He could scarcely ever have had a degrading thought. He might have omitted a virtue or two, or many, but could not have had many faults committed for which he need blush or turn pale. When warmed into confidence, his conversation appears to have been so delightful that the greatest wits sat rapt and charmed to listen to him. No man bore poverty and narrow fortune with a more lofty cheerfulness. His letters to his friends at this period of his life, when he had lost his Government pension and given up his college chances, are full of courage and a gay confidence and philosophy: and they are none the worse in my eyes, and I hope not in those of his last and greatest biographer (though Mr. Macaulay is bound to own and lament a certain weakness for wine, which the great and good Joseph Addison notoriously possessed, in common with countless gentlemen of his time), because some of the letters are written when his honest hand was shaking a little in the morning after libations to purple Lyæus over-night. He was fond of drinking the healths of his friends: he writes to Wyche, of Hamburg, gratefully remembering Wyche's "hoc." "I have been drinking your health to-day with Sir Richard Shirley," he writes to Bathurst. "I have lately had the honor

* MR. ADDISON TO MR. WYCHE.

"DEAR SIR, - My hand at present begins to grow steady enough for a letter, so the properest use I can put it to is to thank ye honest gentleman that set it a shaking. I have had this morning a desperate design in my head to attack you in verse, which I should certainly have done could I have found out a rhyme to rummer. But though you have escaped for ye present, you are not yet out of danger, if I can a little recover my talent at crambo. I am sure, in whatever way I write to you, it will be inpossible for me to express ye deep sense I have of ye many favors you have lately shown me. I shall only tell you that Hambourg has been the pleasantest stage I have met with in my travails. If any of my friends wonder at me for living so long in that place, I dare say it will be thought a very good excuse when I tell him Mr. Wyche was there. As your company made our stay at Hambourg agreeable, your wine has given us all ye satisfaction that we have found in our journey through Westphalia. If drinking your health will do you any good, you may expect to be as longlived as Methuselah, or, to use a more familiar instance, as ye oldest hoc in ye cellar. I hope ye two pair of legs that was left a swelling behind us are by this time come to their shapes again. I can't forbear troubling you with my hearty respects to ye owners of them, and desiring you to believe me always,

"Dear Sir,

Yours," &c.

"To Mr. WYCHE, His Majesty's Resident at Hambourg,

'May, 1703."

From the Life of Addison, by Miss AIKIN. Vol. i. p. 147.

to meet my Lord Effingham at Amsterdam, where we have drunk Mr. Wood's health a hundred times in excellent champagne," he writes again. Swift * describes him over his cups, when Joseph yielded to a temptation which Jonathan resisted. Joseph was of a cold nature, and needed perhaps the fire of wine to warm his blood. If he was a parson, he wore a tyewig, recollect. A better and more Christian man scarcely ever breathed than Joseph Addison. If he had not that little weakness for wine - why, we could scarcely have found a fault with him, and could not have liked him as we do.†

At thirty-three years of age, this most distinguished wit, scholar, and gentleman was without a profession and an income. His book of "Travels" had failed: his "Dialogues on Medals " had no particular success: his Latin verses, even though reported the best since Virgil, or Statius at any rate, had not brought him a Government place, and Addison was living up three shabby pair of stairs in the Haymarket (in a poverty over which old Samuel Johnson rather chuckles), when in these shabby rooms an emissary from Government and For

*It is pleasing to remember that the relation between Swift and Addison was, on the whole, satisfactory from first to last. The value of Swift's testimony, when nothing personal inflamed his vision or warped his judg ment, can be doubted by nobody.

"Sept. 10, 1710.—I sat till ten in the evening with Addison and Steele. "11.— Mr. Addison and I dined together at his lodgings, and I sat with him part of this evening.

"18.-To-day I dined with Mr. Stratford at Mr. Addison's retirement near Chelsea. I will get what good offices I can from Mr. Addison. To-day all our company dined at Will Frankland's, with Steele and Addison, too.

"27.

"29. I dined with Mr. Addison," &c. - Journal to Stella.

Addison inscribed a presentation copy of his Travels " To Dr. Jonathan Swift, the most agreeable companion, the truest friend, and the greatest genius of his age." (SCOTT. From the information of Mr. Theophilus Swift.)

"Mr. Addison, who goes over first secretary, is a most excellent person; and being my most intimate friend, I shall use all my credit to set him right in his notions of persons and things."- Letters.

"I examine my heart, and can find no other reason why I write to you now, besides that great love and esteem I have always had for you. I have nothing to ask you either for my friend or for myself." - SWIFT to ADDISON (1717). SCOTT's Swift. Vol. xix. p. 274.

Political differences only dulled for a while their friendly communications. Time renewed them: and Tickell enjoyed Swift's friendship as a legacy from the man with whose memory his is so honorably connected.

"Addison usually studied all the morning; then met his party at Button's; dined there, and stayed five or six hours, and sometimes far into the night. I was of the company for about a year, but found it too much for me: it hurt my health, and so I quitted it."- POPE. Spence's Anecdotes.

tune came and found him.* A poem was wanted about the Duke of Marlborough's victory of Blenheim. Would Mr. Addison write one? Mr. Boyle, afterwards Lord Carleton, took back the reply to the Lord Treasurer Godolphin, that Mr. Addison would. When the poem had reached a certain stage, it was carried to Godolphin; and the last lines which he read were these:

"But, O my Muse! what numbers wilt thou find
To sing the furious troops in battle join'd?
Methinks I hear the drum's tumultuous sound
The victor's shouts and dying groans confound;
The dreadful burst of cannon rend the skies,

And all the thunder of the battle rise.

