nV ^v V °- %^ <£ <> ■- ^ / *« _/ ,4 a <$" a^ Q V tf \*)F * °^^ '->>* -- *W : \& .: | ^ ^ v* cs ^ ■ r# o ^ ^ ^ ^> ^0* * „<> s> °^ V 3vc? ^ ^ <** W :\^ ».v % V ^ * ° * % ^ <£ ^ £ -^ ^ fv* ^^^A lA^/k". ^b. -v rfCO i. S> ,. i • o , % • o* P <2o ^ TWENTIETH CENTURY TEXT-BOOKS EDITED BY A. F. NIGHTINGALE, Ph.D., LL. D. SUPERINTENDENT OP SCHOOLS, ,OOK COUNTY, ILLINOIS FORMERLY SUPERINTENDENT OF HIGH SCHOOLS, CHICAGO TWENTIETH CENTURY TEXT-BOOKS MACAULAY'S ESSAYS ON ADDISON AND JOHNSON EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY GEORGE B. AITON, M. A. INSPECTOR OF HIGH SCHOOLS, STATE OF MINNESOTA NEW YORK D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 1903 THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, Two Copies Received SEP 14 1903 Copyngnt Entry Or*** /^"?cZ ^CLASS CL; XXc. N© COPY B. Copyright, 1899, 1903 By D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 7 ?c PREFATORY NOTE. This edition of Macaulay's essays on Addison and Johnson has been prepared with special reference to its use in secondary schools. ~No attempt has been made to supplant the use of dictionary, cyclopaedia of names, atlas, and historical reference wor,ks by over- loading the text with cumbersome notes. A few proper names are given a setting; for others the student must consult his authorities; and others yet he must learn to pass over as not essential to the essayist's meaning. A number of quotations are given, not only to strengthen or to temper Macaulay's thought, but also in the hope of interesting students in the literary criti- cism of the past half century. An understanding of English political history is prerequisite to an understanding of the two essays, the first of which might not inappropriately be called a political tractate. A chronological table is given, by means of which the student may arrange in proper vi PREFATORY NOTE. sequence Macaulay's numerous allusions to political events. The list of reference works is not extended to cover all the material available, but is cut down to the lowest limit, and may be regarded as a personal recommenda- tion of books which should be in a school library. G. B. A. INTRODUCTION. Macaulay's standing in the world of letters was secure when he was twenty-five years of age. The main facts of his early and after life are readily set in order. One step follows another as naturally and as easily as the heir apparent succeeds his father on the throne, and in turn is followed by his own son. Genius is pro- verbially waited upon by a tardy paymaster, but Ma- caulay had an immediate reward of the most substan- tial and appreciable kind. Few men have achieved success in more directions, or on easier terms. He rose to eminence as a statesman and a man of letters; he became a person of wealth and an ornament of society ; he was made a member of the British peerage ; his life was crowded with useful service, and his career was full of honor: but Macaulay's biography is devoid of crisis, and is, in a way, uneventful. Macaulay is far less interesting, therefore, than Milton; less interest- ing, perhaps through a shorter lapse of time, than Ad- dison ; and certainly much less interesting than his own writings. Yet it would not be fair to say that the life of one who bore so conspicuous and honorable a part in British affairs is uninteresting. It would be unjust to say that a writer who has illuminated so many lit- erary characters, and rendered literature attractive to young readers, is simply a superior sort of Boswell, holding to British letters somewhat the same relation 2 vii v ;ii INTRODUCTION. that Boswell held to a single man, in whose personality we have little concern. It were unjust to the memory of a British gentleman, a gentleman in the best sense of the word, to belittle in any way the character or the signal service of Macaulay ; but his life is so uniformly a series of prolonged successes in literature, in politics, in society, and in financial matters, so uninterrupted a "cascade of fallings on his feet," and so devoid of grap- plings with untoward circumstance, that to those who naturally rejoice in a hard and well-fought battle, the tougher the better, in which merit eventually comes out successful, or grimly goes down without thought of surrender, his life seems to lack an important ele- ment of interest. The Macaulays, as the name indicates, were High- landers. Great - grandfather Aulay Macaulay and Grandfather John Macaulay were parish ministers with their full share of tribulation, blessed with very moderate circumstances, amid which they reared large families of from twelve to fourteen vigorous children. They appear to have been men of intelligence, readers and writers, from whom Macaulay inherited the char- acteristics which have distinguished him. Trevelyan gives us an interesting note in his Life. " Mr. Carlyle caught sight of Macaulay's face in unwonted repose, as he was turning the pages of a book. ' I noticed/ said he, ' the homely Norse features that you find everywhere in the Western Isles, and I thought to my- self, Well ! any one can see that you are an honest good sort of a fellow made out of oatmeal/ " Zachary, father of Lord Macaulay, went out to Jamaica as a bookkeeper on an estate owned by a Glas- gow business firm, but being profoundly impressed by INTRODUCTION. i x the evils of negro slavery as witnessed on the Jamaica plantations he refused liberal offers of further employ- ment, and returned home at twenty-four, to throw himself into the movement for the abolition of slavery in the British colonies. The famous essayist, Thomas Babington Macau- lay, was the eldest son of this lifelong anti-slavery worker, and was born at Eothley Temple, a comfort- able country mansion in Leicestershire, midway be- tween York and London. His boyhood was passed at Clapham, a pleasant suburban district of London. His biographer has given us an interesting account of a pre- cocious childhood. The boy was a great reader and an inveterate talker, wise beyond his years. When but four years old he was visiting at the house of a friend, and a servant had the misfortune to spill some hot coffee over the boy's legs. His hostess was, of course, mortified and compassionate, and after a few moments asked him how he was feeling, when " the little fellow looked up in her face and replied, ' Thank you, madam, the agony is abated.' " When a mere child he was sent to an excellent grammar school, and made extraordinary progress. At seven he wrote an epitome of general history, still pre- served in his " boyish scrawl," in which he passes sage judgment upon various worthies, including Cromwell, who " was an unjust and wicked man." At twelve Macaulay was sent away from home, where his remark- able talent had been developed but never praised, to a fitting school, and in 1818 he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, where he distinguished himself as an om- nivorous reader, a surpassing talker, and an ardent partisan in national politics. He won two prizes for x INTRODUCTION. excellence in English verse, but had an aversion to Latin composition. He won a prize for an essay on The Conduct and Character of William the Third, but detested mathematics. In 1824 Macaulay received his master's degree, and was made a fellow of Trinity, with a pecuniary per- quisite, it would appear, of some £300 per annum. Two years later he was admitted to the bar, but beyond the able prosecution of a libel case for his father against an obnoxious editor he never followed up his profession seriously. Zachary Macaulay's home was an anti-slavery center, and young Macaulay had been under the influ- ence of these earnest reformers from childhood. When he returned from Cambridge to his father's home, it is natural that they should have sought to enlist his ready tongue and able pen. He had a comfortable in- come from his fellowship; he disliked the law, or at least disliked the drudgery necessary to work up a prac- tice. He was fond of debate, fond of politics, obliging in disposition, and warm in his sympathies. So it is little wonder that he was drawn into the spirited con- troversy of the times. In 1824 he distinguished him- self by an eloquent address before the Anti-Slavery Society. He won some reputation as a writer for Knight's Quarterly Magazine, and was eagerly hailed by the Whig party as a valuable accession to their ranks. About this time, Jeffrey, the editor of the Edin- burgh Eeview, a violent Whig, zealous for the rising interests of that party, wrote to a friend in London: " Can you not lay your hands on some clever young man who can write for us? The original supporters INTRODUCTION. x j of the work are getting old, and are either too busy or too stupid; and here (Edinburgh) the young men are mostly Tories." Macaulay was suggested, and his first contribution, Milton, appeared in the Eeview for Au- gust, 1825. Macaulay's reputation was made. The Whigs were delighted. Jeffrey wrote : " The more I think, the less I can conceive where you picked up that style." Social invitations poured in, the mistress of Holland House took him up, and in the phrase of the day Macaulay woke one morning to find himself famous. This connection with the Edinburgh Eeview, once formed, lasted for eighteen years, and was never formally sundered. Milton, his first effort, though afterward pronounced by himself faulty and overloaded with ornament, is considered his ablest essay. Curi- ously enough, The Life and Writings of Addison, al- most his last contribution, is usually regarded as the next in rank. In these papers, prepared amid other duties at the rate of from one to three a year, there is necessarily inequality of merit, but none are slovenly. His review of Boswell's Life of Johnson is noted. A few sentences from a famous paragraph found in his essay on Ranke's History of the Popes give an idea of the vigor to be found in his historical reviews, and also illustrate the largeness of Macaulay' s views and his freedom from bigotry. " There is not, and there never was on this earth, a work of human policy so well de- serving of examination as the Roman Catholic Church. The history of that church joins together the two great ages of human civilization. No other institution is left standing which carries the mind back to the times when the smoke of sacrifice rose from the Pantheon, and when camelopards and tigers bounded in the Flavian x ii INTRODUCTION. amphitheatre. The proudest royal houses are but of yesterday when compared with the line of the supreme pontiffs. Nor do we see any sign which indicates that the term of her long dominion is approaching. She saw the commencement of all the governments and of all the ecclesiastical establishments that now exist in the world; and we feel no assurance that she is not destined to see the end of them all. She was great and respected before the Saxon had set foot on Britain, before the Frank had passed the Khine, when Grecian eloquence still nourished in Antioch, when idols were still worshipped in the temple of Mecca. And she may still exist in undiminished vigor when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast soli- tude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's." Warren Hastings is perhaps his most celebrated historical essay. That on Madame D'Arblay is one of the least valuable. Madame D'Arblay was a woman who wrote Evelina, a society novel, while the nation was losing a continent by the American Eevolution, who laced the stays and dressed the hair of the vulgar queen of an ignorant king for five years, and who finally married a French officer. She owes her reputation chiefly to the fact that she was made the subject of an essay by the most popular of modern essayists, whose genius forged this cheap material into a paper interesting to the Holland House social circle, rather than to a literary posterity. In 1830, Macaulay was given a seat in Parliament as a member for Calne, a pocket borough. He immedi- ately became an advocate of the bill to give Jews the right of holding office, and in 1832 he eloquently pro- INTRODUCTION. m'ii moted the famous Eeform Bill, the principal object of which, it will be remembered, was the abolition of " rotten boroughs," one of which he had the honor to represent, and the recognition of populous districts, and, particularly, prosperous manufacturing centers which had recently grown up. The next year, to the unspeakable joy of his vener- able father, Macaulay took a prominent part in procur- ing the passage of a bill abolishing slavery in the Brit- ish colonies. Macaulay was now a member of the Board of Control, which represented the Crown in its dealings with the East Indian directors. He actively identified himself with measures of administrative re- form. In 1834 he was appointed a member of the Su- preme Council of India, for which country he sailed at once. His salary was £10,000 per annum — not an ex- orbitant sum when the need of having an honest man of ability is taken into consideration. His previous legal training was of service in discharging the func- tions of this new post. Among his other labors, he was appointed president of the Law Commission, which framed a criminal code for India. In 1838 Macaulay returned to England, and, after a year spent in travel on the continent, he was returned to Parliament for Edinburgh, which he continued to represent al- most continuously, and it is unnecessary to say with great ability, until his retirement from politics in 1856. Seventeen years are filled to a moment with parlia- mentary proceedings, in discharging the duties of cabi- net positions, with social dinners, travel, essay writing, university honors, and correspondence ; yet in the midst of it all he managed somehow to write his History of x iv INTRODUCTION. England, the most popular and brilliant sketch of a historical period that has yet appeared in print. The first volume appeared in 1848, and other volumes in rapid succession. Messrs. Longmans, his fortunate publishers, gave him an early check for £20,000, a bit of paper which has become historic in the annals of literature. Toward the close of his life Macaulay withdrew from society, and, with the exception of an annual autumnal tour in France, Switzerland, or Italy, he enjoyed his friends and his books in a delightful home, chiefly library and garden, to which he retired for genuine comfort in his later days. In 1857 the Queen was pleased, at the suggestion of Prime Minister Pal- merston, to make him a member of the British House of Lords, with the title of Baron Macaulay of Eothley, the place of his birth. Macaulay was much pleased with this honor, but took no part in the proceedings of the Upper House. In fact, his health now began to decline. He was unable to carry forward his history to the point originally intended. One winter evening late in 1859 he died in an armchair in the midst of his books, and a few days later his remains were borne by the great men of Britain from that same Jerusalem Chamber, in which Addison lay in state, to the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey. His life was one of singular probity and fidelity to principle. His last signature was affixed to a check for £25, sent to a poor but deserving curate. A sketch of Lord Macaulay would be incomplete without mention of his poems. Macaulay had a lit- erary theory of " restoring to poetry the legends of which poetry had been robbed by history." He had INTRODUCTION. XV been a versifier from childhood. In 1842 he published his Lays of Ancient Rome, which met with immediate popularity. Few schoolboys are unfamiliar with Ho- ratius at the Bridge, or Ivry, at least, and here we have the verdict of the critics, by no means final, that his poems are well enough for schoolboys, but not worthy of high place. Macaulay's Style. As Jeffrey intimated, Macaulay's style is his own. It could not be described to one who has not read him. He has had a host of followers, but had no predecessor, and he was well aware of his own characteristics: "A new member of the Review. There is an article which is a mocking-bird imitation of me. Somehow or other, the mimic cannot catch the note, but many people would not be able to distinguish. But I am a very un- safe model. My manner is, I think, and the world thinks, on the whole, a good one; but it is very near to a bad manner indeed, and those characteristics of my style which are most easily copied are the most questionable." In the use of words Macaulay is ever felicitous ; but he makes no effort to recover words out of date, to condense a chapter into a burning epithet, as Carlyle did, or to invent new terms, after the fashion of the minor writers of to-day. His vocabulary is a , model of propriety and good usage. Macaulay has several ways of assisting the reader to carry his thought. One habit is that of pairing off words in such a manner that they fasten themselves like burs. Thus, in his paper on Lord Nugent 7 s Me- morials of Hampden he accounts for a change of sym- pathies and a falling off of votes, which left the Puri- xv i INTRODUCTION. tan leaders of the Long Parliament in great danger immediately after their first drastic efforts by saying : " The English are always inclined to side with the weak party which is in the wrong, rather than with the strong party which is in the right. This may be seen in all contests, from contests of boxers to contests of faction." Here we have weak party and wrong placed in antithesis with strong party and right in a manner to make the expression cling to the reader. This par- ticular feature of Macaulay's style, not entirely original with him, has been employed so frequently since that it is somewhat in disrepute. Lowell, speaking of Pope, says : " I think one gets a little tired of the invariable this set off by the inevitable that, and wishes an- tithesis would let him have a little quiet now and then/' Other features of Macaulay's style are the balanced sentence, in which he is confessedly a master, the use of the period and of climax^, illustrations of which may be readily found in the essays which follow. Macaulay is never hurried. He is the well-bred man of society, whose position as a speaker is secure. He chooses his topic with dignity and takes ample time to do his subject justice. There is no trace of nervousness. He never seems afraid of wearying and gives no weariness. Indeed, it is surprising that one who spoke and wrote so often never seems to lose heart in his subject. Another reason why Macaulay holds the reader's attention is that he is tremendously in earnest. An anecdote is afloat to the effect that a young wit hit off this element of Macaulay's character by wishing he might be as cocksure of some one fact as Macaulay was of everything. Finally, his style is a model of clearness. We are INTRODUCTION. xv {{ not left in doubt for a moment as to what the essayist means to say. This was his pride. Criticism in gen- eral he cared little for, but he was thankful to have his attention directed to any fancied obscurity of meaning. In this, and in his use of words, Macaulay's example is invaluable to the young writer. BOOKS OF REFERENCE. The Century Cyclopaedia of Names. Hare, Walks in London. Green, The History of the English People. Morris, Age of Anne. McCarthy, Epoch of Reform. Addison, Collected Works, Bohn's Library. Macaulay, Essays. History of England. Poems. Courthope, Addison. Trevelyan, Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay. Johnson, Lives of the Poets. Arnold, Mixed Essays. Lowell, Literary Essays. Morley, John, Miscellanies. Saintsbury, Corrected Impressions. Stephen, Hours in a Library, third series. Thackeray, English Humorists. Taine, English Literature. Gosse, History of Eighteenth Century Literature. Carlyle, Essays. Stephen, Johnson (Men of Letters). Johnson, Rasselas. Rambler. Idler. Boswell, Life of Br. Samuel Johnson, Hale, Longer English Poems. CHKONOLOGICAL TABLE OF IMPORTANT EVENTS IN THE PERIODS THAT INCLUDE THE LIVES OF ADDISON, JOHNSON, AND MACAULAY. 1603. James I succeeded. 1607. Virginia settled. 1608. Milton born, December 9. 1616. Death of Shakespeare. 1620. Bacon's Novum Organum. 1660. Restoration of the Stuarts. 1667. Milton's Paradise Lost. 1672. Birth of Addison. 1678. Oates invents the Popish Plot. 1689. William and Mary succeeded. 1690. Battle of the Boyne, July 1. 1694. Bank of England set up. 1699. Addison travels. 1701. Grand Alliance: Germany, England, and Holland against France. 1702. Anne succeeded. 1704. Battle of Blenheim, August 13. 1706. Battle of Ramillies, May 23. Act of Union with Scotland. 1709. Birth of Johnson. 1709-1711. Tatler, founded by Steele. 1710. Prosecution of Sacheverell, Tory reaction. Whigs dismissed. 1711. Pope's Essay on Criticism. The Spectator, founded by Steele and Addison, pub- lished daily, 555 numbers. xix XX CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE. 1712. The Rape of the Lock. 1713. Guardian, founded by Steele. 1715. Pope's Iliad. 1719. Addison's death. 1721. Ministry of Sir Robert Walpole. 1726. Gulliver's Travels. 1727. George II. 1748. Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle. 1750. The Rambler. 1755. Johnson's Dictionary. Defeat of General Braddock. 1758. Ministry of William Pitt. 1758-1760. Idler, founded by Johnson. 1759. Publication of Rasselas. 1765. Stamp Act passed. 1773. Johnson's Journey to the Hebrides. 1776. Declaration of Independence, July 4. 1781. Johnson's Lives of the Poets. 1784. Johnson's Death. 1786. Trial of Warren Hastings. 1791. Boswell's Life of Johnson. 1800. Act of Union with Ireland. Macaulay born at Rothley Temple, October 25. 1805. Battle of Trafalgar, October 21. 1807. Abolition of slave trade. 1818. Macaulay goes to the University of Cambridge. 1821. George IV succeeded. 1824. Macaulay a Fellow of Trinity. 1825. Essay on Milton. 1826. Called to the bar. 1829. Catholic Emancipation bill. 1830. William IV succeeded. Macaulay M. P. for Calne ; speech on Jewish disabili- ties ; visit to Paris. 1832. Parliamentary Reform bill passed, June 7. 1833. Suppression of Colonial slavery. 1834. System of national education begun. Macaulay goes to India as Member of Council. 1837. Victoria succeeded. 1838. Macaulay returns to Europe ; tour on the Continent. CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE. xxi 1839. M. P. for Edinburgh ; Secretary of War. 1842. Lays of Ancient Rome. Speech on the Copyright Question. 1843. Essay on Addison. Essays republished in book form. 1848. First two volumes of the History published. 1856. Macaulay resigns from Parliament. 1857. Becomes Baron Macaulay of Roth ley Temple. 1859. Death of Macaulay at Holly Lodge, December 28. JOSEPH ADDISON. THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF ADDISON. 1 Some reviewers are of opinion that a lady who dares to publish a book renounces by that act the fran- chises appertaining to her sex, and can claim no ex- emption from the utmost rigor of critical procedure. From that opinion we dissent. We admit, indeed, that in a country which boasts of many female writers, eminently qualified by their talents and, acquirements to influence the public mind, it would be of most per- nicious consequence that inaccurate history or unsound philosophy should be suffered to pass uncensured, merely because the offender chanced to be a lady. But we conceive that, on such occasions, a critic would do well to imitate the courteous knight who found himself compelled by duty to keep the lists against Brada- mante. He, we are told, defended successfully the cause of which he was the champion; but, before the fight began, exchanged Balisarda for a less deadly sword, of which he carefully blunted the point and edge.* Nor are the immunities of sex the only immunities which Miss Aikin may rightfully plead. Several of * Orlando Furioso, xlv, G8. 2 MACAULAY'S her works, and especially the very pleasing Memoirs of the Reign of James the First, have fully entitled her to the privileges enjoyed by good writers. One of those privileges we hold to be this, that such writers, when, either from the unlucky choice of a subject, or from the indolence too often produced by success, they hap- pen to fail, shall not be subjected to the severe disci- pline which it is sometimes necessary to inflict upon dunces and impostors, but shall merely be reminded by a gentle touch, like that with which the Laputan 2 flap- per roused his dreaming lord, that it is high time to wake. Our readers will probably infer from what we have said that Miss Aikin's book has disappointed 3 us. The truth is that she is not well acquainted with her subject. No person who is not familiar with the political and literary history of England during the reigns of Wil- liam the Third, of Anne, and of George the First, can possibly write a good life of Addison. Now, we mean no reproach to Miss Aikin, and many will think that we pay her a compliment when we say that her studies have taken a different direction. She is better ac- quainted with Shakespeare and Raleigh than with Con- greve and Prior; and is far more at home among the ruffs and peaked beards of Theobald's 4 than among the Steenkirks 5 and flowing periwigs which surround- ed Queen Anne's tea-table at Hampton. She seems to have written about the Elizabethan Age because she had read much about it ; she seems, on the other hand, to have read a little about the age of Addison because she had determined to write about it. The consequence is that she has had to describe men and things without having either a correct or a vivid idea of them, and that ADDISON. 