling countenance.

Addison and Swift were both teachers and counsellors of humanity-Swift as the particular servant of his Church, Addison as a layman. But it is the layman who is the better Christian. In an early poem Swift prays that men may feel him when he writes; then, he says,

'the muse and I no more revenge desire,

Each line shall stab, shall blast, like daggers and like fire.'

It was not the Saviour of men who taught Swift to stab and blast them. Addison never despairs of any man's salvation, or even seems to know that the shapes of lust and cruelty, fear and murder, lurk in the darkness. He has nothing to say to them. It is the Dean of St Patrick's who loves to fall upon them with a great bill-hook or a blaze of flame. Addison keeps to the small sins and the fashionable sinners; his weapons are light and shining-gentle persuasion, kindly ridicule, a still small voice, not the earthquake or the fire. But he has nothing like the audacity and universal power of Swift; and Swift soon tired of Addison's politeness. I will not meddle with the "Spectator," he wrote to Stella; 'let him fair-sex it to the world's end.'* A paragraph from 'A Tale of a Tub' would have torn a Spectator' to pieces.

Addison's favourite instrument for the correction of

* Journal to Stella,' Feb. 8, 1712.

men's faults is humour, and he loves to employ it upon all those absurdities of dress and social custom and eccentricity of speech and conduct upon which his biographers have expatiated so long and so often. But humour spent upon absurdities of dress and custom loses nearly all its point when they have passed away. What is the hooped petticoat to us? How can we enter into Addison's jests upon it? So it has come about that only the essays from the 'Spectator' are now commonly read. Sir Roger and the Club are human beings independent of place and time and circumstance. We need no commentary to see how exquisitely some types of humanity are represented in Sir Roger himself, and Will Wimble, and Sir Andrew Freeport. The other papers often depend upon custom and fashions long forgotten, and their morality is that of another age. But when the 'Spectator' visits Sir Roger in Worcestershire we are in the midst of men like ourselves, and recognise them for our old acquaintance.

In a passage already quoted Addison claims that his mirth is always innocent. Yet he loves to hover about subjects with a faint suspicion of impropriety-women's petticoats, and ankles, and tuckers-in the manner of Charles Lamb manufacturing sixpenny jokes for the 'Morning Post' on flesh-coloured stockings and the 'glowing instep.' He is almost equally fond of subjects whose impropriety is not doubtful; and Sir James Frazer exactly catches the manner of the 'Spectator' when he suggests that Will Honeycomb had seduced the 'blowzy milkmaid' to whom we leave him unhappily married, and that a horsewhip brandished by a stout bucolic arm, had some share in leading Mr Honeycomb like a lamb to the altar.'

How can Addison's practice and professions be reconciled? The psychology is not very clear, but there are parallels—Jeremy Taylor, for example, and John Milton. 'Holy Living' contains a section in which the writer 'is disagreeably broad and rough'-paragraphs that 'do not make for edification'; the Ductor Dubitantium' is crowded with considerations which a wise and liberalminded priest might discuss in private conversation with adult persons, but which must, one thinks, even in 1660, have seemed indiscreet and embarrassing when set down

in print in a popular manual.' So Hallam says of Milton that voluptuousness is not wholly uncongenial to him. A few lines in "Paradise Lost" are rather too plain, and their gravity makes them worse.'

The reader who buys a set of the 'Spectator' in the belief that Addison's pages shine with unsullied purity will meet with some surprises, particularly if he has been led to believe that Addison effected a revolution in the tone of popular literature.† But such a reputation does not grow up by accident. The truth is that Addison's will is good; he loves virtue and ensues it, as Jeremy Taylor and John Milton did, too; but sometimes his sleeping passions wake, and will not be denied. Posterity has judged him by the general tendency of his works, not by the effect of some particular passages.