"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:
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 passed),
Calm and serene he drives the furious blast;
And, pleased the Almighty's orders to perform,
Rides in the whirlwind and directs the storm."

Addison left off at a good moment. That simile was pronounced to be of the greatest ever produced in poetry. That angel, that good angel, flew off with Mr. Addison, and landed him in the place of Commissioner of Appeals —vice Mr. Locke providentially promoted. In the following year Mr. Addison went to Hanover with Lord Halifax, and the year after was made Under Secretary of State. O angel visits! you come "few and far between" to literary gentlemen's lodgings! Your wings seldom quiver at second-floor windows now!

You laugh? You think it is in the power of few writers now-a-days to call up such an angel? Well, perhaps not; but permit us to comfort ourselves by pointing out that there are in the poem of the "Campaign" some as bad lines as heart can desire: and to hint that Mr. Addison did very wisely in not going further with my Lord Godolphin than that

"When he returned to England (in 1702), with a meanness of appearance which gave testimony of the difficulties to which he had been reduced, he found his old patrons out of power, and was, therefore, for a time, at full leisure for the cultivation of his mind." - JOHNSON: Lives of the Poets.

angelical simile.

Do allow me, just for a little harmless mischief, to read you some of the lines which follow. Here is the interview between the Duke and the King of the Romans after the battle:

"Austria's young monarch, whose imperial sway
Sceptres and thrones are destined to obey,
Whose boasted ancestry so high extends
That in the Pagan Gods his lineage ends,
Comes from afar, in gratitude to own
The great supporter of his father's throne.
What tides of glory to his bosom ran
Clasped in th' embraces of the godlike man!
How were his eyes with pleasing wonder fixt,
To see such fire with so much sweetness mixt!
Such easy greatness, such a graceful port,

So turned and finished for the camp or court!

How many fourth-form boys at Mr. Addison's school of Charterhouse could write as well as that now? The "Campaign" has blunders, triumphant as it was; and weak points like all campaigns.*

In the year 1713 "Cato" came out. Swift has left a description of the first night of the performance. All the laurels of Europe were scarcely sufficient for the author of this prodigious poem.† Laudations of Whig and Tory chiefs, popular

"Mr. Addison wrote very fluently; but he was sometimes very slow and scrupulous in correcting. He would show his verses to several friends; and would alter almost everything that any of them hinted at as wrong. He seemed to be too diffident of himself; and too much concerned about his character as a poet; or (as he worded it) too solicitous for that kind of praise which, God knows, is but a very little matter after all!"— POPE. Spence's Anecdotes.

t 66 As to poetical affairs," says Pope, in 1713, "I am content at present to be a bare looker-on. Cato was not so much the wonder of Rome in his days, as he is of Britain in ours; and though all the foolish industry possible has been used to make it thought a party play, yet what the author once said of another may the most properly in the world be applied to him on this occasion:

"Envy itself is dumb-in wonder lost;

And factions strive who shall applaud him most.'

"The numerous and violent claps of the Whig party on the one side of the theatre were echoed back by the Tories on the other; while the author sweated behind the scenes with concern to find their applause proceeding more from the hand than the head. 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, and presented him with fifty guineas in acknowledgment (as he expressed it) for defending the cause of liberty so well against a perpetual dictator."- POPE's Letters to SIR W.

TRUMBULL.

ovations, complimentary garlands from literary men, translations in all languages, delight and homage from all — save from John Dennis in a minority of one. Mr. Addison was called the "great Mr. Addison" after this. The Coffee-house Senate saluted him Divus: it was heresy to question that decree.

Meanwhile he was writing political papers and advancing in the political profession. He went Secretary to Ireland. He was appointed Secretary of State in 1717. And letters of his are extant, bearing date some year or two before, and written to young Lord Warwick, in which he addresses him as "my dearest lord," and asks affectionately about his studies, and writes very prettily about nightingales and birds'-nests, which he has found at Fulham for his lordship. Those nightingales were intended to warble in the ear of Lord Warwick's mamma. Addison married her ladyship in 1716; and died at Holland House three years after that splendid but dismal union.*

"Cato" ran for thirty-five nights without interruption. Pope wrote the Prologue, and Garth the Epilogue.

It is worth noticing how many things in "Cato" keep their ground as habitual quotations, e.g. :—

big with the fate

Of Cato and of Rome.'

""Tis not in mortals to command success,

But we'll do more, Sempronius, we'll deserve it."

"Blesses his stars, and thinks it luxury."

"I think the Romans call it Stoicism."

"My voice is still for war."

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

Not to mention

And the eternal

"The woman who deliberates is lost."

"Plato, thou reasonest well,"

which avenges, perhaps, on the public their neglect of the play!

"The lady was persuaded to marry him on terms much like those on which a Turkish princess is espoused -to whom the Sultan is reported to pronounce, Daughter, I give thee this man for thy slave.' The marriage, if uncontradicted report can be credited, made no addition to his happiness; it neither found them, nor made them, equal. . . . . Rowe's ballad of The Despairing Shepherd' is said to have been written, either before or after marriage, upon this memorable pair."- DR. JOHNSON.

"I received the news of Mr. Addison's being declared Secretary of State with the less surprise, in that I knew that post was almost offered to him before. At that time he declined it, and I really believe that he would