3 she has often fallen into errors of a very serious kind. The reputation which Miss Aikin has justly earned stands so high, and the charm of Addison's letters is so great, that a second edition of this work may prob- ably be required. If so, we hope that every paragraph will be revised, and that every date and fact about which there can be the smallest doubt will be carefully verified. To Addison himself we are bound by a sentiment as much like affection as any sentiment can be, which is inspired by one who has been sleeping a hundred and twenty years in Westminster Abbey. We trust, how- ever, that this feeling will not betray us into that abject idolatry which we have often had occasion to repre- hend in others, and which seldom fails to make both the idolater and the idol ridiculous. A man of genius and virtue is but a man. All his powers cannot be equally developed, nor can we expect from him perfect self-knowledge. We need not, therefore, hesitate to admit that Addison has left us some compositions which do not rise above mediocrity, some heroic poems hardly equal to Parn ell's, some criticism as superficial as Dr. Blair's, and a tragedy not very much better than Dr. Johnson's. It is praise enough to say of a writer that, in a high department of literature, in which many eminent writers have distinguished themselves, he has had no equal ; and this may with strict justice be said of Addison. As a man, he may not have deserved the adoration which he received from those who, bewitched by his fascinating society, and indebted for all the comforts of life to his generous and delicate friendship, wor- shipped him nightly in his favorite temple at But- 4 MACAULAY'S ton's. 6 But, after full inquiry and impartial reflection, we have long been convinced that he deserved as much love and esteem as can be justly claimed by any of our infirm and erring race. Some blemishes may un- doubtedly be detected in his character; but the more carefully it is examined, the more will it appear, to use the phrase of the old anatomists, sound in the noble parts, free from all taint of perfidy, of cowardice, of cruelty, of ingratitude, of envy. Men may easily be named in whom some particular good disposition has been more conspicuous than in Addison. But the just harmony of qualities, the exact temper between the stern and the humane virtues, the habitual observance of every law, not only of moral rectitude, but of moral grace and dignity, distinguish him from all men who have been tried by equally strong temptations, and about whose conduct we possess equally full infor- mation. His father was the Reverend Lancelot Addison, who, though eclipsed by his more celebrated son, made some figure in the world, and occupies with credit two folio pages in the Biographia Britannica. Lan- celot was sent up, as a poor scholar, from Westmore- land to Queen's College, Oxford, in the time of the Commonwealth, made some progress in learning, be- came, like most of his fellow-students, a violent Eoyal- ist, lampooned the heads of the university, and was forced to ask pardon on his bended knees. When he had left college, he earned a humble subsistence by reading the liturgy of the fallen Church to the families of those sturdy squires whose manor-houses were scat- tered over the wild of Sussex. After the Restoration his loyalty was rewarded with the post of chaplain to ADDISON. 5 the garrison of Dunkirk. When Dunkirk was sold to France, he lost his employment. But Tangier had been ceded by Portugal to England as part of the mar- riage portion of the Infanta Catharine, and to Tangier Lancelot Addison was sent. A more miserable situ- ation can hardly be conceived. It was difficult to say whether the unfortunate settlers were more tormented by the heats or by the rains, by the soldiers within the wall or by the Moors without it. One advantage the chaplain had. He enjoyed an excellent opportunity of studying the history and manners of Jews and Mo- hammedans, and of this opportunity he appears to have made excellent use. On his return to England, after some years of banishment, he published an interesting volume on the Polity and Eeiigion of Barbary, and another on the Hebrew Customs and the State of Rab- binical Learning. He rose to eminence in his profes- sion and became one of the royal chaplains, a Doctor of Divinity, Archdeacon of Salisbury, and Dean of Lich- field. It is said that he would have been made a bishop after the Revolution if he had not given offence to the Government by strenuously opposing, in the Convocation of 1689, the liberal policy of William and Tillotson. In 1672, not long after Dr. Addison's return from Tangier, his son Joseph was born. Of Joseph's child- hood we know little. He learned his rudiments at schools in his father's neighborhood, and was then sent to the Charter House. 7 The anecdotes which are popu- larly related about his boyish tricks do not harmonize very well with what we know of his riper years. There remains a tradition that he was the ringleader in a barring out, and another tradition that he ran away 6 MACAULAY'S from school and hid himself in a wood, where he fed on berries and slept in a hollow tree, till after a long search he was discovered and brought home. If these stories be true, it would be curious to know by what moral discipline so mutinous and enterprising a lad was transformed into the gentlest and most modest of men. We have abundant proof that, whatever Joseph's pranks may have been, he pursued his studies vigor- ously and successfully. At fifteen he was not only fit for the university, but carried thither a classical taste and a stock of learning which would have done honor to a Master of Arts. He was entered at Queen's Col- lege, 8 Oxford ; but he had not been many months there, when some of his Latin verses fell by accident into the hands of Dr. Lancaster, Dean of Magdalene College. The young scholar's diction and versification were al- ready such as veteran professors might envy. Dr. Lan- caster was desirous to serve a boy of such promise ; nor was an opportunity long wanting. The Kevolution had just taken place; and nowhere had it been hailed with more delight than at Magdalene College. That great and opulent corporation had been treated by James, and by his chancellor, with an insolence and injustice which, even in such a prince and in such a minister, may justly excite amazement, and which had done more than even the prosecution of the bishops to alienate the Church of England from the throne. A president, duly elected, had been violently expelled from his dwelling; a Papist had been set over the so- ciety by a royal mandate ; the fellows who, in conform- ity with their oaths, had refused to submit to this usurper, had been driven forth from their quiet clois- ADDISON. 7 ters and gardens, to die of want or to live on charity. But the day of redress and retribution speedily came. The intruders were ejected; the venerable House was again inhabited by its old inmates ; learning nourished under the rule of the wise and virtuous Hough; and with learning was united a mild and liberal spirit too often wanting in the princely colleges of Oxford. In consequence of the troubles through which the so- ciety had passed, there had been no valid election of new members during the year 1688. In 1689, there- fore, there was twice the ordinary number of vacancies ; and thus Dr. Lancaster found it easy to procure for his young friend admittance to the advantages of a foundation then generally esteemed the wealthiest in Europe. At Magdalene Addison resided during ten years. He was, at first, one of those scholars who are called Demies, but was subsequently elected a fellow. His college is still proud of his name; his portrait still hangs in the hall ; and strangers are still told that his favorite walk was under the elms which fringe the meadow on the banks of the Cherwell. It is said, and is highly probable, that he was distinguished among his fellow-students by the delicacy of his feelings, by the shyness of his manners, and by the assiduity with which he often prolonged his studies fai into the night. It is certain that his reputation for ability and learning stood high. Many years later, the ancient doctors of Magdalene continued to talk in their common room of his boyish compositions, and expressed their sorrow that no copy of exercises so remarkable had been pre-* served. It is proper, however, to remark that Miss Aikin 8 MACAULAY'S has committed the error, very pardonable in a lady, of overrating Addison's classical attainments. In one de- partment of learning, indeed, his proficiency was such as it is hardly possible to overrate. His knowledge of the Latin poets, from Lucretius and Catullus down to Claudian and Prudentius, was singularly exact and profound. He understood them thoroughly, entered into their spirit, and had the finest and most discrim- inating perception of all their peculiarities of style and melody; nay, he copied their manner with admirable skill, and surpassed, we think, all their British imita- tors who had preceded him, Buchanan and Milton alone excepted. This is high praise; and beyond this we cannot with justice go. It is clear that Addison's serious attention during his residence at the university was almost entirely concentrated on Latin poetry, and that, if he did not wholly neglect other provinces of an- cient literature, he vouchsafed to them only a cursory glance. He does not appear to have attained more than an ordinary acquaintance with the political and moral writers of Eome; nor was his own Latin prose by any means equal to his Latin verse. His knowledge of Greek, though doubtless 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. A minute examination of his works, if we had time to make such an examination, would fully bear out these remarks. We will briefly advert to a few of the facts on which our judgment is grounded. Great praise is due to the Notes which Addison ap- pended to his version of the second and third books of the Metamorphoses. Yet those notes, while they show him to have been, in his own domain, an accomplished ADDISON. 9 scholar, show also how confined that domain was. They are rich in apposite references to Virgil, Statius, and Claudian; but they contain not a single illustra- tion drawn from the Greek poets. Now if, in the whole compass of Latin literature, there be a passage which stands in need of illustration drawn from the Greek poets, it is the story of Pentheus in the third book of the Metamorphoses. Ovid was indebted for that story to Euripides and Theocritus, both of whom he has sometimes followed minutely. But neither to Euripides nor to Theocritus does Addison make the faintest allusion; and we therefore believe that we do not wrong him by supposing that he had little or no knowledge of their works. His travels in Italy, again, abound with classical quotations happily introduced; but scarcely one of those quotations is in prose. He draws more illustra- tions from Ausonius and Manilius than from Cicero. Even his notions of the political and military affairs of the Romans seem to be derived from poets and poet- asters. Spots made memorable by events which have changed the destinies of the world, and which have been worthily recorded by great historians, bring to his mind only scraps of some ancient versifier. In the gorge of the Apennines he naturally remembers the hardships which Hannibal's army endured, and pro- ceeds to cite, not the authentic narrative of Polybius, not the picturesque narrative of Livy, but the languid hexameters of Silius Italicus. On the banks of the Rubicon he never thinks of Plutarch's lively descrip- tion, or of the stern conciseness of the Commentaries, or of those letters to Atticus which so forcibly express the alternations of hope and fear in a sensitive mind 3 10 MACAULAY'S at a great crisis. His only authority for the events of the civil war is Lucan. All the best ancient works of art at Eome and Flor- ence are Greek. Addison saw them, however, without recalling one single verse of Pindar, of Callimachus, or of the Attic dramatists ; but they brought to his recol- lection innumerable passages of Horace, Juvenal, Sta- tius, and Ovid. The same may be said of the Treatise on Medals. In that pleasing work we find about three hundred passages extracted with great judgment from the Eo- man poets, but we do not recollect a single passage taken from any Eoman orator or historian; and we are confident that not a line is quoted from any Greek writer. No person who had derived all his informa- tion on the subject of medals from Addison would sus- pect that the Greek coins were in historical interest equal, and in beauty of execution far superior, to those of Eome. If it were necessary to find any further proof that Addison's classical knowledge was confined within nar- row limits, that proof would be furnished by his Essay on the Evidences of Christianity. The Eoman poets throw little or no light on the literary and historical questions which he is under the necessity of examining in that essay. He is, therefore, left completely in the dark; and it is melancholy to see how helplessly he gropes his way from blunder to blunder. He assigns, as grounds for his religious belief, stories as absurd as that of the Cock-lane ghost, 9 and forgeries as rank as Ireland's Vortigern, 10 puts faith in the lie about the Thundering Legion, 11 is convinced that Tiberius moved the senate to admit Jesus among the gods, and pro- ADDISON. 11 nounces the letter of Abgarug, King of Edessa, to be a record of great authority. 12 Nor were these errors the effects of superstition ; for to superstition Addison was by no means prone. The truth is that he was writing about what he did riot understand. Miss Aikin has discovered a letter, from which it appears that, while Addison resided at Oxford, he was one of several writers whom the booksellers engaged to make an English version of Herodotus ; and she infers that he must have been a good Greek scholar. We can allow very little weight to this argument, when we con- sider that his fellow-laborers were to have been Boyle and Blackmore. Boyle is remembered chiefly as the nominal author of the worst book on Greek history and philology that ever was printed; and this book, bad as it is, Boyle was unable to produce without help. Of Blackmore's attainments in the ancient tongues, it may be sufficient to say that, in his prose, he has con- founded an aphorism with an apophthegm, 13 and that when, in his verse, he treats of classical subjects, his habit is to regale his readers with four false quantities to a page. It is probable that the classical acquirements of Addison were of as much service to him as if they had been more extensive. The world generally gives its admiration, not to the man who does what nobody else even attempts to do, but to the man who does best what multitudes do well. Bentley was so immeasurably su- perior to all the other scholars of his time that few among them could discover his superiority. But the accomplishment in which Addison excelled his con- temporaries was then, as it is now, highly valued and assiduously cultivated at all English seats of 12 MACAULAY'S learning. Everybody who had been at a public school had written Latin verses; many had written such verses with tolerable success, and were quite able to ap- preciate, though by no means able to rival, the skill with which Addison imitated Virgil. His lines on the Barometer and the Bowling-green were applauded by hundreds, to whom the Dissertation on the Epistles of Phalaris was as unintelligible as the hieroglyphics on an obelisk. Purity of style, and an easy flow of numbers, are common to all Addison's Latin poems. Our favorite piece is the Battle of the Cranes and Pygmies; for in that piece we discern a gleam of the fancy and humor which many years later enlivened thousands of break- fast-tables. Swift boasted that he was never known to steal a hint; and he certainly owed as little to his predecessors as any modern writer. Yet we cannot help suspecting that he borrowed, perhaps unconscious- ly, one of the happiest touches in his Voyage to Lilliput from Addison's verses. Let our readers judge. " The emperor," says Gulliver, " is taller by about the breadth of my nail than any of his court, which alone is enough to strike an awe into the beholders." About thirty years before Gullivers Travels ap- peared, Addison wrote these lines: " Jamque acies inter medias sese arduus infert Pygmeadum ductor, qui, majestate verendus, Incessuque gravis, reliquos supereminet omnes Mole gigantea, mediamque exsurgit in ulnam." 14 The Latin poems of Addison were greatly and just- ly admired both at Oxford and Cambridge, before his name had ever been heard by the wits who thronged the coffee-houses round Drurv Lane Theatre. In his ADDISON. 13 twenty-second year, he ventured to appear before the public as a writer of English verse. He addressed some complimentary lines to Dryden, who, after many triumphs and many reverses, had at length reached a secure and lonely eminence among the literary men of that age. Dryden appears to have been much gratified by the young scholar's praise; and an interchange of civilities and good offices followed. Addison was prob- ably introduced by Dryden to Congreve, and was cer- tainly presented by Congreve to Charles Montague, who was then Chancellor of the Exchequer, and leader of the Whig party in the House of Commons. At this time Addison seemed inclined to devote himself to poetry. He published a translation of part of the fourth Georgic, Lines to King William, and other performances of equal value, that is to say, of no value at all. But in those days the public was in the habit of receiving with applause pieces which would now have little chance of obtaining the Newdigate prize or the Seatonian prize. 15 And the reason is obvious. The heroic couplet was then the favorite measure. The art of arranging words in that measure, so that the lines may flow smoothly, that the accents may fall correctly, that the rhymes may strike the ear strongly, and that there may be a pause at the end of every distich, is an art as mechanical as that of mending a kettle or shoeing a horse, and may be learned by any human being who has sense enough to learn any- thing. But, like other mechanical arts, it was gradu- ally improved by means of many experiments and many failures. It was reserved for Pope to discover the trick, to make himself complete master of it, and to teach it to everybody else. From the time when his 14 MACAULAY'S Pastorals appeared, heroic versification became matter of rule and compass ; and, before long, all artists were on a level. Hundreds of dunces who never blundered on one happy thought or expression were able to write reams of couplets which, as far as euphony was con- cerned, could not be distinguished from those of Pope' himself, and which very clever writers of the reign of Charles the Second, Rochester, for example, or Marvel, or Oldham, would have contemplated with admiring despair. Ben Jonson was a great man, Hoole a very small man. But Hoole, coming after Pope, had learned how to manufacture deca syllable verses, and poured them forth by thousands and tens of thousands, all as well turned, as smooth, and as like each other as the blocks which have passed through Mr. Brunei's mill in the dockyard at Portsmouth. Ben's heroic couplets re- semble blocks rudely hewn out by an unpractised hand, with a blunt hatchet. Take as a specimen his trans- lation of a celebrated passage in the iEneid : " This child our parent earth, stirr'd up with spite Of all the gods, brought forth, and, as some write, She was last sister of that giant race That sought to scale Jove's court, right swift of pace, And swifter far of wing, a monster vast And dreadful. Look, how many plumes are placed On her huge corpse, so many waking eyes Stick underneath, and, which may stranger rise In the report, as many tongues she wears." Compare with these jagged, misshapen distichs the neat fabric which Hoole's machine produces in unlim- ited abundance. We take the first lines' on which we open in his version of Tasso. They are neither better nor worse than the rest : ADDISON. 15 " O thou, whoe'er thou art, whose steps arc led, By choice or fate, these lonely shores to tread, No greater wonders east or west can boast Than yon small island on the pleasing coast. If e'er thy sight would blissful scenes explore, The current pass, and seek the further shore." Ever since the time of Pope there has been a glut of lines of this sort; and we are now as little disposed to admire a man for being able to write them as for being able to write his name. But in the days of William the Third such versification was rare; and a rhymer who had any skill in it passed for a great poet, just as in the dark ages a person who could write his name passed for a great clerk. Accordingly Duke, Stepney, Granville, Walsh, and others whose only title to fame was that they said in tolerable metre what might have been as well said in prose, or what was not worth saying at all, were honored with marks of dis- tinction which ought to be reserved for genius. With these Addison must have ranked, if he had not earned true and lasting glory by performances which very little resembled his juvenile poems. Dryden was now busied with Virgil, and obtained from Addison a critical preface to the Georgics. In return for this service, and for other services of the same kind, the veteran poet, in the postscript to the translation of the iEneid, complimented his young friend with great liberality, and indeed with more lib- erality than sincerity. He affected to be afraid that his own performance would not sustain a comparison with the version of the fourth Georgic, by " the most ingenious Mr. Addison of Oxford." " After his bees," added Dryden, " my latter swarm is scarcely worth the hiving." 16 MACAULAY'S The time had now arrived when it was necessary for Addison to choose a calling. Everything seemed to point his course toward the clerical profession. His habits were regular, his opinions orthodox. His col- lege had large ecclesiastical preferment in its gift, and boasts that it has given at least one bishop to almost every see in England. Dr, Lancelot Addison held an honorable place in the Church, and had set his heart on seeing his son a clergyman, It is clear, from some expressions in the young man's rhymes, that his inten- tion was to take orders. But Charles Montague inter- fered. Montague had first brought himself into no- tice by verses, well timed and not contemptibly written, but never, we think, rising above mediocrity. Fortu- nately for himself and for his country, he early quitted poetry, in which he could never have attained a rank as high as that of Dorset or Eochester, and turned his mind to official and parliamentary business. It is written that the ingenious person who undertook to in- struct Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, in the art of fly- ing, ascended an eminence, waved his wings, sprang into the air, and instantly dropped into the lake. But it is added that the wings, which were unable to sup- port him through the sky, bore him up effectually as soon as he was in the water. This is no bad type of the fate of Charles Montague, and of men like him. When he attempted to soar into the regions of poetical invention, he altogether failed; but as soon as he had descended from that ethereal elevation into a lower and grosser element, his talents instantly raised him above the mass. He became a distinguished financier, de- bater, courtier, and party leader. He still retained his fondness for the pursuits of his early days; but he ADDISON. 17 showed that fondness not by wearying the public with his own feeble performances, but by discovering and encouraging literary excellence in others. A crowd of wits and poets, who could easily have vanquished him as a competitor, revered him as a judge and a patron. In his plans for the encouragement of learning, he was cordially supported by the ablest and most virtuous of his colleagues, the Lord Chancellor Somers. Though both these great statesmen had a sincere love of letters, it was not solely from a love of letters that they were desirous to enlist youths of high intellectual qualifica- tions in the public service. The Eevolution had altered the whole system of government. Before that event, the press had been controlled by censors, and the Parlia- ment had sat only two months in eight years. Now the press was free, and had begun to exercise unprecedent- ed influence on the public mind. Parliament met an- nually, and sat long. The chief power in the state had passed to the House of Commons. At such a con- juncture, it was natural that literary and oratorical talents should rise in value. There was danger that a government which neglected such talents might be sub- verted by them. It was, therefore, a profound and en- lightened policy which led Montague and Somers to attach such talents to the Whig party, by the strongest ties both of interest and of gratitude. It is remarkable that in a neighboring country we have recently seen similar effects follow from similar causes. The Eevolution of July, 1830, established representative government in France. The men of letters instantly rose to the highest importance in the state. At the present moment most of the persons whom we see at the head both of the administration 4 18 MACAULAY'S and of the opposition have been professors, historians, journalists, poets. The influence of the literary class in England, during the generation which followed the Eevolution, was great, but by no means so great as it has lately been in France; for, in England, the aris- tocracy of intellect had to contend with a powerful and deeply rooted aristocracy of a very different kind. France had no Somersets and Shrewsburys to keep down her Addisons and Priors. It was in the year 1699, when Addison had just completed his twenty-seventh year, that the course of his life was finally determined. Both the great chiefs of the ministry were kindly disposed towards him. In political opinions he already was what he continued to be through life, a firm, though a moderate, Whig. He had addressed the most polished and vigorous of his early English lines to Somers, and had dedicated to Montague a Latin poem, truly Virgilian, both in style and rhythm, on the Peace of Ryswick. The wish of the young poet's great friends was, it should seem, to employ him in the service of the crown abroad. But an intimate knowledge of the French language was a qualification indispensable to a diplomatist; and this qualification Addison had not acquired. It was, there- fore, thought desirable that he should pass some time on the Continent in preparing himself for official em- ployment. His own means were not such as would en- able him to travel, but a pension of three hundred pounds a year was procured for him by the interest of the lord chancellor. It seems to have been apprehend- ed that some difficulty might be started by the rulers of Magdalene College. But the Chancellor of the Ex- chequer wrote in the strongest terms to Hough. The ADDISON. 