If one were asked to write a character-sketch of an English gentleman of the reign of Anne, one would describe a man born in the middle class, educated first at a public school, and then at Oxford, endowed by nature with an exquisite skill in Latin verse, and a taste not less exquisite for wine and conversation. Possessing that temperament which accepts the ideals of any society into which it is born, never rising much above them, but never falling far beneath them, he would enter Parliament, and hold a place under government without either success or failure, and would employ his leisure hours in the deep and placid enjoyment of literature and religion. Such qualifications and gifts as these were Addison's. But, though for more than a hundred years they made him the standard of English social life, they could not give him an immortality of fame. That is the reward of greater powers than he possessed, and greater sacrifices than he was ever willing to make.

A. C. GUTHKELCH.

* Edmund Gosse, Jeremy Taylor,' pp. 73 and 166.

+ There was no change in the tone of popular literature; and the change

in the drama was due, not to Addison, but to Jeremy Collier.

Art. 14.-BRITISH GOVERNMENT AND WAR.

THE New Year of 1916 opens the decisive phase of the war. How long the material and moral endurance of the combatants may yet prolong the conflict no man can say. But the main issue will, in all human probability, be settled in favour of one side or the other before next autumn. The struggle, if it continues after that, will be not so much to upset the verdict of next summer's battlefields as to garner in the harvest of victory, or resist the payment in full of the debt of defeat. Upon this decisive phase the Allies enter with many advantages in their favour. They have resisted unbroken the enemy's first and most formidable onset. They have inflicted very heavy losses upon him. Their reserves of man-power are still superior to his. Their deficiency in munition-power is slowly but surely being made good. Their economic resources, intrinsically far greater, have not yet been too seriously impaired by extravagance and defective organisation. The strain of the great blockade is a constant pervasive factor telling steadily upon the enemy's nerves and intensifying that craving for peace which may one day become irresistible.

If there is anxiety as to the outcome, it is not from any doubt as to the value of these assets in our favour, but from a growing conviction, based on the experience of the past year, that the supreme direction of Allied policy and Allied strategy has failed to manifest either the foresight, the concentration of effort, or the ruthless energy required for victory. It is not only the Alliance, as such, that has been characterised by the defects. The co-operation of partners so equal in status and so widely different in their outlook and in their interests must almost inevitably fall short of the degree of concentration and efficiency displayed by Germany in conducting her own affairs and those of her dependent allies, though it is satisfactory to note an increasing improvement in this respect, more particularly in the result of recent conferences between the British and French authorities. But the Allied Governments have each separately shown certain weaknesses. And, for us, the defects of our own Government-both because we are most directly concerned with it, and because we believe their persistence or

their cure to be the determining factor in the issue of the war-are matters of supreme interest at this moment. The failure to take the problem of munitions in hand at the beginning, the neglect of the recruiting situation throughout last summer and autumn, the haphazard inconsequence of the Dardanelles adventure, the futile efforts to square the diplomatic circle in the Balkans, the pitiful oscillations of our military policy in that region while our enemies were steadily and remorselessly extirpating a gallant ally-these are not things we can afford to repeat another year and still hope to defeat an adversary like Germany.

Where lies the responsibility for our failures, and what are the steps we must take to ensure that the mistakes of the past year will not be repeated in the year now before us? The answer to the first question is threefold. We have failed, firstly, owing to the defective character of our central military direction; secondly, owing to the unsuitability of Cabinet government, such as it has become in recent years, for carrying on war; and thirdly, owing to the deadening effect of our whole political system upon the very qualities most requisite for waging war. The answer to the second question is that we must reorganise the War Office, devise a new instrument of government, and-last but most important step of all-summon to the direction of affairs men who are free from the vices of our political system and who possess in themselves the qualities of constructive thought, of decision and driving power which are essential to victory. What is more, we must do all these things without delay.

Our military organisation underwent a searching test in the South African War. The experience of that war showed conclusively that the over-centralisation of all control over the various branches of military organisation in a single Commander-in-Chief was destructive of real responsibility and efficiency. Above all it showed that the most important function of all, that of planning and thinking out military policy for the future, was bound to be hopelessly neglected if it was entrusted or subordinated to any individual or department already occupied with the engrossing cares of administrative routine in any shape or form.