19 state — such was the purport of Montague's letter — could not, at that time, spare to the Church such a man as Addison. Too many high civil posts were already occupied by adventurers, who, destitute of every liberal art and sentiment, at once pillaged and disgraced the country which they pretended to serve. It had become necessary to recruit for the public serv- ice from a very different class, from that class of which Addison was the representative. The close of the minister's letter was remarkable. " I am called," he said, " an enemy of the Church. But I will never do it any other injury than keeping Mr. Addison out of it." This interference was successful ; and, in the sum- mer of 1699, Addison, made a rich man by his pension, and still retaining his fellowship, quitted his beloved Oxford, and set out on his travels. He crossed from Dover to Calais, proceeded to Paris, and was received there with great kindness and politeness by a kinsman of his friend Montague, Charles, Earl of Manchester, who had just been appointed ambassador to the court of France. The countess, a Whig and a toast, was probably as gracious as her lord ; for Addison long re- tained an agreeable recollection of the impression which she at this time made on him, and, in some lively lines written on the glasses of the Kit Cat Club, 16 de- scribed the envy which her cheeks, glowing with the genuine bloom of England, had excited among the painted beauties of Versailles. Lewis the Fourteenth was at this time expiating the vices of his youth by a devotion which had no root in reason, and bore no fruit of charity. The servile literature of France had changed its character to suit 20 MACAULAY'S the changed character of the prince. No book ap- peared that had not an air of sanctity. Kacine, who was just dead, had passed the close of his life in writ- ing sacred dramas; and Dacier was seeking for the Athanasian mysteries in Plato. Addison described this state of things in a short but lively and graceful letter to Montague. Another letter, written about the same time to the lord chancellor, conveyed the strong- est assurances of gratitude and attachment. " The only return I can make to your lordship," said Addison, "will be to apply myself entirely to my business." With this view he quitted Paris and repaired to Blois, a place where it was supposed that the French lan- guage was spoken in its highest purity, and where not a single Englishman could be found. Here he passed some months pleasantly and profitably. Of his way of life at Blois, one of his associates, an abbe named Philippeaux, gave an account to Joseph Spence. If this account is to be trusted, Addison studied much, mused much, talked little, had fits of absence, and either had no love-affairs, or was too discreet to confide them to the abbe. A man who, even when surrounded by fellow-countrymen and fellow-students, had always been remarkably shy and silent, was not likely to be lo- quacious in a foreign tongue, and among foreign com- panions. But it is clear from Addison's letters, some of which were long after published in the Guardian, that, while he appeared to be absorbed in his own medi- tations, he was really observing French society with that keen and sly yet not ill-natured side glance which was peculiarly his own. From Blois he returned to Paris ; and, having now mastered the French language, found great pleasure in ADDISON. 21 the society of French philosophers and poets. He gave an account, in a letter to Bishop Hough, of two highly interesting conversations, one with Malbranche, the other with Boileau. Malbranche expressed great par- tiality for the English, and extolled the genius of New- ton, but shook his head when Hobbes was mentioned, and was indeed so unjust as to call the author of the Leviathan a poor silly creature. Addison's modesty restrained him from fully relating, in his letter, the circumstances of his introduction to Boileau. Boileau, having survived the friends and rivals of his youth, old, deaf, and melancholy, lived in retirement, seldom went either to court or to the Academy, 17 and was al- most inaccessible to strangers. Of the English and of English literature he knew nothing. He had hardly heard the name of Dryden. Some of our countrymen, in the warmth of their patriotism, have asserted that this ignorance must have been affected. We own that we see no ground for such a supposition. English lit- erature was to the French of the age of Lewis the Four- teenth what German literature was to our own grand- fathers. Very few, we suspect, of the accomplished men who, sixty or seventy years ago, used to dine in Leicester Square with Sir Joshua, or at Streatham with Mrs. Thrale, had the slightest notion that Wie- land was one of the first wits and poets, and Lessing, beyond all dispute, the first critic in Europe. Boileau knew just as little about the Paradise Lost, and about Absalom and Ahitophel; but he had read Addison's Latin poems, and admired them greatly. They had given him, he said, quite a new notion of the state of learning and taste among the English. Johnson will have it that these praises were insincere. " Nothing/' 22 MACAULAY'S says he, " is better known of Boileau than that he had an injudicious and peevish contempt of modern Latin ; and therefore his profession of regard was probably the effect of his civility rather than approbation." Now, nothing is better known of Boileau than that he was singularly sparing of compliments. We do not remember that either friendship or fear ever induced him to bestow praise on any composition which he did not approve. On literary questions, his caustic, dis- dainful, and self-confident spirit rebelled against that authority to which everything else in France bowed down. He had the spirit to tell Lewis the Fourteenth, firmly and even rudely, that his majesty knew nothing about poetry, and admired verses which were detest- able. What was there in Addison's position that could induce the satirist, whose stern and fastidious temper had been the dread of two generations, to turn syco- phant for the first and last time? Nor was Boileau's contempt of modern Latin either injudicious or pee- vish. He thought, indeed, that no poem of the first or- der would ever be written in a dead language. And did he think amiss? Has not the experience of centuries confirmed his opinion ? Boileau also thought it prob- able that, in the best modern Latin, a writer of the Au- gustan Age would have detected ludicrous improprie- ties. And who can think otherwise? What modern scholar can honestly declare that he sees the smallest impurity in the style of Livy? Yet is it not certain that, in the style of Livy, Pollio, whose taste had been formed on the banks of the Tiber, detected the inele- gant idiom of the Po? Has any modern scholar un- derstood Latin better than Frederic the Great under- stood French? Yet is it not notorious that Frederic ADDISON. 23 the Great, after reading, speaking, writing French, and nothing but French, during more than half a century, after unlearning his mother-tongue in order to learn French, after living familiarly during many years with French associates, could not, to the last, compose in French, without imminent risk of committing some mistake which would have moved a smile in the liter- ary circles of Paris ? Do we believe that Erasmus and Fracastorius wrote Latin as well as Dr. Robertson and Sir Walter Scott wrote English? And are there not in the Dissertation on India, the last of Dr. Robertson's works, in Waverley, in Marmion, Scotticisms at which a London apprentice would laugh? But does it fol- low, because we think thus, that we can find nothing to admire in the noble alcaics of Gray, or in the play- ful elegiacs of Vincent Bourne? Surely not. Nor was Boileau so ignorant or tasteless as to be incapable of appreciating good modern Latin. In the very let- ter to which Johnson alludes, Boileau says, " Ne croyez pas pourtant que je veuille par la blamer les vers Latins que vous m'avez envoyes d'un de vos illustres acade- miciens. Je les ai trouves fort beaux, et dignes de Vida et de Sannazar, mais non pas d'Horace et de Vir- gile." 18 Several poems, in modern Latin, have been praised by Boileau quite as liberally as it was his habit to praise anything. He says, for example, of the Pere Fraguier's epigrams, that Catullus seems to have come to life again. But the best proof that Boileau did not feel the undiscerning contempt for modern Latin verses which has been imputed to him is, that he wrote and published Latin verses in several metres. Indeed, it happens, curiously enough, that the most severe cen- sure ever pronounced by him on modern Latin is con- %± MACAULAY'S veyed in Latin hexameters. We allude to the frag- ment which begins — " Quid numeris iterum me balbutire Latinis, Longe Alpes citra natum de patre Sicambro, Musa, jubes?" 19 1 For these reasons we feel assured that the praise which Boileau bestowed on the Machine Gesticulantes and the Gerano-Pygmaeomachia 20 was sincere. He cer- tainly opened himself to Addison with a freedom which was a sure indication of esteem. Literature was the chief subject of conversation. The old man talked on his favorite theme much and well — indeed, as his young hearer thought, incomparably well. Boileau had undoubtedly some of the qualities of a great critic. He wanted imagination; but he had strong sense. His literary code was formed on narrow principles; but in applying it, he showed great judgment and pene- tration. In mere style, abstracted from the ideas of which style is the garb, his taste was excellent. He was well acquainted with the great Greek writers; and, though unable fully to appreciate their creative genius, admired the majestic simplicity of their man- ner, and had learned from them to despise bombast and tinsel. It is easy, we think, to discover, in the Spectator and the Guardian, traces of the influence, in part salutary and in part pernicious, which the mind of Boileau had on the mind of Addison. While Addison was at Paris, an event took place which made that capital a disagreeable residence for an Englishman and a Whig. Charles, second of the name, King of Spain, died ; and bequeathed his domin- ions to Philip, Duke of Anjou, a younger son of the Dauphin. The King of France, in direct violation of ADDISON. 95 his engagements both with Great Britain and with the States General, accepted the bequest on behalf of his grandson. The house of Bourbon was at the summit of human grandeur. England had been outwitted, and found herself in a situation at once degrading and perilous. The people of France, not presaging the calamities by which they were destined to expiate the perfidy of their sovereign, went mad with pride and delight. Every man looked as if a great estate had just been left him. " The French conversation," said Addison, "begins to grow insupportable; that which was before the vainest nation in the world is now worse than ever." Sick of the arrogant exultation of the Parisians, and probably foreseeing that the peace be- tween France and England could not be of long dura- tion, he set off for Italy. In December, 1700, he embarked at Marseilles. As he glided along the Ligurian coast, he was delighted by the sight of myrtles and olive trees, which retained their verdure under the winter solstice. Soon, how- ever, he encountered one of the black storms of the Mediterranean. The captain of the ship gave up all for lost, and confessed himself to a Capuchin who hap- pened to be on board. The English heretic, in the mean time, fortified himself against the terrors of death with devotions of a very different kind. How strong an impression this perilous voyage made on him appears from the ode, " How are thy servants blest, Lord ! " which was long after published in the Spec- tator. After some days of discomfort and danger, Ad- dison was glad to land at Savona, and to make his way, over mountains where no road had yet been hewn out by art, to the city of Genoa. 2G MACAULAY'S At Genoa, still ruled by her own Doge, and by the nobles whose names were inscribed on her Book of Gold, Addison made a short stay. He admired the narrow streets overhung by long lines of towering pal- aces, the walls rich with frescoes, the gorgeous temple of the Annunciation, and the tapestries whereon were recorded the long glories of the house of Doria. Thence he hastened to Milan, where he contemplated the Gothic magnificence of the cathedral with more wonder than pleasure. He passed Lake Benacus while a gale was blowing, and saw the waves raging as they raged when Virgil looked upon them. At Venice, then the gayest spot in Europe, the traveller spent the Car- nival, the gayest season of the year, in the midst of masques, dances, and serenades. Here he was at once diverted and provoked by the absurd dramatic pieces which then disgraced the Italian stage. To one of those pieces, however, he was indebted for a valuable hint. He was present when a ridiculous play on the death of Cato was performed. Cato, it seems, was in love with a daughter of Scipio. The lady had given her heart to Caesar. The rejected lover deter- mined to destroy himself. He appeared seated in his library, a dagger in his hand, a Plutarch and a Tasso before him ; and, in this position, he pronounced a so- liloquy before he struck the blow. We are surprised that so remarkable a circumstance as this should have escaped the notice of all Addison's biographers. There cannot, we conceive, be the smallest doubt that this scene, in spite of its absurdities and anachronisms, struck the traveller's imagination, and suggested to him the thought of bringing Cato on the English stage. It is well known that about this time he be°:an his ADDISON. 27 tragedy, and that he finished the first four acts before he returned to England. On his way from Venice to Rome, he was drawn some miles out of a beaten road, by a wish to see the smallest independent state in Europe. On a rock where the snow still lay, though the Italian spring was now far advanced, was perched the little fortress of San Marino. 21 The roads which led to the secluded town were so bad that few travellers had ever visited it, and none had ever published an account of it. Ad- dison could not suppress a good-natured smile at the simple manners and institutions of this singular com- munity. But he observed, with the exultation of a Whig, that the rude mountain tract which formed the territory of the republic swarmed with an honest, healthy, and contented peasantry, while the rich plain which surrounded the metropolis of civil and spiritual tyranny was scarcely less desolate than the uncleared wilds of America. At Rome Addison remained on his first visit only long enough to catch a glimpse of St. Peter's and of the Pantheon. His haste is the more extraordinary be- cause the Holy Week was close at hand. He has given no hint which can enable us to pronounce why he chose to fly from a spectacle which every year allures from distant regions persons of far less taste and sensibility than his. Possibly, travelling, as he did, at the charge of a government distinguished by its enmity to the Church of Rome, he may have thought that it would be imprudent in him to assist at the most magnificent rite of that Church. Many eyes would be upon him ; and he might find it difficult to behave in such a manner as to give offence neither to his patrons in England, nor 28 MACAULAY'S to those among whom he resided. Whatever his mo- tives may have been, he turned his back on the most august and affecting ceremony which is known among men, and posted along the Appian Way to Naples. Naples was then destitute of what are now, per- haps, its chief attractions. The lovely bay and the awful mountain were indeed there. But a farm- house stood on the theatre of Herculaneum, 22 and rows of vines grew over the streets of Pompeii. The tem- ples of Pselstum had not, indeed, been hidden from the eye of man by any great convulsion of nature; but, strange to say, their existence was a secret even to art- ists and antiquaries. Though situated within a few hours' journey of a great capital, where Salvator had not long before painted, and where Vico was then lec- turing, those noble remains were as little known to Europe as the ruined cities overgrown by the forests of Yucatan. What was to be seen at Naples, Addison saw. He climbed Vesuvius, explored the tunnel of Po- silipo, and wandered among the vines and almond trees of Capreae. But neither the wonders of nature nor those of art could so occupy his attention as to prevent him from noticing, though cursorily, the abuses of the Government and the misery of the people. The great kingdom which had just descended to Philip the Fifth was in a state of paralytic dotage. Even Castile and Aragon were sunk in wretchedness. Yet, com- pared with the Italian dependencies of the Spanish crown, Castile and Aragon might be called prosper- ous. It is clear that all the observations which Ad- dison made in Italy tended to confirm him in the po- litical opinions which he had adopted at home. To the last, he always spoke of foreign travel as the best ADDISON. 29 cure for Jacobitism. In his Freeholder, the Tory fox- hunter asks what travelling is good for, except to teach a man to jabber French, and to talk against passive obedience. From Naples Addison returned to Kome by sea along the coast which his favorite Virgil had cele- brated. The felucca passed the headland where the oar and trumpet were placed by the Trojan adventur- ers on the tomb of Misenus, and anchored at night under the shelter of the fabled promontory of Circe. The voyage ended in the Tiber, still overhung with dark verdure, and still turbid with yellow sand, as when it met the eyes of iEneas. From the ruined port of Ostia the stranger hurried to Eome; and at Eome he remained during those hot and sickly months when, even in the Augustan Age, all who could make their escape fled from mad dogs and from streets black with funerals, to gather the first figs of the season in the country. It is probable that, when he, long after, poured forth in verse his gratitude to the Providence which had enabled him to breathe unhurt in tainted air, he was thinking of the August and September which he passed at Rome. It was not till the latter end of October that he tore himself away from the masterpieces of ancient and modern art which are collected in the city so long the mistress of the world. He then journeyed north- ward, passed through Siena, and for a moment forgot his prejudices in favor of classic architecture as he looked on the magnificent cathedral. At Florence he spent some days with the Duke of Shrewsbury, who, cloyed with the pleasures of ambition, and impatient of its pains, fearing both parties, and loving neither, 30 MACAULAY'S had determined to hide in an Italian retreat talents and accomplishments which, if they had been united with fixed principles and civil courage, might have made him the foremost man of his age. These days, we are told, passed pleasantly; arid we can easily be- lieve it. For Addison was a delightful companion when he was at his ease; and the Duke, though he seldom forgot that he was a Talbot, had the invaluable art of putting at ease all who came near him. Addison gave some time to Florence, and especially to the sculptures in the Museum, which he preferred even to those of the Vatican. He then pursued his journey through a country in which the ravages of the last war were still discernible, and in which all men were looking forward with dread to a still fiercer conflict. Eugene had already descended from the Ehaetian Alps to dispute with Catinat the rich plain of Lombardy. The faithless ruler of Savoy was still reckoned among the allies of Lewis. England had not yet actually declared war against France; but Man- chester had left Paris ; and the negotiations which pro- duced the Grand Alliance against the house of Bour- bon were in progress. Under such circumstances, it was desirable for an English traveller to reach neutral ground without delay. Addison resolved to cross Mont Cenis. It was December ; and the road was very different from that which now reminds the stranger of the power and genius of Napoleon. The winter, how- ever, was mild; and the passage was, for those times, easy. To this journey Addison alluded when, in the ode which we have already quoted, he said that for him the Divine goodness had warmed the hoary Alpine hills. ADDISON. 31 It was in the midst of the eternal snow that he composed his Epistle to his friend Montague, now Lord Halifax. That Epistle, once widely renowned, is now known only to curious readers, and will hardly be considered by those to whom it is known as in any per- ceptible degree heightening Addison's fame. It is, however, decidedly superior to any English composi- tion which he had previously published. Nay, we think it quite as good as any poem in heroic metre which appeared during the interval between the death of Dryden and the publication of the Essay on Criti- cism. It contains passages as good as the second-rate passages of Pope, and would have added to the reputa- tion of Parnell or Prior. But, whatever be the literary merits or defects of the Epistle, it undoubtedly does honor to the principles and spirit of the author. Halifax had now nothing to give. He had fallen from power, had been held up to obloquy, had been impeached by the House of Com- mons, and, though his peers had dismissed the impeach- ment, had, as it seemed, little chance of ever again fill- ing high office. The Epistle, written at such a time, is one among many proofs that there was no mixture of cowardice or meanness in the suavity and moderation which distinguished Addison from all the other public men of those stormy times. At Geneva the traveller learned that a partial change of ministry had taken place in England, and that the Earl of Manchester had become Secretary of State. Manchester exerted himself to serve his young friend. It was thought advisable that an English agent should be near the person of Eugene in Italy; and Addison, whose diplomatic education was now 32 MACAULAY'S I finished, was the man selected. He was preparing to enter on his honorable functions, when all his prospects were for a time darkened by the death of William the Third. Anne had long felt a strong aversion, personal, po- litical, and religious, to the Whig party. That aver- sion appeared in the first measures of her reign. Man- chester was deprived of the seals, after he had held them only a few weeks. Neither Somers nor Halifax was sworn of the Privy Council. Addison shared the fate of his three patrons. His hopes of employment in the public service were at an end; his pension was stopped ; and it was necessary for him to support him- self by his own exertions. He became tutor to a young English traveller, and appears to have rambled with his pupil over great part of Switzerland and Germany. At this time he wrote his pleasing treatise on Medals. It was not published till after his death; but several distinguished scholars saw the manuscript, and gave just praise to the grace of the style, and to the learning and ingenuity evinced by the quotations. From Germany Addison repaired to Holland, where he learned the melancholy news of his father's death. After passing some months in the United Provinces, he returned about the close of the year 1703 to England. He was there cordially received by his friends, and introduced by them into the Kit Cat Club, a society in which were collected all the various talents and accomplishments which then gave lustre to the Whig party. Addison was, during some months after his return from the Continent, hard pressed by pecuniary diffi- culties. But it was soon in the power of his noble ADDISON. 33 patrons to serve him effectually. A political change, silent and gradual, but of the highest importance, was in daily progress. The accession of Anne had been hailed by the Tories with transports of joy and hope; and for a time it seemed that the Whigs had fallen never to rise again. The throne was surrounded by men supposed to be attached to the prerogative and to the Church; and among these none stood so high in the favor of the sovereign as the Lord-treasurer Godol- phin and the Captain-general Marlborough. The country gentlemen and country clergymen had fully expected that the policy of these ministers would be directly opposed to that which had been almost con- stantly followed by William; that the landed interest would be favored at the expense of trade; that no ad- dition would be made to the funded debt; that the privileges conceded to Dissenters by the late king would be curtailed, if not withdrawn; that the war with France, if there must be such a war, would, on our part, be almost entirely naval ; and that the Gov- ernment would avoid close connections with foreign powers, and, above all, with Holland. But the country gentlemen and country clergymen were fated to be deceived, not for the last time. The prejudices and passions which raged without control in vicarages, in cathedral closes, and in the manor- houses of fox-hunting squires, were not shared by the chiefs of the ministry. Those statesmen saw that it was both for the public interest and for their own in- terest to adopt a Whig policy, at least as respected the alliances of the country and the conduct of the war. But if the foreign policy of the Whigs were adopted, it was impossible to abstain from adopting also their 34 MACAULAY'S financial policy. The natural consequences followed. The rigid Tories were alienated from the Government. The votes of the Whigs became necessary to it. The votes of the Whigs could be secured only by further concessions, and further concessions the queen was in- duced to make. At the beginning of the year 1704, the state of parties bore a close analogy to the state of parties in 1826. In 1826, as in 1704, there was a Tory ministry divided into two hostile sections. The position of Mr. Canning and his friends in 1826 corresponded to that which Marlborough and Godolphin occupied in 1704. Nottingham and Jersey were, in 1704, what Lord Eldon and Lord Westmoreland were in 1826. The Whigs of 1704 were in a situation resembling that in which the Whigs of 1826 stood. In 1704, Somers, Halifax, Sunderland, Cowper, were not in of- fice. There was no avowed coalition between them and the moderate Tories. It is probable that no direct communication tending to such a coalition had yet taken place ; yet all men saw that such a coalition was inevitable, nay, that it was already half formed. Such, or nearly such, was the state of things when tidings ar- rived of the great battle fought at Blenheim on the 13th August, 1704. By the Whigs the news was hailed with transports of joy and pride. No fault, no cause of quarrel, could be remembered by them against the commander whose genius had, in one day, changed the face of Europe, saved the imperial throne, humbled the house of Bourbon, and secured the Act of Settlement against foreign hostility. The feeling of the Tories was very different. They could not indeed, without imprudence, openly express regret at an event so glori- IS ADDISON. 35 ous to their country; but their congratulations were so cold and sullen as to give deep disgust to the victori- ous general and his friends. Godolphin was not a reading man. Whatever time he could spare from business he was in the habit of spending at Newmarket 23 or at the card-table. But he was not absolutely indifferent to poetry; and he was too intelligent an observer not to perceive that litera- ture was a formidable engine of political warfare, and that the great Whig leaders had strengthened their party, and raised their character, by extending a lib- eral and judicious patronage to good writers. He was mortified, and not without reason, by the exceeding badness of the poems which appeared in honor of the battle of Blenheim. One of these poems has been res- cued from oblivion by the exquisite absurdity of three lines. " Think of two thousand gentlemen at least, And each man mounted on his capering beast; Into the Danube they were pushed by shoals." Where to procure better verses the treasurer did not know. He understood how to negotiate a loan, or re- mit a subsidy : he was also well versed in the history of running horses and fighting cocks; but his acquaint- ance among the poets was very small. He consulted Halifax; but Halifax affected to decline the office of adviser. He had, he said, done his best, when he had power, to encourage men whose abilities and acquire- ments might do honor to their country. Those times were over. Other maxims had prevailed. Merit was suffered to pine in obscurity, and the public money was squandered on the undeserving. " I do know/' he added, " a gentleman who would celebrate the battle in 36 MACAULAY'S a manner worthy of the subject; but I will not name him." Godolphin, who was expert at the soft answer which turneth away wrath, and who was under the necessity of paying court to the Whigs, gently replied that there was too much ground for Halifax's com- plaints, but that what was amiss should in time be rec- tified, and that in the mean time the services of a man such as Halifax had described should be liberally re- warded. Halifax then mentioned Addison, but, mind- ful of the dignity as well as of the pecuniary interest of his friend, insisted that the minister should apply in the most courteous manner to Addison himself; and this Godolphin promised to do. Addison then occupied a garret up three pair of stairs, over a small shop in the Haymarket. In this humble lodging he was surprised, on the morning which followed the conversation between Godolphin and Halifax, by a visit from no less a person than the Right Honorable Henry Boyle, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, and afterward Lord Carleton. This high- born minister had been sent by the Lord Treasurer as ambassador to the needy poet. Addison readily un- dertook the proposed task, a task which, to so good a Whig, was probably a pleasure. When the poem was little more than half finished, he showed it to Godol- phin, who was delighted with it, and particularly with the famous similitude of the Angel. Addison was in- stantly appointed to a commissionership worth about two hundred pounds a year, and was assured that this appointment was only an earnest of greater favors. The Campaign came forth, and was as much ad- mired by the public as by the minister. It pleases us less, on the whole, than the Epistle to Halifax. Yet ADDISON. 37 it undoubtedly ranks high among the poems which ap- peared during the interval between the death of Dry- den and the dawn of Pope's genius. The chief merit of the Campaign, we think, is that which was noticed by Johnson, the manly and rational rejection of fiction. The first great poet whose works have come down to us sang of war long before war became a science or a trade. If, in his time, there was enmity between two little Greek towns, each poured forth its crowd of citi- zens, ignorant of discipline, and armed with imple- ments of labor rudely turned into weapons. On each side appeared conspicuous a few chiefs whose wealth had enabled them to procure good armor, horses, and chariots, and whose leisure had enabled them to prac- tise military exercises. One such chief, if he were a man of great strength, agility, and courage, would probably be more formidable than twenty common men; and the force and dexterity with which he flung his spear might have no inconsiderable share in deciding the event of the day. Such were probably the battles with which Homer was familiar. But Homer related the actions of men of a former genera- tion, of men who sprang from the gods, and communed with the gods face to face, of men one of whom could with ease hurl rocks which two sturdy hinds of a later period would be unable even to lift. He therefore naturally represented their martial exploits as resem- bling in kind, but far surpassing in magnitude, those of the stoutest and most expert combatants of his own age. Achilles, clad in celestial armor, drawn by celestial coursers, grasping the spear which none but himself could raise, driving all Troy and Lycia before him, and choking Scamander with dead, was only a magnifi- 38 MACAULAY'S cent exaggeration of the real hero, who, strong, fear- less, accustomed to the use of weapons, guarded by a shield and helmet of the best Sidonian fabric, and whirled along by horses of Thessalian breed, struck down with his own right arm foe after foe. In all rude societies similar notions are found. There are at this day countries where the Lifeguardsman Shaw 2 * would be considered as a much greater warrior than the Duke of Wellington. Bonaparte loved to describe the astonishment with which the Mamelukes looked at his diminutive figure. Mourad Bey, distinguished above all his fellows by his bodi]y strength, and by the skill with which he managed his horse and his sabre, could not believe that a man who was scarcely five feet high, and rode like a butcher, could be the greatest sol- dier in Europe. Homer's descriptions of war had therefore as much truth as poetrfy requires. But truth was altogether wanting to the performances of those who, writing about battles which had scarcely anything in common with the battles of his times, servilely imitated his manner. The folly of Silius Italicus, in particular, is positively nauseous. He undertook to record in verse the vicissitudes of a great struggle between generals of the first order; and his narrative is made up of the hideous wounds which these generals inflicted with their own hands. Asdrubal flings a spear which grazes the shoulder of the consul Nero; but Nero sends his spear into Asdrubal's side. Fabius slays Thuris and Butes and Maris and Arses, and the long-haired Ad- herbes, and the gigantic Thylis, and Sapharus and Monaesus, and the trumpeter Morinus. Hannibal runs Perusinus through the groin with a stake, and breaks ADDISON. 39 the backbone of Telesinus with a huge stone. This detestable fashion was copied in modern times, and continued to prevail down to the age of Addison. Several versifiers had described William turning thou- sands to flight by his single prowess, and dyeing the Boyne with Irish blood. Nay, so estimable a writer as John Philips, the author of the Splendid Shilling, represented Marlborough as having won the battle of Blenheim merely by strength of muscle and skill in fence. The following lines may serve as an ex- ample : " Churchill, viewing where The violence of Tallard most prevail'd, Came to oppose his slaughtering arm. With speed Precipitate he rode, urging his way O'er hills of gasping heroes, and fallen steeds Rolling in death. Destruction, grim with blood, Attends his furious course. Around his head The glowing balls play innocent, while he With dire impetuous sway deals fatal blows Among the flying Gauls. In Gallic blood He dyes his reeking sword, and strews the ground With headless ranks. What can they do? Or how Withstand his wide-destroying sword ? " Addison, with excellent sense and taste, departed from this ridiculous fashion. He reserved his praise for the qualities which made Marlborough truly great, energy, sagacity, military science. But, above all, the poet extolled the firmness of that mind which, in the midst of confusion, uproar, and slaughter, examined and disposed everything with the serene wisdom of a higher intelligence. Here it was that he introduced the famous com- parison of Marlborough to an angel guiding the whirl- wind. 25 We will not dispute the general justice of 40 MACAULAY'S Johnson's remarks 26 on this passage. But we must point out one circumstance which appears to have es- caped all the critics. The extraordinary effect which this simile produced when it first appeared, and which to the following generation seemed inexplicable, is doubtless to be chiefly attributed to a line which most readers now regard as a feeble parenthesis, " Such as, of late, o'er pale Britannia pass'd." Addison spoke, not of a storm, but of the storm. The great tempest of November, 1703, the only tempest which in our latitude has equalled the rage of a tropical hurricane, had left a dreadful recollection in the minds of all men. No other tempest was ever in this coun- try the occasion of a parliamentary address or of a public fast. Whole fleets had been cast away. Large mansions had been blown down. One prelate had been buried beneath the ruins of his palace. London and Bristol had presented the appearance of cities just sacked. Hundreds of families were still in mourning. The prostrate trunks of large trees, and the ruins of houses, still attested, in all the Southern counties, the fury of the blast. The popularity which the simile of the angel enjoyed among Addison's contemporaries has always seemed to us to be a remarkable instance of the advantage which, in rhetoric and poetry, the particular has over the general. 27 Soon after the Campaign, was published Addison's Narrative of his Travels in Italy. The first effect pro- duced by this Narrative was disappointment. The crowd of readers who expected politics and scandal, speculations on the projects of Victor Amadeus, and anecdotes about the jollities of convents and the amours of cardinals and nuns, were confounded by find- ADDISON. 41 ing that the writer's mind was much more occupied by the war between the Trojans and Kutulians than by the war between France and Austria; and that he seemed to have heard no scandal of later date than the gal- lantries of the Empress Faustina. In time, however, the judgment of the many was overruled by that of the few; and, before the book was reprinted, it was so eagerly sought that it sold for five times the original price. It is still read with pleasure: the style is pure and flowing; the classical quotations and allusions are numerous and happy; and we are now and then charmed by that singularly humane and delicate hu- mor in which Addison excelled all men. Yet this agreeable work, even when considered merely as the history of a literary tour, may justly be censured on account of its faults of omission. We have already said that, though rich in extracts from the Latin poets, it contains scarcely any references to the Latin orators and historians. We must add that it contains little or rather no information respecting the history and literature of modern Italy. To the best of our re- membrance, Addison does not mention Dante, Pe- trarch, Boccaccio, Boiardo, Berni, Lorenzo de' Medici, or Machiavelli. He coldly tells us that at Ferrara he saw the tomb of Ariosto, and that at Venice he heard the gondoliers sing verses of Tasso. But for Tasso and Ariosto he cared far less than for Valerius Flaccus and Sidonius Apollinaris. The gentle flow of the Ti- cin brings a line of Silius to his mind. The sulphur- ous steam of Albula suggests to him several passages of Martial. But he has not a word to say of the illus- trious dead of Santa Croce ; 28 he crosses the wood of Ravenna without recollecting the Spectre Huntsman, 5 49 MACAULAY'S and wanders up and down Kimini without one thought of Francesca. At Paris he had eagerly sought an intro- duction to Boileau; but he seems not to have been at all aware that at Florence he was in the vicinity of a poet with whom Boileau could not sustain a com- parison, of the greatest lyric poet of modern times, Vincenzio Filicaja. This is the more remarkable, because Filicaja was the favorite poet of the accom- plished Somers, under whose protection Addison trav- elled, and to whom the account of the Travels is dedi- cated. The truth is, that Addison knew little, and cared less, about the literature of modern Italy. His favorite models were Latin. His favorite critics were French. Half the Tuscan poetry that he had read seemed to him monstrous, and the other half tawdry. His Travels were followed by the lively opera of Rosamond. This piece was ill set to music, and there- fore failed on the stage, but it completely succeeded in print, and is indeed excellent in its kind. The smooth- ness with which the verses glide, and the elasticity with which they bound, is, to our ears at least, very pleasing. We are inclined to think that if Addison had left heroic couplets to Pope, and blank verse to Rowe, and had employed himself in writing airy and spirited songs, his reputation as a poet would have stood far higher than it now does. Some years after his death, Rosa- mond was set to new music by Doctor Arne, and was performed with complete success. Several passages long retained their popularity, and were daily sung, during the latter part of George the Second's reign, at all the harpsichords in England. — While Addison thus amused himself, his prospects, and the prospects of his party, were constantly becom- ADDISON. 43 ing brighter and brighter. In the spring of 1705, the ministers were freed from the restraint imposed by a House of Commons in which the Tories of the most perverse class had the ascendancy. The elections were favorable to the Whigs. The coalition which had been tacitly and gradually formed was now openly avowed. The Great Seal was given to Cowper. Somers and Halifax were sworn of the council. Halifax was sent in the following year to carry the decorations of the Order of the Garter to the Electoral Prince of Hano- ver, and was accompanied on this honorable mission by Addison, who had just been made Under-secretary of State. The Secretary of State under whom Addi- son first served was Sir Charles Hedges, a Tory. But Hedges was soon dismissed to make room for the most vehement of Whigs, Charles, Earl of Sunderland. In every department of the State, indeed, the High Churchmen were compelled to give place to their oppo- nents. At the close of 1707, the Tories who still re- mained in office strove to rally, with Harley at their head. But the attempt, though favored by the queen, who had always been a Tory at heart, and who had now quarrelled with the Duchess of Marlborough, was un- successful. The time was not yet. The Captain Gen- eral was at the height of popularity and glory. The Low Church party had a majority in Parliament. The country squires and rectors, though occasionally utter- ing a savage growl, were for the most part in a state of torpor, which lasted till they were roused into activity, and indeed into madness, by the prosecution of Sache- verell. Harley and his adherents were compelled to retire. The victory of the Whigs was complete. At the general election of 1708 their strength in the 44 MACAULAY'S House of Commons became irresistible: and, before the end of that year, Somers was made Lord President of the Council, and Wharton Lord Lieutenant of Ire- land. Addison sat for Malmsbury in the House of Com- mons which was elected in 1708. But the House of Commons was not the field for him. The bashfulness of his nature made his wit and eloquence useless in debate. He once rose, but could not overcome his diffidence, and ever after remained silent. Nobody can think it strange that a great writer should fail as a speaker. But many, probably, will think it strange that Addison's failure as a speaker should have had no unfavorable effect on his success as a politician. In our time, a man of high rank and great fortune might, though speaking very little and very ill, hold a consid- erable post. But it would now be inconceivable that a mere adventurer, a man who, when out of office must live by his pen, should in a few years become succes- sively Under-secretary of State, Chief Secretary for Ireland, and Secretary of State, without some oratori- cal talent. Addison, without 'high birth, and with little property, rose to a post which dukes, the heads of the great houses of Talbot, Russell, and Bentinck have thought it an honor to fill. Without opening his lips in debate, he rose to a post the highest that Chat- ham or Fox ever reached. And this he did before he had been nine years in Parliament. We must look for the explanation of this seeming miracle to the peculiar circumstances in which that generation was placed. During the interval which elapsed between the time when the censorship of the Press ceased, and the time when parliamentary proceedings began to be freely re- ADDISON. 45 ported, literary talents were, to a public man, of much more importance, and oratorical talents of much less importance, than in our time. At present the best way of giving rapid and wide publicity to a fact or an argument is to introduce that fact or argument into a speech made in Parliament. If a political tract were to appear superior to the Conduct of the Allies, or to the best numbers of the Freeholder, the circulation of such a tract would be languid indeed when compared with the circulation of every remarkable word uttered in the deliberations of the legislature. A speech made in the House of Commons at four in the morning is on thirty thousand tables before ten. A speech made on the Monday is read on the Wednesday by multitudes in Antrim and Aberdeenshire. The orator, by the help of the shorthand writer, has to a great extent superseded the pamphleteer. It was not so in the reign of Anne. The best speech could then produce no effect except on those who heard it. It was only by means of the press* that the opinion of the public without doors could be influenced; and the opinion of the public without doors could not but be of the highest importance in a country governed by parliaments, and indeed at that time governed by triennial parliaments. The pen was, therefore, a more formidable political engine than the tongue. Mr. Pitt and Mr. Fox contended only in Par- liament. But Walpole and Pulteney, the Pitt and Fox of an earlier period, had not done half of what was necessary when they sat down amidst the acclamations of the House of Commons. They had still to plead their cause before the country, and this they could do only by means of the press. Their works are now for- gotten. But it is certain that there were in Grub 4G MACAULAY'S Street 29 few more assiduous scribblers of Thoughts, Letters, Answers, Remarks, than these two great chiefs of parties. Pulteney, when leader of the opposition, and possessed of thirty thousand a year, edited The Crafts- man. Walpole, though not a man of literary habits, was the author of at least ten pamphlets, and retouched and corrected many more. These facts sufficiently show of how great importance literary assistance then was to the contending parties. St. John was, certainly in Anne's reign, the best Tory speaker; Cowper was probably the best Whig speaker. But it may well be doubted whether St. John did so much for the Tories as Swift, and whether Cowper did so much for the Whigs as Addison. When these things are duly con- sidered, it will be thought strange that Addison should have climbed higher in the State than any other Eng- lishman has ever, by means merely of literary talents, been able to climb. Swift would, in all probability, have climbed as high, if he had not been encumbered by his cassock and his pudding sleeves. As far as the homage of the great went, Swift had as much of it as if he had been Lord Treasurer. To the influence which Addison derived from his literary talents was added all the influence which arises from character. The world, always ready to think the worst of needy political adventurers, was forced to make one exception. Eestlessness, violence, audacity, laxity of principle, are the vices ordinarily attributed to that class of men. But faction itself could not deny that Addison had, through all changes of fortune, been strictly faithful to his early opinions and to his early friends ; that his integrity was without stain ; that his whole deportment indicated a fine sense of the becom- ADDISON. 47 ing; that, in the utmost heat of controversy, his zeal was tempered by a regard for truth, humanity, and so- cial decorum ; that no outrage could ever provoke him to retaliation unworthy of a Christian and a gentle- man ; and that his only faults were a too sensitive deli- cacy, and a modesty which amounted to bashfulness. He was undoubtedly one of the most popular men of his time; and much of his popularity he owed, we believe, to that very timidity which his friends la- mented. That timidity often prevented him from ex- hibiting his talents to the best advantage. But it pro- pitiated Nemesis. It averted that envy which would otherwise have been excited by fame so splendid, and by so rapid an elevation. No man is so great a favorite with the public as he who is at once an object of ad- miration, of respect, and of pity; and such were the feelings which Addison inspired. Those who enjoyed the privilege of hearing his familiar conversation de- clared with one voice that it was superior even to his writings. The brilliant Mary Montague said that she had known all the wits, and that Addison was the best company in the world. The malignant Pope was forced to own that there was a charm in Addison's talk which could be found nowhere else. Swift, when burning with animosity against the Whigs, could not but confess to Stella that, after all, he had never known any associate so agreeable as Addison. Steele, an ex- cellent judge of lively conversation, said that the con- versation of Addison was at once the most polite and the most mirthful that could be imagined ; that it was Terence and Catullus in one, heightened by an ex- quisite something which was neither Terence nor Ca- tullus, but Addison alone. Young, an excellent judge 48 MACAULAY'S of serious conversation, said that when Addison was at his ease, he went on in a noble strain of thought and language, so as to chain the attention of every hearer. jSTor were Addison's great colloquial powers more ad- mirable than the courtesy and softness of heart which appeared in his conversation. At the same time, it would be too much to say that he was wholly devoid of the malice which is, perhaps, inseparable from a keen sense of the ludicrous. He had one habit which both Swift and Stella applauded, and which we hardly know how to blame. If his first attempts to set a presuming dunce right were ill received, he changed his tone, " as- sented with civil leer," and lured the flattered cox- comb deeper and deeper into absurdity. That such was his practice, we should, we think, have guessed from his works. The Tatler's criticisms on Mr. Soft- ly's sonnet, and The Spectator's dialogue with the poli- tician who is so zealous for the honor of Lady Q — p — t — s, are excellent specimens of this irinocent mischief. Such were Addison's talents for conversation. But his rare gifts were not exhibited to crowds or to stran- gers. As soon as he entered a large company, as soon as he saw an unknown face, his lips were sealed, and his manners became constrained. None who met him only in great assemblies would have been able to believe that he was the same man who had often kept a few friends listening and laughing round a table, from the time when the play ended till the clock of St. Paul's in Covent Garden struck four. Yet, even at such a table, he was not seen to the best advantage. To enjoy his conversation in the highest perfection, it was necessary to be alone with him, and to hear him, in his own phrase, think aloud. " There is no such thing," he ADDISON. 49 used to say, " as real conversation, but between two persons." This timidity, a timidity surely neither ungraceful nor unamiable, led Addison into the two most serious faults which can with justice be imputed to him. He found that wine broke the spell which lay on his fine intellect, and was therefore too easily seduced into con- vivial excess. Such excess was in that age regarded, even by grave men, as the most venial of all peccadil- loes, and was so far from being a mark of ill breeding that it was almost essential to the character of a fine gentleman. But the smallest speck is seen on a white ground; and almost all the biographers of Addison have said something about this failing. Of any other statesman or writer of Queen Anne's reign we should no more think of saying that he sometimes took too much wine than that he wore a long wig and a sword. To the excessive modesty of Addison's nature we must ascribe another fault which generally arises from a very different cause. He became a little too fond of seeing himself surrounded by a small circle of admir- ers, to whom he was as a king, or rather as a god. All these men were far inferior to him in ability, and some of them had very serious faults. Nor did these faults escape his observation; for, if ever there was an eye which saw through and through men, it was the eye of Addison. But, with the keenest observation, and the finest sense of the ridiculous, he had a large char- ity. The feeling with which he looked on most of his humble companions was one of benevolence, slightly tinctured with contempt. He was at perfect ease in their company; he was grateful for their devoted at- tachment; and he loaded them with benefits. Their 6 50 MACAULAY'S veneration for him appears to have exceeded that with which Johnson was regarded by Boswell, or Warburton by Hurd. It was not in the power of adulation to turn such a head, or deprave such a heart, as Addison's. But it must in candor be admitted that he contracted some of the faults which can scarcely be avoided by any person who is so unfortunate as to be the oracle of a small literary coterie. One member of this little society was Eustace Bud- gell, a young Templar of some literature, and a distant relation of Addison. There was at this time no stain on the character of Budgell, and it is not improbable that his career would have been prosperous and honor- able, if the life of his cousin had been prolonged. But when the master was laid in the grave, the disciple broke loose from all restraint, descended rapidly from one degree of vice and misery to another, ruined his fortune by follies, attempted to repair it by crimes, and at length closed a wicked and unhappy life by self- murder. Yet, to the last, the wretched man, gambler, lampooner, cheat, forger, as he was, retained his affec- tion and veneration for Addison, and recorded those feelings in the last lines which he traced before he hid himself from infamy under London Bridge. Another of Addison's favorite companions was Am- brose Philips, a good Whig and a middling poet, who had the honor of bringing into fashion a species of composition which has been called, after his name, Namby Pamby. But the most remarkable members of the little senate, as Pope long afterward called it, were Eichard Steele and Thomas Tickell. Steele had known Addison from childhood. They had been together at the Charter House and at Ox- ADDISON. 51 ford; but circumstances had then, for a time, sepa- rated them widely. Steele had left college without taking a degree, had been disinherited by a rich rela- tion, had led a vagrant life, had served in the army, had tried to find the philosopher's stone, and had writ- ten a religious treatise and several comedies. He was one of those people whom it is impossible either to hate or to respect. His temper was sweet, his affections warm, his spirits lively, his passions strong, and his principles weak. His life was spent in sinning and re- penting; in inculcating what was right, and doing what was wrong. In speculation, he was a man of piety and honor ; in practice, he was much of the rake and a little of the swindler. He was, however, so good- natured that it was not easy to be seriously angry with him, and that even rigid moralists felt more inclined to pity than to blame him, when he diced himself into a spunging house 30 or drank himself into a fever. Ad- dison regarded Steele with kindness not unmingled with scorn, tried, with little success, to keep him out of scrapes, introduced him to the great, procured a good place for him, corrected his plays, and, though by no means rich, lent him large sums of money. One of these loans appears, from a letter dated in August, 1708, to have amounted to a thousand pounds. These pecuniary transactions probably led to frequent bick- erings. It is said that, on one occasion, Steele's negli- gence, or dishonesty, provoked Addison to repay him- self by the help of a bailiff. We cannot join with Miss Aikin in rejecting this story. Johnson heard it from Savage, who heard it from Steele. Few private trans- actions which took place a hundred and twenty years ago are proved by stronger evidence than this. But 52 MACAULAY'S we can by no means agree with those who condemn Addison's severity. The most amiable of mankind may well be moved to indignation, when what he has earned hardly, and lent with great inconvenience to himself, for the purpose of relieving a friend in dis- tress, is squandered with insane profusion. We will illustrate our meaning by an example, which is not the less striking because it is taken from fiction. Dr. Har- rison, in Fielding's Amelia, is represented as the most benevolent of human beings ; yet he takes in execution, not only the goods, but the person of his friend Booth. Dr. Harrison resorts to this strong measure because he has been informed that Booth, while pleading poverty as an excuse for not paying just debts, had been buying fine jewellery and setting up a coach. No person who is well acquainted with Steele's life and correspondence can doubt that he behaved quite as ill to Addison as Booth was accused of behaving to Dr. Harrison. The real history, we have little doubt, was something like this: A letter comes to Addison, imploring help in pathetic terms, and promising reformation and speedy repayment. Poor Dick declares that he has not an inch of candle, or a bushel of coals, or credit with the butcher for a shoulder of mutton. Addison is moved. He determines to deny himself some medals which are wanting to his series of the Twelve Caesars ; to put off buying the new edition of Bayle's Dictionary; and to wear his old sword and buckles another year. In this way he manages to send a hundred pounds to his friend. The next day he calls on Steele, and finds scores of gentlemen and ladies assembled. The fiddles are playing. The table is groaning under champagne, burgundy, and pyramids of sweetmeats. Is it strange ADDISON. 53 that a man whose kindness is thus abused should send sheriff's officers to reclaim what is due to him ? Tickell was a young man, fresh from Oxford, who had introduced himself to public notice by writing a most ingenious and graceful little poem in praise of the opera of Rosamond. He deserved, and at length attained, the first place in Addison's friendship. For a time Steele and Tickell were on good terms. But they loved Addison too much to love each other, and at length became as bitter enemies as the rival bulls in Virgil. At the close of 1708, Wharton became Lord Lieu- tenant of Ireland, and appointed Addison Chief Secre- tary. Addison was consequently under the necessity of quitting London for Dublin. Besides the chief secre- taryship, which was then worth about two thousand pounds a year, he obtained a patent appointing him keeper of the Irish Records for life, with a salary of three or four hundred a year. Budgell accompanied his cousin in the capacity of private secretary. Wharton and Addison had nothing in common but Whiggism. The Lord Lieutenant was not only licen- tious and corrupt, but was distinguished from other libertines and jobbers by a callous impudence which presented the strongest contrast to the Secretary's gen- tleness and delicacy. Many parts of the Irish admin- istration at this time appear to have deserved serious blame. But against Addison there was not a murmur. He long afterward asserted, what all the evidence which we have ever seen tends to prove, that his dili- gence and integrity gained the friendship of all the most considerable persons in Ireland. The parliamentary career of Addison in Ireland 5± MACAULAY'S has, we think, wholly escaped the notice of all his biog- raphers. He was elected member for the borough of Cavan in the summer of 1709; and in the journals of two sessions his name frequently occurs. Some of the entries appear to indicate that he so far overcame his timidity as to make speeches. Nor is this by any means improbable; for the Irish House of Commons was a far less formidable audience than the English House; and many tongues which were tied by fear in greater assembly became fluent in the smaller. Gerard Hamilton, for example, who, from fear of losing the fame gained by his single speech, sat mute at West- minster during forty years, spoke with great effect at Dublin when he was secretary to Lord Halifax. While Addison was in Ireland, an event occurred to which he owes his high and permanent rank among British writers. As yet his fame rested on perform- ances which, though highly respectable, were not built for duration, and which would, if he had produced nothing else, have now been almost forgotten, on some excellent Latin verses, on some English verses which occasionally rose above mediocrity, and on a book of travels, agreeably written, but not indicating any ex- traordinary powers of mind. These works showed him to be a man of taste, sense, and learning. The time had come when he was to prove himself a man of genius, and to enrich our literature with composi- tions which will live as long as the English language. In the spring of 1709, Steele formed a literary project, of which he was far indeed from foresee- ing the consequences. Periodical papers had during many years been published in London. Most of these were political; but in some of them questions ADDISON, 55 of morality, taste, and love casuistry had been dis- cussed. The literary merit of these works was small indeed; and even their names are now known only to the curious. Steele had been appointed gazetteer by Sunder- land, at the request, it is said, of Addison, and thus had access to foreign intelligence earlier and more authentic than was in those times within the reach of an ordinary news-writer. This circumstance seems to have suggested to him the scheme of publishing a periodical paper on a new plan. It was to appear on the days on which the post left London for the country, which were, in that generation, the Tuesdays, Thurs- days, and Saturdays. It was to contain the foreign news, accounts of theatrical representations, and the literary gossip of Will's and of the Grecian. It was also to contain remarks on the fashionable topics of the day, compliments to beauties, pasquinades on noted sharpers, and criticisms on popular preachers. The aim of Steele does not appear to have been at first higher than this. He was not ill qualified to conduct the work which he had planned. His public intelli- gence he drew from the best sources. He knew the town, and had paid dear for his knowledge. He had read much more than the dissipated men of that time were in the habit of reading. He was a rake among scholars, and a scholar among rakes. His style was easy and not incorrect, and, though his wit and humor were of no high order, his gay animal spirits imparted to his compositions an air of vivacity which ordinary readers could hardly distinguish from comic genius. His writings have been well compared to those light wines which, though deficient in body and flavor, are 56 MACAULAY'S yet a pleasant small drink, if not kept too long or car- ried too far. Isaac Bickerstaff, 31 Esquire, Astrologer, was an imaginary person, almost as well known in that age as Mr. Panl Pry or Mr. Samuel Pickwick in ours. Swift had assumed the name of Bickerstaff in a satirical pam- phlet against Partridge, the maker of almanacs. Par- tridge had been fool enough to publish a furious reply. Bickerstaff had rejoined in a second pamphlet still more diverting than the first. All the wits had com- bined to keep up the joke, and the town was long in convulsions of laughter. Steele determined to employ the name which this controversy had made popular; and, in April, 1709, it was announced that Isaac Bickerstaff, Esquire, Astrologer, was about to pub- lish a paper called the Tatler. Addison had not been consulted about this scheme ; but as soon as he heard of it, he determined to give his assistance. The effect of that assistance cannot be better described than in Steele's own words. " I fared," he said, " like a distressed prince who calls in a powerful neighbor to his aid. I was undone by my auxiliary. When I had once called him in, I could not subsist without dependence on him." " The paper," he says elsewhere, "was advanced indeed. It was raised to a greater thing than I intended it." It is probable that Addison, when he sent across St. George's Channel his first contributions to the Tatler, had no notion of the extent and variety of his own powers. He was the possessor of a vast mine, rich with a hundred ores. But he had been acquainted only with the least precious part of his treasures, and had hitherto contented himself with producing some- ADDISON. 57 times copper and sometimes lead, intermingled with a little silver. All at once, and by mere accident, he had lighted on an inexhaustible vein of the finest gold. The mere choice and arrangement of his words would have sufficed to make his essays classical. For never, not even by Dryden, not even by Temple, had the English language been written with such sweetness, grace, and facility. But this was the smallest part of Addison's praise. Had he clothed his thoughts in the half French style of Horace Walpole, or in the half Latin style of Dr. Johnson, or in the half Ger- man jargon of the present day, 32 his genius would have triumphed over all faults of manner. As a moral satirist he stands unrivalled. If ever the best Tat- lers and Spectators were equalled in their own kind, We should be inclined to guess that it must have been by the lost comedies of Menander. In wit, properly so called, Addison was not inferior to Cowley or Butler. No single ode of Cowley con- tains so many happy analogies as are crowded into the lines to Sir Godfrey Kneller; and we would under- take to collect from the Spectators as great a number of ingenious illustrations as can be found in Hudibras. The still higher faculty of invention Addison possessed in still larger measure. The numerous fictions, gen- erally original, often wild and grotesque, but always singularly graceful and happy, which are found in his essays, fully entitle him to the rank of a great poet, a rank to which his metrical compositions give him no claim. As an observer of life, of manners, of all the shades of human character, he stands in the first class. And what he observed he had the art of com- municating in two widely different ways. He could 58 MACAULAY'S describe virtues, vices, habits, whims, as well as Claren- don. But he could do something better. He could call human beings into existence, and make them ex- hibit themselves. If we wish to find anything more vivid than Addison's best portraits, we must go either to Shakespeare or to Cervantes. But what shall we say of Addison's humor, of his sense of the ludicrous, of his power of awakening that sense in others, and of drawing mirth from incidents which occur every day, and from little peculiarities of temper and manner, such as may be found in every man ? We feel the charm ; we give ourselves up to it ; but we strive in vain to analyze it. Perhaps the best way of describing Addison's peculiar pleasantry is to compare it with the pleasantry of some other great satirists. The three most eminent masters of the art of ridicule, during the eighteenth century, were, we conceive, Addison, Swift, and Vol- taire. Which of the three had the greatest power of moving laughter may be questioned. But each of them, within his own domain, was supreme. Voltaire is the prince of buffoons. His merriment is without disguise or restraint. He gambols ; he grins ; he shakes his sides; he points the finger; he turns up the nose; he shoots out the tongue. The manner of Swift is the very opposite to this. He moves laughter, but never joins in it. He appears in his works such as he appeared in society. All the company are con- vulsed with merriment, while the dean, the author of all the mirth, preserves an invincible gravity, and even sourness of aspect, and gives utterance to the most eccentric and ludicrous fancies, with the air of a man reading the commination service. ADDISON. 59 The manner of Addison is as remote from that of Swift as from that of Voltaire. He neither laughs out like the French wit, nor, like the Irish wit, throws a double portion of severity into his countenance while laughing inwardly; but preserves a look peculiarly his own, a look of demure serenity, disturbed only by an arch sparkle of the eye, an almost imperceptible eleva- tion of the brow, an almost imperceptible curl of the lip. His tone is never that either of a Jack Pudding or of a Cynic. It is that of a gentleman, in whom the quickest sense of the ridiculous is constantly tem- pered by good nature and good breeding. We own that the humor of Addison is, in our opin- ion, of a more delicious flavor than the humor of either Swift or Voltaire. Thus much, at least, is certain that both Swift and Voltaire have been successfully mimicked, and that no man has yet been able to mimic Addison. The letter of the Abbe Coyer to Pansophe is Voltaire all over, and imposed, during a long time, on the Academicians of Paris. There are passages in Arbuthnot's satirical works which we, at least, cannot distinguish from Swift's best writing. But of the many eminent men who have made Addison their model, though several have copied his mere diction with happy effect, none has been able to catch the tone of his pleasantry. In the World, in the Connoisseur, in the Mirror, in the Lounger, there are numerous papers written in obvious imitation of his Tatlers and Spectators. Most of those papers have some merit; many are very lively and amusing; but there is not a single one which could be passed off as Addison's on a critic of the smallest perspicacity. But that which chiefly distinguishes Addison from 60 MACAULAY'S Swift, from Voltaire, from almost all the other great masters of ridicule, is the grace, the nobleness, the moral purity, which we find even in his merriment. Severity, gradually hardening and darkening into mis- anthropy, characterizes the works of Swift. The nature of Voltaire was, indeed, not inhuman; but he venerated nothing. Neither in the masterpieces of the purest examples of virtue, neither in the Great First Cause nor in the awful enigma of the grave, could he see anything but subjects for drollery. The more solemn and august the theme, the more monkey- like was his grimacing and chattering. The mirth of Swift is the mirth of Mephistopheles ; the mirth of Voltaire is the mirth of Puck. If, as Soame Jenyns oddly imagined, a portion of the happiness of seraphim and just men made perfect be derived from an ex- quisite perception of the ludicrous, their mirth must surely be none other than the mirth of Addison: a mirth consistent with tender compassion for all that is frail, and with profound reverence for all that is sublime. Nothing great, nothing amiable, no moral duty, no doctrine of natural or revealed religion, has ever been associated by Addison with any degrading idea. His humanity is without a parallel in literary history. The highest proof of virtue is to possess boundless power without abusing it. No kind of power is more formidable than the power of making men ridiculous; and that power Addison possessed in boundless measure. How grossly that power was abused by Swift and by Voltaire is well known. But of Addison it may be confidently affirmed that he has blackened no man's character, nay, that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to find in all the volumes ADDISON. 61 which he has left us a single taunt which can he called ungenerous or unkind. Yet he had detractors, whose malignity might have seemed to justify as terrible a revenge as that which men, not superior to him in genius, wreaked on Bettesworth and on Franc de Pom- pigan. He was a politician; he was the best writer of his party; he lived in times of fierce excitement, in times when persons of high character and station stooped to scurrility such as is now practised only by the basest of mankind. Yet no provocation and no example could induce him to return railing for railing. Of the service which his essays rendered to morality it is difficult to speak too highly. It is true that, when the Tatler appeared, that age of outrageous profane- ness and licentiousness which followed the Eestora- tion had passed away. Jeremy Collier had shamed the theatres into something which, compared with the excesses of Etherege and Wycherley, might be called decency. Yet there still lingered in the public mind a pernicious notion that there was some connection between 'genius and profligacy, between the domestic virtues and the sullen formality of the Puritans. That error it is the glory of Addison to have dispelled. He taught the nation that the faith and the morality of Hale and Tillotson might be found in company with wit more sparkling than the wit of Congreve, and with humor richer than the humor of Vanbrugh. So effec- tually, indeed, did he retort on vice the mockery which had recently been directed against virtue, that, since his time, the open violation of decency has always been considered among us as the mark of a fool. And this revolution, the greatest and most salutary ever effected 62 MACAULAY'S by any satirist, he accomplished, be it remembered, without writing one personal lampoon. In the early contributions of Addison to the Tatler his peculiar powers were not fully exhibited. Yet, from the first, his superiority to all his coadjutors was evident. Some of his later Tatlers are fully equal to anything that he ever wrote. Among the portraits, we most admire Tom Folio, Ned Softly, and the Po- litical Upholsterer. The Proceedings of the Court of Honor, the Thermometer of Zeal, the Story of the Frozen "Words, the Memoirs of the Shilling, are ex- cellent specimens of that ingenious and lively species of fiction in which Addison excelled all men. There is one still better paper, of the same class. But though that paper, a hundred and thirty-three years ago, was probably thought as edifying as one of Smalridge's sermons, we dare not indicate it to the squeamish readers of the nineteenth century. During the session of Parliament which commenced in November, 1709, and which the impeachment of Sacheverell has made memorable, Addison appears to have resided in London. The Tatler was now more popular than any periodical paper had ever been ; and his connection with it was generally known. It was not known, however, that almost everything good in the Tatler was his. The truth is, that the fifty or sixty numbers which we owe to him were not merely the best, but so decidedly the best that any five of them are more valuable than all the two hundred numbers in which he had no share. He required, at this time, all the solace which he could derive from literary success. The queen had always disliked the Whigs. She had during some ADDISON. G3 years disliked the Marlborough family. But, reign- ing by a disputed title, she could not venture directly to oppose herself to a majority of both Houses of Par- liament ; and, engaged as she was in a war on the event of which her own crown was staked, she could not venture to disgrace a great and successful general. But at length, in the year 1710, the causes which had restrained her from showing her aversion to the Low Church party ceased to operate. The trial of Sachev- erell produced an outbreak of public feeling scarcely less violent than the outbreaks which we can ourselves remember in 1820 and in 1831. The country gentle- men, the country clergymen, the rabble of the towns, were all, for once, on the same side. It was clear that, if a general election took place before the excitement abated, the Tories would have a majority. The serv- ices of Marlborough had been so splendid that they were no longer necessary. The queen's throne was secure from all attack on the part of Lewis. Indeed, it seemed much more likely that the English and Ger- man armies would divide the spoils of Versailles and Marli than that a marshal of France would bring back the Pretender to St. James's. The queen, acting by the advice of Harley, determined to dismiss her serv- ants. In June the change commenced. Sunderland was the first who fell. The Tories exulted over his fall. The Whigs tried, during a few weeks, to persuade themselves that her majesty had acted only from per- sonal dislike to the secretary, and that she meditated no further alteration. But, early in August, Godol- phin was surprised by a letter from Anne, which directed him to break his white staff. Even after this event, the irresolution or dissimulation of Harley kept G4 MACAULAY'S up the hopes of the Whigs during another month; and then the ruin became rapid and violent. The Par- liament was dissolved. The ministers were turned out. The Tories were called to office. The tide of popularity ran violently in favor of the High Church party. That party, feeble in the late House of Com- mons, was now irresistible. The power which the Tories had thus suddenly acquired, they used with blind and stupid ferocity. The howl which the whole pack set up for prey and for blood appalled even him who had roused and unchained them. When, at this distance of time, we calmly review the conduct of the discarded ministers, we cannot but feel a movement of indignation at the injustice with which they were treated. No body of men had ever administered the government with more energy, ability, and modera- tion; and their success had been proportioned to their wisdom. They had saved Holland and Germany. They had humbled France. They had, as it seemed, all but torn Spain from the house of Bourbon. They had made England the first power in Europe. At home they had united England and Scotland. They had respected the rights of conscience and the liberty of the subject. They retired, leaving their country at the height of prosperity and glory. And yet they were pursued to their retreat by such a roar of obloquy as was never raised against the Government which threw away thirteen colonies, or against the Government which sent a gallant army to perish in the ditches of Walcheren. None of the Whigs suffered more in the general wreck than Addison. He had just sustained some heavy pecuniary losses, of the nature of which we are ADDISON. C5 imperfectly informed, when his secretaryship was taken from him. He had reason to believe that he should also be deprived of the small Irish office which he held by patent. He had just resigned his fellow- ship. It seems probable that he had already ventured to raise his eyes to a great lady, and that, while his political friends were in power, and while his own for- tunes were rising, he had been, in the phrase of the romances which were then fashionable, permitted to hope. But Mr. Addison the ingenious writer and Mr. Addison the chief secretary were, in her ladyship's opinion, two very different persons. All these calami- ties united, however, could not disturb the serene cheerfulness of a mind conscious of innocence, and rich in its own wealth. He told his friends, with smiling resignation,. that they ought to admire his philosophy; that he had lost at once his fortune, his place, his fel- lowship, and his mistress ; that he must think of turn- ing tutor again, and yet that his spirits were as good as ever. He had one consolation. Of the unpopularity which his friends had incurred, he had no share. Such was the esteem with which he was regarded, that, while the most violent measures were taken for the purpose of forcing Tory members on Whig corporations, he was returned to Parliament without even a contest. Swift, who was now in London, and who had already deter- mined on quitting the Whigs, wrote to Stella in these remarkable words : " The Tories carry it among the new members six to one. Mr. Addison's election has passed easy and undisputed; and I believe if he had a mind to be kins:, he would hardly be refused." The good-will with which the Tories regarded Ad- 00 MACAULAY'S dison is the more honorable to him, because it had not been purchased by any concession on his part. Dur- ing the general election he published a political jour- nal, entitled the Whig Examiner. Of that journal it may be sufficient to say that Johnson, in spite of his strong political prejudices, pronounced it to be superior in wit to any of Swift's writings on the other side. When it ceased to appear, Swift, in a letter to Stella, expressed his exultation at the death of so formidable an antagonist. " He might well rejoice," says Johnson, "at the death of that which he could not have killed." " On no occasion," he adds, " was the genius of Addison more vigorously exerted, and on none did the superiority of his powers more evi- dently appear." The only use which Addison appears to have made of the favor with which he was regarded by the Tories was to save some of his friends from the general ruin of the Whig party. He felt himself to be in a situation which made it his duty to take a decided part in poli- tics. But the case of Steele and of Ambrose Philips was different. For Philips, Addison even conde- scended to solicit, with what success we have not ascer- tained. Steele held two places. He was gazetteer, and he was also a commissioner of stamps. The Gazette was taken from him. But he was suffered to retain his place in the Stamp Office, on an implied understanding that he should not be active against the new Government; and he was, during more than two years, induced by Addison to observe this armistice with tolerable fidelity. Isaac Bickerstaff accordingly became silent upon politics, and the article of news, which had once ADDISON. 67 formed about one-third of his paper, altogether dis- appeared. The Tatler had completely changed its character. It was now nothing but a series of essays on books, morals, and manners. Steele therefore re- solved to bring it to a close, and to commence a new work on an improved plan. It was announced that this new work would be published daily. The under- taking was generally regarded as bold, or rather rash ; but the event amply justified the confidence with which Steele relied on the fertility of Addison's genius. On the second of January, 1711, appeared the last Tatler. At the beginning of March following appeared the first of an incomparable series of papers, contain- ing observations on life and literature by an imaginary Spectator. The Spectator himself was conceived and drawn by Addison; and it is not easy to doubt that the por- trait was meant to be in some features a likeness of the painter. The Spectator is a gentleman who, after passing a studious youth at the university, has trav- elled on classic ground, and has bestowed much atten- tion on curious points of antiquity. He has, on his return, fixed his residence in London, and has observed all the forms of life which are to be found in that great city, has daily listened to the wits of Will's, has smoked with the philosophers of the Grecian, and has mingled with the parsons at Child's, and with the politicians at the St. James's. In the morning, he often listens to the hum of the Exchange; in the evening, his face is constantly to be seen in the pit of Drury Lane Thea- tre. But an insurmountable bashfulness prevents him from opening his mouth, except in a small circle of in- timate friends. C8 MACAULAY'S These friends were first sketched by Steele. Four of the club, the templar, the clergyman, the soldier, and the merchant, were uninteresting figures, fit only for a background. But the other two, an old country baronet and an old town rake, though not delineated with a very delicate pencil, had some good strokes. Addison took the rude outlines into his own hands, retouched them, colored them, and is in truth the creator of the Sir Eoger de Coverley and the Will Honeycomb with whom we are all familiar. The plan of the Spectator must be allowed to be both original and eminently happy. Every valuable essay in the series may be read with pleasure separate- ly; yet the five or six hundred essays form a whole, and a whole which has the interest of a novel. It must be remembered, too, that at that time no novel giving a lively and powerful picture of the common life and manners of England had appeared. Eichardson was working as a compositor. Fielding was robbing birds' nests. Smollett was not yet born. The narrative, therefore, which connects together the Spectator's essays gave to our ancestors their first taste of an exquisite and untried pleasure. That narrative was indeed constructed with no art or labor. The events were such events as occur every day. Sir Roger comes up to town to see Eugenio, as the worthy baronet always calls Prince Eugene, goes with the Spectator on the water to Spring Gardens, walks among the tombs in the Abbey, and is frightened by the Mo- hawks, 33 but conquers his apprehension so far as to go to the theatre when the Distressed Mother is acted. The Spectator pays a visit in the summer to Coverley Hall, is charmed with the old house, the old butler, ADDISON. G9 and the old chaplain, eats a jack caught by Will Wim- ble, rides to the assizes, and hears a point of law dis- cussed by Tom Touchy. At last a letter from the honest butler brings to the club the news that Sir Roger is dead. Will Honeycomb marries and reforms at sixty. The club breaks up; and the Spectator resigns his functions. Such events can hardly be said to form a plot; yet they are related with such truth, such grace, such wit, such humor, such pathos, such knowledge of the human heart, such knowledge of the ways of the world, that they charm us on the hun- dredth perusal. We have not the least doubt that if Addison had written a novel, on the extensive plan, it would have been superior to any that we possess. As it is, he is entitled to be considered not only as the greatest of the English essayists, but as the forerun- ner of the great English novelists. We say this of Addison alone; for Addison is the Spectator. About three sevenths of the work are his; and it is no exaggeration to say that his worst essay is as good as the best of any of his coadjutors. His best essays approach near to absolute perfection; nor is their excellence more wonderful than their variety. His invention never seems to flag; nor is he ever under the necessity of repeating himself, or of wearing out a subject. There are no dregs in his wine. He regales us after the fashion of that prodigal nabob who held that here was only one good glass in a bottle. As soon as we have tasted the first sparkling foam of a jest, it is withdrawn, and a fresh draught of nectar is at our lips. On the Monday we have an allegory as lively and ingenious as Lucian's Auction of Lives; on the Tuesday, an Eastern apologue as richly colored as the 70 MACAULAY'S Tales of Scheherezade ; on the Wednesday, a character described with the skill of La Bruyere ; on the Thurs- day, a scene from common life equal to the best chap- ters in the Vicar of Wakefield; on the Friday, some sly Horatian pleasantry on fashionable follies, on hoops, patches, or puppet shows; and on the Saturday, a religious meditation, which will bear a comparison with the finest passages in llassillon. ' It is dangerous to select where there is so much that deserves the highest praise. We will venture, how- ever, to say that any person who wishes to form a just notion of the extent and variety of Addison's powers will do well to read at one sitting the following papers : the two Visits to the Abbey, the Visit to the Exchange, the Journal of the Eetired Citizen, the Vision of Mirza, the Transmigrations of Pugg the Monkey, and the Death of Sir Eoger de Coverley. The least valuable of Addison's contributions to the Spectator are, in the judgment of our age, his critical papers. Yet his critical papers are always luminous, and often ingenious. The very worst of them must be regarded as creditable to him, when the character of the school in which he had been trained is fairly considered. The best of them were much too good for his readers. In truth, he was not so far behind our generation as he was before his own. No essays in the Spectator were more censured and derided than those in which he raised his voice against the contempt with which our fine old ballads were regarded, and showed the scoffers that the same gold which, burnished and polished, gives lustre to the iEneid and the Odes of Horace, is mingled with the rude dross of Chevy Chase. ADDISON. 71 It is not strange that the success of the Spectator should have been such as no similar work has ever ob- tained. The number of copies daily distributed was at first three thousand. It subsequently increased, and had risen to near four thousand when the stamp tax was imposed. That tax was fatal to a crowd of jour- nals. The Spectator, however, stood its ground, doubled its price, and, though its circulation fell off, still yielded a large revenue both to the state and to the authors. For particular papers the demand was immense; of some, it is said, twenty thousand copies were required. But this was not all. To have the Spectator served up every morning with the bohea and rolls was a luxury for the few. The majority were content to wait till essays enough had appeared to form a volume. Ten thousand copies of each volume were immediately taken off, and new editions were called for. It must be remembered that the popu- lation of England was then hardly a third of what it now is. The number of Englishmen who were in the habit of reading was probably not a sixth of what it now is. A shopkeeper or a farmer who found any pleasure in literature was a rarity. Nay, there was doubtless more than one knight of the shrine whose country-seat did not contain ten books, receipt-books and books on farriery included. In these circumstances, the sale of the Spectator must be considered as indicating a popularity quite as great as that of the most success- ful works of Sir Walter Scott and Mr. Dickens in our own time. At the close of 1712 the Spectator ceased to appear. It was probably felt that the short-faced gentleman 72 MACAULAY'S and his club had been long enough before the town; and that it was time to withdraw them, and to replace them by a new set of characters. In a few weeks the first number of the Guardian was published. But the Guardian was unfortunate both in its birth and in its death. It began in dulness, and disappeared in a tem- pest of faction. The original plan was bad. Addison contributed nothing till sixty-six numbers had ap- peared; and it was then impossible to make the Guar- dian what the Spectator had been. Nestor Ironside and the Miss Lizards were people to whom even he could impart no interest. He could only furnish some excellent little essays, both serious and comic; and this he did. Why Addison gave no assistance to the Guardian during the first two months of its existence is a ques- tion which has puzzled the editors and biographers, but which seems to us to admit of a very easy solution. He was then engaged in bringing his Cato on the stage. The first four acts of this drama had been lying in his desk since his return from Italy. His modest and sensitive nature shrank from the risk of a public and shameful failure ; and, though all who saw the manu- script were loud in praise, some thought it possible that an audience might become impatient even of very good rhetoric, and advised Addison to print the play without hazarding a representation. At length, after many fits of apprehension, the poet yielded to the urgency of his political friends, who hoped that the public would discover some analogy between the fol- lowers of Caesar and the Tories, between Sempronius and the apostate Whigs, between Cato, struggling to the last for the liberties of Eome, and the band of ADDISON. 73 patriots who still stood firm round Halifax and Wharton. Addison gave the play to the managers of Drury Lane Theatre, without stipulating for any advantage to himself. They therefore thought themselves bound to spare no cost in scenery and dresses. The decora- tions, it is true, would not have pleased the skilful eye of Mr. Macready. Juba's waistcoat blazed with gold lace; Marcia's hoop was worthy of a duchess on the birthday ; and Cato wore a wig worth fifty guineas. The prologue was written by Pope, and is undoubtedly a dignified and spirited composition. The part of the hero was excellently played by Booth. Steele under- took to pack a house. The boxes were in a blaze with the stars of the Peers in opposition. The pit was crowded with attentive and friendly listeners from the Inns of Court and the literary coffee-houses. Sir Gil- bert Heathcote, Governor of the Bank of England, was at the head of a powerful body of auxiliaries from the City, 34 warm men and true Whigs, but better known at Jonathan's and Garraway's than in the haunts of wits and critics. These precautions were quite superfluous. The Tories, as a body, regarded Addison with no unkind feelings. Nor was it for their interest, professing, as they did, profound reverence for law and prescription, and abhorrence both of popular insurrection and of standing armies, to appropriate to themselves reflec- tions thrown on the great military chief and dema- gogue, who, with the support of the legions and of the common people, subverted all the ancient institu- tions of his country. Accordingly, every shout that was raised by the members of the Kit Cat was echoed 7 74 MACAULAY'S by the High Churchmen of the October; and the cur- tain at length fell amidst thunders of unanimous applause. The delight and admiration of the town were de- scribed by the Guardian in terms which we might attribute to partiality, were it not that the Examiner, the organ of the ministry, held similar language. The Tories, indeed, found much to sneer at in the conduct of their opponents. Steele had on this, as on other occasions, shown more zeal than taste or judgment. The honest citizens who marched under the orders of Sir Gibby, as he was facetiously called, probably knew better when to buy and when to sell stock than when to clap and when to hiss at a play, and incurred some ridicule by making the hypocritical Sempronius their favorite, and by giving to his insincere rants louder plaudits than they bestowed on the temperate eloquence of Cato. Wharton, too, who had the in- credible effrontery to applaud the lines about flying from prosperous vice and from the power of impious men to a private station, did not escape the sarcasms of those who justly thought that he could fly from nothing more vicious or impious than himself. The epilogue, which was written by Garth, a zealous Whig, was severely and not unreasonably censured as ignoble and out of place. But Addison was described, even by the bitterest Tory writers, as a gentleman of wit and virtue, in whose friendship many persons of both parties were happy, and whose narne ought not to be mixed up with factious squabbles. Of the jests by which the triumph of the Whig party was disturbed, the most severe and happy was Bolingbroke's. Between two acts, he sent for Booth ADDISON. 75 to his box, and presented him, before the whole theatre, with a purse of fifty guineas for defending the cause of liberty so well against a perpetual dictator. This was a pungent allusion to the attempt which Marlbor- ough had made, not long before his fall, to obtain a patent creating him Captain General for life. It was April; and in April, a hundred and thirty years ago, the London season was thought to be far advanced. During a whole month, however, Cato was performed to overflowing houses, and brought into the treasury of the theatre twice the gains of an ordinary spring. In the summer the Drury Lane company went down to the Act at Oxford, and there, before an audi- ence which retained an affectionate remembrance of Addison's accomplishments and virtues, his tragedy was acted during several days. The gownsmen began to besiege the theatre in the forenoon, and by one in the afternoon all the seats were filled. About the merits of the piece which had so extraor- dinary an effect, the public, we suppose, has made up its mind. To compare it with the masterpieces of the Attic stage, with the great English dramas of the time of Elizabeth, or even with the productions of Schiller's manhood, would be absurd indeed. Yet it contains excellent dialogue and declamation, and, among plays fashioned on the French model, must be allowed to rank high; not, indeed, with Athalie or Saul; but, we think, not below Cinna, and certainly above any other English tragedy of the same school, above many of the plays of Cornville, above many of the plays of Vol- taire and Alfieri, and above some plays of Racine. Be this as it may, we have little doubt that Cato did as much as the Tatlers, Spectators, and Freeholders 76 MACAULAY'S united to raise Addison's fame among his contem- poraries. The modesty and good nature of the successful dramatist had tamed even the malignity of faction. But literary envy, it should seem, is a fiercer passion than party spirit. It was by a zealous Whig that the fiercest attack on the Whig tragedy was made. John Dennis published Eemarks on Cato, which were written with some acuteness, and with much coarseness and asperity. Addison neither defended himself nor re* taliated. On many points he had an excellent defence ; and nothing would have been easier than to retaliate ; for Dennis had written bad odes, bad tragedies, bad comedies : he had, moreover, a larger share than most men of those infirmities and eccentricities which excite laughter; and Addison's power of turning either an absurd book or an absurd man into ridicule was un- rivalled. Addison, however, serenely conscious of his superiority, looked with pity on his assailant, whose temper, naturally irritable and gloomy, had been soured by want, by controversy, and by literary fail- ures. But among the young candidates for Addison's favor there was one distinguished by talents from the rest, and distinguished, we fear, not less by malignity and insincerity. Pope was only twenty-five. But his powers had expanded to their full maturity; and his best poem, the Rape of the Lock, had recently been published. Of his genius, Addison had always ex- pressed high admiration. But Addison had early dis- cerned, what might indeed have been discerned by an eye less penetrating than his, that the diminutive, crooked, sickly boy was eager to revenge himself on ADDISON. Y7 society for the unkindness of nature. In the Spec- tator, the Essay on Criticism had been praised with cordial warmth ; but a gentle hint had been added that the writer of so excellent a poem would have done well to avoid ill-natured personalities. Pope, though evi- dently more galled by the censure than gratified by the praise, returned thanks for the admonition, and prom- ised to profit by it. The two writers continued to ex- change civilities, counsel, and small good offices. Addi- son publicly extolled Pope's miscellaneous pieces; and Pope furnished Addison with a prologue. This did not last long. Pope hated Dennis, whom he had in- jured without provocation. The appearance of the Eemarks on Cato gave the irritable poet an oppor- tunity of venting his malice under the show of friend- ship, and such an opportunity could not be but wel- come to a nature which was implacable in enmity, and which always preferred the tortuous to the straight path. He published, accordingly, the Narrative of the Frenzy of John Dennis. But Pope had mistaken his powers. He was a great master of invective and sarcasm. He could dissect a character in terse and sonorous couplets, brilliant with antithesis; but of dramatic talent he was altogether destitute. If he had written a lampoon on Dennis such as that on Atticus, or that on Sporus, the old grumbler would have been crushed. But Pope writing dialogue resembled — to borrow Horace's imagery and his own — a wolf, which instead of biting, should take to kicking, or a monkey which should try to sting. The Narrative is utterly contemptible. Of argument there is not even the show ; and the jests are such as, if they were introduced into a farce, would call forth the hisses of the shilling 78 MACAULAY'S gallery. Dennis raves about the drama ; and the nurse thinks that he is calling for a dram. " There is," he cries, " no peripetia in the tragedy, no change of for- tune, no change at all." " Pray, good sir, be not angry," says the old woman ; " I'll fetch change." This is not exactly the pleasantry of Addison. There can be no doubt that Addison saw through this officious zeal, and felt himself deeply aggrieved by it. So foolish and spiteful a pamphlet could do him no good, and, if he were thought to have any hand in it, must do him harm. Gifted with incomparable powers of ridicule, he had never, even in self-defence, used those powers inhumanly or uncourteously ; and he was not disposed to let others make his fame and his interests a pretext under which they might commit outrages from which he had himself constantly ab- stained. He accordingly declared that he had no con- cern in the Narrative, that he disapproved of it, and that if he answered the Remarks, he would answer them like a gentleman; and he took care to communi- cate this to Dennis. Pope was bitterly mortified; and to this transaction we are inclined to ascribe the hatred with which he ever after regarded Addison. In September, 1713, the Guardian ceased to appear. Steele had gone mad about politics. A general election had just taken place: he had been chosen member for Stockbridge; and he fully expected to play a first part in Parliament. The immense success of the Tatler and Spectator had turned his head. He had been the editor of both those papers, and was not aware how entirely they owed their influence and popularity to the genius of his friend. His spirits, always violent, were now excited by vanity, ambition, and faction, to ADDISON. 70 such a pitch that he every day committed some offence against good sense and good taste. All the discreet and moderate members of his own party regretted and con- demned his folly. " I am in a thousand troubles," Addison wrote, " about poor Dick, and wish that his zeal for the public may not be ruinous to himself. But he has sent me word that he is determined to go on, and that any advice I may give him in this particular will have no weight with him." Steele set up a political paper called the English- man, which, as it was not supported by contributions from Addison, completely failed. By this work, by some other writings of the same kind, and by the airs which he gave himself at the first meeting of the new Parliament, he made the Tories so angry that they determined to expel him. The Whigs stood by him gallantly, but were unable to save him. The vote of expulsion was regarded by all dispassionate men as a tyrannical exercise of the power of the majority. But Steele's violence and folly, though they by no means justified the steps which his enemies took, had completely disgusted his friends; nor did he ever re- gain the place which he had held in the public esti- mation. Addison about this time conceived the design of adding an eighth volume to the Spectator. In June, 1714, the first number of the new series appeared, and during about six months three papers were published weekly. Nothing can be more striking than the con- trast between the Englishman and the eighth volume of the Spectator, between Steele without Addison, and Addison without Steele. The Englishman is forgot- ten : the eighth volume of the Spectator contains, per- 80 MACAULAY'S haps, the finest essays, both serious and playful, in the English language. Before this volume was completed, the death of Anne produced an entire change in the administration of public affairs. The blow fell suddenly. It found the Tory party distracted by internal feuds, and un- prepared for any great effort. Harley had just been disgraced. Bolingbroke, it was supposed, would be the chief minister. But the queen was on her death- bed before the white staff had been given, and her last public act was to deliver it with a feeble hand to the Duke of Shrewsbury. The emergency produced a coalition between all sections of public men who were attached to the Protestant succession. George the First was proclaimed without opposition. A council, in which the leading Whigs had seats, took the direc- tion of affairs till the new king should arrive. The first act of the lords justices was to appoint Addison their secretary. There is an idle tradition that he was directed to prepare a letter to the king, that he could not satisfy himself as to the style of this composition, and that the lords justices called in a clerk who at once did what was wanted. It is not strange that a story so flattering to mediocrity should be popular; and we are sorry to deprive dunces of their consolation. But the truth must be told. It was well observed by Sir James Mack- intosh, whose knowledge of these times was unequalled, that Addison never, in any official document, affected wit or eloquence, and that his despatches are, without exception, remarkable for unpretending simplicity. Everybody who knows with what ease Addison's finest essays were produced must be convinced that, if well ADDISON. 81 turned phrases had been wanted, he would have had no difficulty in finding them. We are, however, in- clined to believe that the story is not absolutely with- out a foundation. It may well be that Addison did not know, till he had consulted experienced clerks who re- membered the times when William the Third was absent on the Continent, in what form a letter from the Council of Regency to the king ought to be drawn. We think it very likely that the ablest statesmen of our time, Lord John Russell, Sir Robert Peel, Lord Palmerston, for example, would, in similar circum- stances, be found quite as ignorant. Every office has some litle mysteries which the dullest man may learn with a little attention, and which the greatest man cannot possibly know by intuition. One paper must be signed by the chief of the department ; another by his deputy; to a third the royal sign-manual is necessary. One communication is to be registered, and another is not. One sentence must be in black ink, and another in red ink. If the ablest Secretary for Ireland were moved to the India Board, if the ablest President of the India Board were moved to the War Office, he would require instruction on points like these; and we do not doubt that Addison required such instruc- tion when he became, for the first time, secretary to the lords justices. George the First took possession of his kingdom without opposition. A new ministry was formed, and a new Parliament favorable to the Whigs chosen. Sunderland was appointed Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland ; and Addison again went to Dublin as Chief Secretary. At Dublin Swift resided; and there was much speculation about the way in which the dean and the 8 82 MACAULAY'S secretary would behave towards each other. The re- lations which existed between these remarkable men form an interesting and pleasing portion of literary history. They had early attached themselves to the same political party and to the same patrons. While Anne's Whig ministry was in power, the visits of Swift to London and the official residence of Addison in Ireland had given them opportunities of knowing each other. They were the two shrewdest observers of their age. But their observations on each other had led them to favorable conclusions. Swift did full justice to the rare powers of conversation which were latent under the bashful deportment of Addison. Addison, on the other hand, discerned much good-nature under the severe look and manner of Swift ; and, indeed, the Swift of 1708 and the Swift of 1738 were two very different men. But the paths of the two friends diverged widely. The Whig statesmen loaded Addison with solid bene- fits. They praised Swift, asked him to dinner, and did nothing more for him. His profession laid them under a difficulty. In the State they could not pro- mote him; and they had reason to fear that, by be- stowing preferment in the Church on the author of the Tale of a Tub, they might give scandal to the public, which had no high opinion of their orthodoxy. He did not make fair allowance for the difficulties which prevented Halifax and Somers from serving him, thought himself an ill-used man, sacrificed honor and consistency to revenge, joined the Tories, and be- came their most formidable champion. He soon found, however, that his old friends were less to blame than he had supposed. The dislike with which the queen ADDISON. 83 and the heads of the Church regarded him was insur- mountable ; and it was with the greatest difficulty that he obtained an ecclesiastical dignity of no great value, on condition of fixing his residence in a country which he detested. Difference of poltical opinion had produced, not in- deed a quarrel, but a coolness between Swift and Addi- son. They at length ceased altogether to see each other. Yet there was between them a tacit compact like that between the hereditary guests in the Iliad. ""Ey^ea 8' aWrjXwv dXea)/xe#a kol 81 6/xiXov * IIoXXoi fxev yap ijxoi Tpaes AcXetrot r eniicovpoi, Kreiveiv, ov K6 0e6s ye noprj kol 7roo~o-\ /a^eia), IIoXXoi d av crol Amatol, evaipep,ev, op Ke dvvrjai." 36 It is not strange that Addison, who calumniated and insulted nobody, should not have calumniated or insulted Swift. But it is remarkable that Swift, to whom neither genius nor virtue was sacred, and who generally seemed to find, like most other renegades, a peculiar pleasure in attacking old friends, should have shown so much respect and tenderness to Addison. Fortune had now changed. The accession of the house of Hanover had secured in England the liberties of the people, and in Ireland the dominion of the Protestant caste. To that caste Swift was more odious than any other man. He was hooted and even pelted in the streets of Dublin ; and could not venture to ride along the strand for his health without the attendance of armed servants. Many whom he had formerly served now libelled and insulted him. At this time Addison arrived. He had been advised not to show the smallest civility to the Dean of St. Patrick's. He 84 MACAULAY'S had answered, with admirable spirit, that it might be necessary for men whose fidelity to their party was sus- pected to hold no intercourse with political opponents ; but that one who had been a steady Whig in the worst times might venture, when the good cause was trium- phant, to shake hands with an old friend who was one of the vanquished Tories. His kindness was sooth- ing to the proud and cruelly wounded spirit of Swift ; and the two great satirists resumed their habits of friendly intercourse. Those associates of Addison whose political opin- ions agreed with his shared his good fortune. He took Tickell with *him to Ireland. He procured for Budgell a lucrative place in the same kingdom. Am- brose Philips was provided for in England. Steele had injured himself so much by his eccentricity and perverseness that he obtained but a very small part of what he thought his due. He was, however, knighted ; he had a place in the household; and he subsequently received other marks of favor from the court. Addison did not remain long in Ireland. In 1715 he quitted his secretaryship for a seat at the Board of Trade. In the same year his comedy of the Drummer was brought on the stage. The name of the author was not announced; the piece was coldly received; and some critics have expressed a doubt whether it were really Addison's. To us the evidence, both ex- ternal and internal, seems decisive. It is not in Ad- dison's best manner; but it contains numerous pas- sages which no other writer known to us could have produced. It was again performed after Addison's death, and, being known to be his, was loudly ap- plauded. ADDISON. 85 Toward the close of the year 1715, while the rebel- lion was still raging in Scotland, Addison published the first number of a paper called the Freeholder. Among his political works the Freeholder is entitled to the first place. Even in the Spectator there are few serious papers nobler than the character of his friend Lord Somers, and certainly no satirical papers su- perior to those in which the Tory fox-hunter is intro- duced. This character is the original of Squire West- ern, and is drawn with all Fielding's force, and with a delicacy of which Fielding was altogether destitute. As none of Addison's works exhibits stronger marks of his genius that the Freeholder, so none does more honor to his moral character. It is difficult to extol too highly the candor and humanity of a political writer whom even the excitement of civil war cannot hurry into unseemly violence. Oxford, it is well known, was then the stronghold of Toryism. The High Street had been repeatedly lined with bayonets in order to keep down the disaffected gownsmen; and traitors pursued by the messengers of the Govern- ment had been concealed in the garrets of several col- leges. Yet the admonition which, even under such circumstances, Addison addressed to the University is singularly gentle, respectful, and even affectionate. Indeed, he could not find it in his heart to deal harshly even with imaginary persons. His fox-hunter, though ignorant, stupid, and violent, is at heart a good fellow, and is at last reclaimed by the clemency of the king. Steele was dissatisfied with his friend's moderation, and, though he acknowledged that the Freeholder was excellently written, complained that the ministry played on a lute when it was necessary to blow the $Q MACAULAY'S trumpet. He accordingly determined to execute a flourish after his own fashion, and tried to rouse the public spirit of the nation by means of a paper called the Town Talk, which is now as utterly for- gotten as his Englishman, as his Crisis, as his Letter to the Bailiff of Stockbridge, as his Reader; in short, as everything he wrote without the help of Addison. In the same year in which the Drummer was acted, and in which the first numbers of the Freeholder ap- peared, the estrangement of Pope and Addison became complete. Addison had from the first seen that Pope was false and malevolent. Pope had discovered that Addison was jealous. The discovery was made in a strange manner. Pope had written the Rape of the Lock, in two cantos, without supernatural machinery. These two cantos had been loudly applauded, and by none more loudly than by Addison. Then Pope thought of the Sylphs and Gnomes, Ariel, Momentilla, Crispissa, and Umbriel, and resolved to interweave the Rosicrucian mythology with the original fabric. He asked Addison's advice. Addison said that the poem as it stood was a delicious little thing, and entreated Pope not to run the risk of marring what was so excel- lent in trying to mend it. Pope afterward declared that this insidious counsel first opened his eyes to the baseness of him who gave it. Now there can be no doubt that Pope's plan was most ingenious, and that he afterward executed it with great skill and success. But does it necessarily follow that Addison's advice was bad ? And if Addison's ad- vice was bad, does it necessarily follow that it was given from bad motives? If a friend were to ask us ADDISON. 87 whether we would advise him to risk his all in a lottery of which the chances were ten to one against him, we should do our best to dissuade him from running such a risk. Even if he were so lucky as to get the thirty thousand pound prize, we should not admit that we had counselled him ill; and we should certainly think it the height of injustice in him to accuse us of having been actuated by malice. We think Addison's advice good advice. It rested on a sound principle, the result of long and wide experience. The general rule un- doubtedly is that, when a successful work of imagina- tion has been produced, it should not be recast. We cannot at this moment call to mind a single instance in which this rule has been transgressed with happy effect, except the instance of the Rape of the Lock. Tasso recast his Jerusalem. Akenside recast his Pleasures of the Imagination, and his Epistle to Curio. Pope himself, emboldened no doubt by the success with which he had expanded and remodelled the Rape of the Lock, made the same experiment on the Dunciad. All these attempts failed. Who was to foresee that Pope would, once in his life, be able to do what he could not himself do twice, and what nobody else had ever done? Addison's advice was good. But had it been bad, why should we pronounce it dishonest ? Scott tells us that one of his best friends predicted the failure of Waverley. Herder adjured Goethe not to take so un- promising a subject as Faust. Hume tried to dissuade Robertson from writing the History of Charles the Fifth. Nay, Pope himself was one of those who prophesied that Cato would never succeed on the stage, and advised Addison to print it without risking a rep- 88 MACAULAY'S reservation. But Scott, Goethe, Kobertson, Addison, had the good sense and generosity to give their advisers credit for the best intentions. Pope's heart was not of the same kind with theirs. In 1715, while he was engaged in translating the Iliad, he met Addison at a coffee house. Phillipps and Budgell were there; but their sovereign got rid of them, and asked Pope to dine with him alone. After dinner, Addison said that he lay under a difficulty which he wished to explain. " Tickell," he said, " translated, some time ago, the first book of the Iliad. I have promised to look it over and correct it. I can- not, therefore, ask to see yours, for that would be double dealing." Pope made a civil reply, and begged that his second book might have the advantage of Ad- dison's revision. Addison readily agreed, looked over the second book, and sent it back with warm com- mendations. TickelPs version of the first book appeared soon after this conversation. In the preface, all rivalry was earnestly disclaimed. Tickell declared that he should not go on with the Iliad. That enterprise he should leave to powers which he admitted to be superior to his own. His only view, he said, in publishing this specimen was to bespeak the favor of the public to a translation of the Odyssey, in which he had made some progress. Addison, and Addison's devoted followers, pro- nounced both the versions good, but maintained that Tickell's had more of the original. The town gave a decided preference to Pope's. We do not think it worth while to settle such a question of precedence. Neither of the rivals can be said to have translated ADDISON. 89 the Iliad, unless, indeed, the word translation be used in the sense which it bears in the Midsummer Night's Dream. When Bottom makes his appearance with an ass's head instead of his own, Peter Quince ex- claims, "Bless thee! Bottom, bless thee! thou art translated." In this sense, undoubtedly, the readers of either Pope or Tickell may very properly exclaim, " Bless thee, Homer! thou art translated in- deed." Our readers will, we hope, agree with us in think- ing that no man in Addison's situation could have acted more fairly and kindly, both towards Pope and towards Tickell, than he appears to have done. But an odious suspicion had sprung up in the mind of Pope. He fancied, and he soon firmly believed, that there was a deep conspiracy against his fame and his fortunes. The work on which he had staked his repu- tation was to be depreciated. The subscription, on which rested his hopes of a competence, was to be de- feated. With this view Addison had made a rival translation : Tickell had consented to father it : and the wits of Button's had united to puff it. Is there any external evidence to support this grave accusatipn ? The answer is short. There is absolutely none. Was there any internal evidence which proved Ad- dison to be the author of this version ? Was it a work which Tickell was incapable of producing? Surely not. Tickell was a fellow of a college at Oxford, and must be supposed to have been able to construe the Iliad; and he was a better versifier than his friend. We are not aware that Pope pretended to have discov- ered any turns of expression peculiar to Addison. Had 90 MACAULAY'S such turns of expression been discovered, they would be sufficiently accounted for by supposing Addison to have corrected his friend's lines, as he owned that he had done. Is there anything in the character of the accused persons which makes the accusation probable? We answer confidently — nothing. Tickell, was long after this time described by Pope himself as a very fair and worthy man. Addison had been, during many years, before the public. Literary rivals, political opponents, had kept their eyes on him. But neither envy nor fac- tion, in their utmost rage, had ever imputed to him a single deviation from the laws of honor and of social morality. Had he been indeed a man meanly jealous of fame, and capable of stooping to base and wicked arts for the purpose of injuring his competitors, would his vices have remained latent so long? He was a writer of tragedy : had he ever injured Eowe ? He was a writer of comedy : had he not done ample justice to Congreve, and given valuable help to jSteele ? He was a pamphleteer: have not his good-nature and gener- osity been acknowledged by Swift, his rival in fame and his adversary in politics? That Tickell should have been guilty of a villany seems to us highly improbable. That Addison should have been guilty of a villany seems to us highly im- probable. But that these two men should have con- spired together to commit a villany seems to us im- probable in a tenfold degree. AH that is known to us of their intercourse tends to prove that it was not the intercourse of two accomplices in crime. These are some of the lines in which Tickell poured forth his sorrow over the coffin of Addison : ADDISON. 91 " Or dost thou warn poor mortals left behind, A task well suited to thy gentle mind? Oh, if sometimes thy spotless form descend, To me thine aid, thou guardian genius, lend. When rage misguides me, or when fear alarms, When pain distresses, or when pleasure charms, In silent whisperings purer thoughts impart, And turn from ill a frail and feeble heart; Lead through the paths thy virtue trod before, Till bliss shall join, nor death can part us more." In what words, we should like to know, did this guardian genius invite his pupil to join in a plan such as the editor of the Satirist would hardly dare to pro- pose to the editor of the Age ? We do not accuse Pope of bringing an accusation which he knew to be false. We have not the smallest doubt that he believed it to be true; and the evidence on which he believed it he found in his own bad heart. His own life was one long series of tricks, as mean and as malicious as that of which he suspected Addison and Tickell. He was x all stiletto and mask. To injure, to insult, and to save himself from the consequences of injury and insult by lying and equivocating, was the habit of his life. He published a lampoon on the Duke of Chandos; he was taxed with it, and he lied and equivocated. He published a lampoon on Aaron Hill; he was taxed with it, and he lied and equivo- cated. He published a still fouler lampoon on Lady Mary Wortley Montague; he was taxed with it, and he lied with more than usual effrontery and vehemence. He puffed himself, and abused his enemies under feigned names. He robbed himself of his own letters, and then raised the hue and cry after them. Besides his frauds of malignity, of fear, of interest, and of 92 MACAULAY'S vanity, there were frauds which he seems to have com- mitted from love of fraud alone. He had a habit of stratagem, a pleasure in outwitting all who came near him. Whatever his object might be, the indirect road to it was that which he preferred. For Bolingbroke Pope undoubtedly felt as much love and veneration as it was in his nature to feel for any human being. Yet Pope was scarcely dead when it was discovered that, from no motive except the mere love of artifice, he had been guilty of an act of gross perfidy to Boling- broke. Nothing was more natural than that such a man as this should attribute to others that which he felt within himself. A plain, probable, coherent explana- tion is frankly given to him. He is certain that it is all a romance. A line of conduct scrupulously fair, and even friendly, is pursued toward him. He is con- vinced that it is merely a cover for a vile intrigue by which he is to be disgraced and ruined. It is vain to ask him for proofs. He has none, and wants none, except those which he carries in his own bosom. Whether Pope's malignity at length provoked Addi- son to retaliate for the first and last time, cannot now be known with certainty. We have only Pope's story, which runs thus. A pamphlet appeared containing some reflections which stung Pope to the quick. What those reflections were, and whether they were reflec- tions of which he had a right to complain, we have now no means of deciding. The Earl of Warwick, a foolish and vicious lad, who regarded Addison with the feelings with which such lads generally regard their best friends, told Pope, truly or falsely, that this pam- phlet had been written by Addison's direction. When ADDISON. 93 we consider what a tendency stories have to grow, in passing even from one honest man to another honest man, and when we consider that to the name of honest man neither Pope nor the Earl of Warwick had a claim, we are not disposed to attach much importance to this anecdote. It is certain, however, that Pope was furious. He had already sketched the character of Atticus in prose. In his anger he turned this prose into the brilliant and energetic lines which everybody knows by heart, 36 or ought to know by heart, and sent them to Addison. One charge which Pope has enforced with great skill is probably not without foundation. Addison was, we are inclined to believe, too fond of presiding over a circle of humble friends. Of the other imputations which these famous lines are intended to convey, scarcely one has ever been proved to be just, and some are certainly false. That Addison was not in the habit of " damning with faint praise " appears from innumerable passages in his writings, and from none more than from those in which he mentions Pope. And it is not merely unjust, but ridiculous, to describe a man who made the fortune of almost every one of his intimate friends, as " so obliging that he ne'er obliged." That Addison felt the sting of Pope's satire keenly, we cannot doubt. That he was conscious of one of the weaknesses with which he was reproached, is highly probable. But his heart, we firmly believe, acquitted him of the gravest part of the accusation. He acted like himself. As a satirist, he was, at his own weapons, more than Pope's match; and he would have been at no loss for topics. A distorted and diseased body, 94 MACAULAY'S tenanted by a yet more distorted and diseased mind; spite and envy thinly disguised by sentiments as be- nevolent and noble as those which Sir Peter Teazle admired in Mr. Joseph Surface; a feeble, sickly licen- tiousness ; an odious love of filthy and noisome images ; these were things which a genius less powerful than that to which we owe the Spectator could easily have held up to the mirth and hatred of mankind. Addi- son had, moreover, at his command other means of vengeance which a bad man would not have scrupled to use. He was powerful in the State. Pope was a Catholic; and, in those times, a minister would have found it easy to harass the most innocent Catholic by innumerable petty vexations. Pope, near twenty years later, said that " through the lenity of the Government alone he could live with comfort." " Consider/' he exclaimed, " the injury that a man of high rank and credit may do to a private person, under penal laws and many other disadvantages." It is pleasing to reflect that the only revenge which Addison took was to in- sert in the Freeholder a warm encomium on the trans- lation of the Iliad, and to exhort all lovers of learning to put down their names as subscribers. There could be no doubt, he said, from the specimens already pub- lished, that the masterly hand of Pope would do as much for Homer as Dryden had done for Virgil. From that time to the end of his life, he always treated Pope, by Pope's own acknowledgment, with justice. Friendship was, of course, at an end. One reason which induced the Earl of Warwick to play the ignominious part of tale-bearer on this occa- sion, may have been his dislike of the marriage which was about to take place between his mother and ADDISON. 95 Addison. The Countess Dowager, a daughter of the old and honorable family of the Myddletons of Chirk, a family which, in any country but ours, would be called noble, resided at Holland House. Addison had, during some years, occupied at Chelsea a small dwell- ing, once the abode of Nell Gwynn. Chelsea is now a district of London, and Holland House may be called a town residence. But, in the days of Anne and George the First, milkmaids and sportsmen wandered between green hedges and over fields bright with daisies, from Kensington almost to the shore of the Thames. Addi- son and Lady Warwick were country neighbors, and became intimate friends. The great wit and scholar tried to allure the young lord from the fashionable amusements of beating watchmen, breaking windows, and rolling women in hogsheads down Holborn Hill, to the study of letters and the practice of virtue. These well meant exertions did little good, however, either to the disciple or to the master. Lord Warwick grew up a rake ; and Addison fell in love. The mature beauty of the countess has been celebrated by poets in language which, after a very large allowance has been made for flattery, would lead us to believe that she was a fine woman; and her rank doubtless heightened her attractions. The courtship was long. The hopes of the lover appear to have risen and fallen with the fortunes of his party. His attachment was at length matter of such notoriety that, when he visited Ireland for the last time, Rowe addressed some consolatory verses to the Chloe of Holland House. It strikes us as a little strange that, in these verses, Addison should be called Lycidas, a name of singularly evil omen for a swain just about to cross St. George's Channel. 96 MACAULAY'S At length Chloe capitulated. Addison was indeed able to treat with her on equal terms. He had reason to expect preferment even higher than that which he had attained. He had inherited the fortune of a brother who died Governor of Madras. He had pur- chased an estate in Warwickshire, and had been wel- comed to his domain in very tolerable verse by one of the neighboring squires, the poetical fox-hunter, Wil- liam Somerville. In August, 1716, the newspapers an- nounced that Joseph Addison, Esquire, famous for many excellent works both in verse and prose, had espoused the Countess Dowager of Warwick. He now fixed his abode at Holland House, a house which can boast of a greater number of inmates dis- tinguished in political and literary history than any other private dwelling in England. His portrait still hangs there. The features are pleasing ; the complexion is remarkably fair; but, in the expression, we trace rather the gentleness of his disposition than the force and keenness of his intellect. Not long after his marriage he reached the height of civil greatness. The Whig Government had, dur- ing some time, been torn by internal dissensions. Lord Townshend led one section of the cabinet, Lord Sun- derland the other. At length, in the spring of 1717, Sunderland triumphed Townshend retired from office, and was accompanied by Walpole and Cowper. Sun- derland proceeded to reconstruct the ministry, and Addison was appointed Secretary of State. It is cer- tain that the Seals were pressed upon him, and were at first declined by him. Men equally versed in official business might easily have been found; and his col- leagues knew that they could not expect assistance from ADDISON. 97 him in debate. He owed his elevation to his popu- larity, to his stainless probity, and to his literary fame. But scarcely had Addison entered the cabinet when his health began to fail. From one serious attack he recovered in the autumn; and his recovery was cele- brated in Latin verses, worthy of his own pen, by Vin- cent Bourne, who was then at Trinity College, Cam- bridge. A relapse soon took place ; and, in the follow- ing spring, Addison was prevented v by a severe asthma from discharging the duties of his post. He resigned it, and was succeeded by his friend Craggs, a young man whose natural parts, though little improved by cultivation, were quick and showy, whose graceful per- son and winning manners had made him generally acceptable in society, and who, if he had lived, would probably have been the most formidable of all the rivals of Walpole. As yet there was no Joseph Hume. The ministers, therefore, were able to bestow on Addison a retiring pension of fifteen hundred pounds a year. In what form this pension was given we are not told by the biographers, and have not time to inquire. But it is certain that Addison did not vacate his seat in the House of Commons. Eest of mind and body seemed to have re-estab- lished his health; and he thanked God, with cheerful piety, for having set him free both from his office and from his asthma. Many years seemed to be before him, and he meditated many works, a tragedy on the death of Socrates, a translation of the Psalms, a treatise on the evidences of Christianity. Of this last performance, a part, which we could well spare, has come down to us. 98 MACAULAY'S But the fatal complaint soon returned, and gradu- ally prevailed against all the resources of medicine. It is melancholy to think that the last months of such a life should have been overclouded both by domestic and by political vexations. A tradition which began early, which has been generally received, and to which we have nothing to oppose, has represented his wife as an arrogant and imperious woman. It is said that, till his health failed him, he was glad to escape from the Countess Dowager and her magnificent dining- room, blazing with the gilded devices of the House of Eich, to some tavern where he could enjoy a laugh, a talk about Virgil and Boileau, and a bottle of claret, with the friends of his happier days. All those friends, however, were not left to him. Sir Eichard Steele had been gradually estranged by various causes. He con- sidered himself as one who, in evil times, had braved martyrdom for his political principles, and demanded, when the Whig party was triumphant, a large com- pensation for what he had suffered when it was mili- tant. The Whig leaders took a very different view of his claims. They thought that he had. "by his own petulance and folly, brought them as well as himself into trouble, and, though they did not absolutely neg- lect him, doled out favors to him with a sparing hand. It was natural that he should be angry with them, and especially angry with Addison. But what above all seems to have disturbed Sir Eichard was the elevation of Tickell, who, at thirty, was made by Addison Under- secretary of State; while the editor of the Tatler and Spectator, the author of the Crisis, the member for Stockbridge who had been prosecuted for firm adher- ence to the House of Hanover, was, at near fifty, forced, ADDISON. 99 after many solicitations and complaints, to content himself with a share in the patent of Drury Lane Theatre. Steele himself says, in his celebrated letter to Congreve, that Addison, by his preference of Tickell, " incurred the warmest resentment of other gentle- men " ; and everything seems to indicate that, of those resentful gentlemen, Steele was himself one. While poor Sir Eichard was brooding over what he considered as Addison's unkindness, a new cause of quarrel arose. The Whig party, already divided against itself, was rent by a new schism. The cele- brated bill for limiting the number of peers had been brought in. The proud Duke of Somerset, first in rank of all the nobles whose religion permitted them to sit in Parliament, was the ostensible author of the measure. But it was supported, and, in truth, devised by the Prime Minister. 2 We are satisfied that the bill was most pernicious; and we fear that the motives which induced Sunder- land to frame it were not honorable to him. But we cannot deny that it was supported by many of the best and wisest men of that age. N or was this strange. The royal prerogative had, within the memory of the generation then in the vigor of life, been so grossly abused, that it was still regarded with a jealousy which, when the peculiar situation of the house of Brunswick is considered, may perhaps be called im- moderate. The particular prerogative of creating peers had, in the opinion of the Whigs, been grossly abused by Queen Anne's last ministry; and even the Tories admitted that her Majesty, in swamping, as it has since been called, the Upper House, had done what only an extreme case could justify. The theory of the LofC. 100 MACAULAY'S English constitution, according to many high authori- ties, was that three independent powers — the sover- eign, the nobility, and the commons — ought constantly to act as checks on each other. If this theory were sound, it seemed to follow that to put one of these powers under the absolute control of the other two was absurd. But if the number of peers were unlim- ited, it could not well be denied that the Upper House was under the absolute control of the Crown and the Commons, and was indebted only to their moderation for any power which it might be suffered to retain. Steele took part with the opposition, Addison with the ministers. Steele, in a paper called the Plebeian, vehemently attacked the bill. Sunderland called for help on Addison, and Addison obeyed the call. In a paper called the Old Whig, he answered, and indeed refuted, Steele's arguments. It seems to us that the premises of both the controversialists were unsound, that, on those premises, Addison reasoned well and Steele ill, and that consequently Addison brought out a false conclusion while Steele blundered upon the truth. In style, in wit, and in politeness, Addison maintained his superiority, though the Old Whig is by no means one of his happiest performances. At first both the anonymous opponents observed the laws of propriety. But at length Steele so far forgot himself as to throw an odious imputation on the morals of the chiefs of the administration. Addi- son replied with severity, but, in our opinion, with less severity than was due to so grave an offence against morality and decorum ; nor did he, in his just anger, forget for a moment the laws of good taste and good breeding. One calumny which has been often repeated, ADDISON. 101 and never yet contradicted, it is our duty to expose. It is asserted in the Biographia Britannica that Addi- son designated Steele as " little Dicky." This asser- tion was repeated by Johnson, who had never seen the Old Whig, and was therefore excusable. It has also been repeated by Miss Aikin, who has seen the Old Whig, and for whom therefore there is less excuse. Now, it is true that the words " little Dicky " occur in the Old Whig, and that Steele's name was Eichard. It is equally true that the words " little Isaac " occur in the Duenna, and that Newton's name was Isaac. But we confidently affirm that Addison's little Dicky had no more to do with Steele than Sheridan's little Isaac with Newton. If we apply the words " little Dicky " to Steele, we deprive a very lively and in- genious passage, not only of all its wit, but of all its meaning. Little Dicky was the nickname of Henry Norris, an actor of remarkably small stature, but of great humor, who played the usurer Gomez, then a most popular part, in Dryden's Spanish Friar. 37 The merited reproof which Steele had received, though softened by some kind and courteous expres- sions, galled him bitterly. He replied with little force and great acrimony ; but no rejoinder appeared. Addi- son was fast hastening to his grave ; and had, we may well suppose, little disposition to prosecute a quarrel with an old friend. His complaint had terminated in dropsy. He bore up long and manfully. But at length he abandoned all hope, dismissed his physi- cians, and calmly prepared himself to die. His works he intrusted to the care of Tickell, and dedicated them a very few days before his death to Craggs, in a letter written with the sweet and grace- 102 MACAULAY'S ful eloquence of a Saturday's Spectator. In this, his last composition, he alluded to his approaching end in words so manly, so cheerful, and so tender, that it is difficult to read them without tears. At the same time he earnestly recommended the interests of Tickell to the care of Craggs. Within a few hours of the time at which this dedi- cation was written, Addison sent to beg Gay, who was then living by his wits about town, to come to Holland House. Gay went, and was received with great kind- ness. To his amazement his forgiveness was implored by the dying man. Poor Gay, the most good-natured and simple of mankind, could not imagine what he had to forgive. There was, however, some wrong, the remembrance of which weighed on Addison's mind, and which he declared himself anxious to repair. He was in a state of extreme exhaustion; and the parting was doubtless a friendly one on both sides. Gay sup- posed that some plan to serve him had been in agita- tion at court, and had been frustrated by Addison's influence. Nor is this improbable. Gay had paid assiduous court to the royal family. But in the queen's days he had been the eulogist of Bolingbroke, and was still connected with many Tories. It is not strange that Addison, while heated by conflict, should have thought himself justified in obstructing the prefer- ment of one whom he might regard as a political enemy. Neither is it strange that, when reviewing his whole life, and earnestly scrutinizing all his mo- tives, he should think that he had acted an unkind and ungenerous part, in using his power against a dis- tressed man of letters, who was as harmless and as helpless as a child. ADDISON. 103 One inference may be drawn from this anecdote. It appears that Addison, on his death-bed, called him- self to a strict account, and was not at ease till he had asked pardon for an injury which it was not even suspected that he had committed, for an injury which would have caused disquiet only to a very tender con- science. Is it not, then, reasonable to infer that, if he had really been guilty of forming a base conspiracy against the fame and fortunes of a rival, he would have expressed some remorse for so serious a crime? But it is unnecessary to multiply arguments and evi- dence for the defence, when there is neither argument nor evidence for the accusation. The last moments of Addison were perfectly serene. His interview with his step-son is universally known. f See/' he said, " how a Christian can die." The piety of Addison was, in truth, of a singularly cheerful char- acter. The feeling which predominates in all his de- votional writings is gratitude. God was to him the all-wise and all-powerful friend who had watched over his cradle with more than maternal tenderness; who had listened to his cries before they could form them- selves in prayer ; who had preserved his youth from the snares of vice; who had made his cup run over with worldly blessings; who had doubled the value of those blessings, by bestowing a thankful heart to enjoy them, and dear friends to partake them; who had rebuked the waves of the Ligurian Gulf, had purified the au- tumnal air of the Campagna, and had restrained the avalanches of Mont Cenis. Of the Psalms, his favorite was that which represents the Euler of all things under the endearing image of a shepherd, whose crook guides the flock safe, through gloomy and desolate glens, to 104: MACAULAY'S meadows well watered and rich with herbage. On that goodness to which he ascribed all the happiness of his life, he relied in the hour of death with the love which casteth out fear. He died on the 17th of June, 1719. He had just entered on his forty-eighth year. His body lay in state in the Jerusalem Chamber, and was borne thence to the Abbey at dead of night. The choir sang a funeral hymn. Bishop Atterbury, one of those Tories who had loved and honored the most accomplished of the Whigs, met the corpse, and led the procession by torchlight round the shrine of Saint Edward and the graves of the Plantagenets, to the Chapel of Henry the Seventh. On the north side of that chapel, in the vault of the House of Albemarle, the coffin of Addison lies next to the coffin of Monta- gue. Yet a few months, and the same mourners passed again along the same aisle. The same sad anthem was again chanted. The same vault was again opened, and the coffin of Craggs was placed close to the coffin of Addison. Many tributes were paid to the memory of Addi- son; but one alone is now remembered. Tickell be- wailed his friend in an elegy which would do honor to the greatest name in our literature, and which unites the energy and magnificence of Dry den to the tenderness and purity of Cowper. This fine poem was prefixed to a superb edition of Addison's works, which was published, in 1721, by subscription. The names of the subscribers proved how widely his fame had been spread. That his countrymen should be eager to pos- sess his writings, even in a costly form, is not wonder- ful. But it is wonderful that, though English litera- ture was then little studied on the Continent, Spanish ADDISON. 105 grandees, Italian prelates, marshals of France, should be found in the list. Among the most remarkable names are those of the Queen of Sweden, of Prince Eugene, of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, of the Dukes of Parma, Modena, and Guastalla, of the Doge of Genoa, of the Regent Orleans, and of Cardinal Dubois. We ought to add that this edition, though eminently beautiful, is in some important points defective; nor, indeed, do we yet possess a complete collection of Addison's writings. It is strange that neither his opulent and noble widow, nor any of his powerful and attached friends, should have thought of placing even a simple tablet, inscribed with his name, on the walls of the Abbey. It was not till three generations had laughed and wept over the pages that the omission was supplied by the public veneration. At length, in our own time, his image, skilfully graven, appeared in Poet's Corner. It represents him, as we can conceive him, clad in his dressing-gown, and freed from his wig, stepping from his parlor at Chelsea into his trim little garden, with the account of the Everlasting Club, or the Loves of Hilpa and Shalum, just finished for the next day's Spectator, in his hand. Such a mark of national respect was due to the unsullied statesman, to the accomplished scholar, to the master of pure English eloquence, to the consummate painter of life and man- ners. It was due, above all, to the great satirist, who alone knew how to use ridicule without abusing it; who, without inflicting a wound, effected a great social reform; and who reconciled wit and virtue, after a long and disastrous separation, during which wit had been led astray by profligacy, and virtue by fanaticism. 9 106 MACAULAY'S NOTES. 1 The essay on Addison first appeared in the Edinburgh Review for July, 1843. 2 Laputa is a fabled island visited by Gulliver in his Trav- els. The inhabitants were so given over to study that a man of rank was attended by a flapper who carried a distended bladder, attached to a long handle, with which he roused his master from a brown study, or warned him when likely to walk over a precipice or into other danger. 3 Under date of April 19th, Macaulay had written Napier, then editor : " Deak Napier — You may count on an article from me on Miss Aikin's Life of Addison. Longman sent me the sheets as they were printed. I own that I am greatly disap- pointed. . . . Miss Aikin's narrative is dull, shallow, and in- accurate. ... I pointed the grossest blunders out to Long- man (London publisher), and advised him to point them out to her without mentioning me. He did so. The poor woman could not deny that my remarks were just; but she railed most bitterly both at the publishers and at the Mr. Nobody who had had the insolence to find any blemish in her writ- ings . . . but I do not think that she suspects me." A few weeks later he writes : " I shall not be at all surprised if both you and the public think my paper on Addison a failure, but I own that I am partial to it. . . . I am truly vexed to find Miss Aikin's book so very bad that it is impossible for us, with due regard to our own character, to praise it. All I can do is to speak civilly of her writings generally, and to express regret that she should have been nodding. I have found not less than forty gross blunders in the first volume. Of these I may perhaps point out eight or ten as courteously as the case will bear. Yet it goes much against my feelings to censure any woman, even with the greatest lenity. I shall not again undertake to review any lady's book till I know how it is executed." With this testimony in mind the student will readily grant that the introductory paragraphs of the essay are quite diplomatic. Macaulay was a bachelor. ADDISON. 107 ♦Pronounced Tibbals. The country seat of Burleigh, Queen Elizabeth's prime minister. 5 Lace cravats with loose flowing ends. 6 A noted coffee house kept by a former servant of Addi- son, a favorite resort of Addison and his friends. Coffee houses were an important feature of London in Addison's day, and exerted a tremendous political influence. Each coffee house had its set of patrons, and a man who cared to know what was going on went to his coffee house with much the same regularity and keenness of interest with which one opens his daily paper in these days. Among the noted resorts men- tioned in this essay are Will's, frequented by wits; the Gre- cian, by scholars; Jonathan's, by merchants; and Garraway's by stockbrokers. 7 A London school for boys. In addition to Addison, the school has the honor of having instructed Steele, Blackstone, Wesley, Grote, Havelock, and Thackeray. Other schools of the same class are Rugby, Eton, and Harrow. 8 The American university idea implies colleges or depart- ments of unlike purposes, as the college of law, of medicine, of arts, of engineering, etc. The English university consists of a group of colleges much alike and under a merely nominal central management. Oxford University, as well as Cam- bridge, includes a score of colleges not unlike in organization and purpose, but occupying separate groups of buildings and under independent, management. The names of the colleges in the oldest two universities are quite similar. Thus, in Ox- ford University, and also in Cambridge University, we find a Pembroke College, a Corpus Christi College, a Queen's College, a Christ's College, a Trinity College, a Jesus College, and a Magdalene College (pronounced Maudlin). Some of these col- leges have great wealth and records reaching back several centuries. All are endowed. The Demies (accent the last syllable) of Magdalene College, Oxford, were granted privi- leges not unlike those enjoyed by the holders of scholarships in American universities. A fellowship, on the other hand, was conferred by a college upon its graduate. It entitled him to apartments and certain meals, and carried with it a liter- ary pension varying in amount from $150 to $800 per annum, 108 MACAULAY'S thus enabling a young man to pursue his graduate studies at his alma mater or abroad. Fellows participated in the gov- ernment of the college. We often hear of fellows going down posthaste from London to participate in some exciting col- lege election. Fellowships were theoretically for life, but were usually revoked on the attainment of an independent position in a profession, or on marriage, unless continued by special vote of the college. 'No less a personage than Samuel Johnson, with the aid of associates, investigated the remarkable case of alleged spirit rapping in Cock Lane, and reported that the whole affair was an imposture practiced by a young girl. Johnson felt pretty sore over the affair and resented any further questioning. 10 Ireland forged various documents purporting to be in Shakespeare's own hand. Among these was a play called Vor- tigern, which was actually placed on the stage (1796) before the imposture was discovered. 11 The legend is one of some note. The Emperor Marcus Aurelius was conducting in person a campaign against the Quadi, a German tribe. The Romans were perishing of thirst in the heat of summer, when, in answer to the prayers of the twelfth legion, composed of Christian soldiers, the cloudless sky darkened and a refreshing rain began to fall. While the Ro- mans were enjoying this respite, the Quadi suddenly made an unexpected attack, and would have cut the Romans to pieces but for an extraordinary descent of fire and hail, before which the Germans fled in dismay. Some phenomenal storm seems without doubt to have occurred. Both the conquered and the conquerors believed that it was supernatural. The German tribes hastened to sue for peace, and the Roman emperor gave his Christian soldiers the name of the " Thundering Legion " (174A.D.). 12 Eusebius, one of the early Christian fathers, alleges in his church history that in one of the churches of Edessa he found a letter in Syriac from Abgarus, ruler of Edessa, to Christ; also Christ's reply to Abgarus. Eusebius wrote in Greek, and gave a Greek translation of both letters. 13 " An aphorism is a truth pointedly set forth, relating rather to speculative principles . . . than to practical matters, ADDISON. 109 and forming a brief and excellent statement of a doctrine; thus, ' Maladies are cured by nature, not by remedies.' An apothegm, in common matters what an aphorism is in higher, is a short, pithy, instructive saying; as, 'Heaven helps those who help themselves.' " The one shades into the other. 14 " And now between the battle lines advances the ardent leader of the Pygmies, terrible in majesty and commanding in step, who towers above all others like a huge mountain, and rises aloft half an arm's length." 15 Sir Roger Newdigate, a Middlesex member of Parliament, founded an annual prize at Oxford for the best English verse. The Seatonian prize is awarded by Cambridge for the same purpose. 18 The Kit Cat Club was a convivial association of wits de- voted to literature, politics, a good time, and the fortunes of the Whig party. Addison became a member on his return from the Continent in 1703. One custom characteristic of the club was that of engraving toasts to famous Whig beauties on the drinking glasses. 17 The French Academy, consisting of forty men of letters, was organized by Cardinal Richelieu in 1635 with a view of controlling the usage of words and influencing literary taste. The constitution provides, among other duties, for the publi- cation of a dictionary of the French language. The latest edition is that of 1878. Vacancies are filled by ballot, not al- ways, it is thought, with justice. 18 " Think not I mean by that to find fault with the Latin verses of one of your illustrious academicians which you have sent me I have found them very beautiful, worthy of Vida and of Sannazar, but not of Horace and of Virgil." 19 " Why, O muse, dost thou bid me, born of a Sicambrian father far this side the Alps, again to lisp in Latin numbers." 20 « p U pp e t shows and the crane-pygmy battle." 21 About one hundred miles south of Venice, on an eastern spur of the Apennines, entirely surrounded by Italian terri- tory. The little republic is still independent and much as Addison found it. Area, 32 square miles; population, 16,000. 22 Herculaneum and Pompeii were buried by an eruption of Vesuvius, 79 a. d., beneath from seventy to one hundred and HO MACAULAY'S twelve feet of mud, ashes, and lava. Their rediscovery was accidental. Excavations were not begun for several years after Addison's visit, so it is quite probable he had no thought of these ancient cities. 23 As may be readily inferred, Newmarket is noted for horse racing. 24 Lifeguardsman Shaw was an English pugilist who won renown at Waterloo, and fell after holding six French guards at bay until he had slain four of them. 25 " So when an angel by divine command With rising tempests shakes a guilty land, Such as of late o'er pale Britannia pass'd, Calm and serene he drives the furious blast; And, pleased the Almighty's orders to perform, Rides in the whirlwind and directs the storm." 20 A portion of Johnson's criticism is given. (See his Lives of the English Poets. ) " No passage in the Campaign has been more often mentioned than the simile of the Angel, which is said in the Tatler to be one of the noblest thoughts that ever entered into the heart of man, and is therefore worthy of attentive consideration. Let it be first inquired whether it be a simile. A poetical simile is a discovery of likeness between two actions in their general nature dissimilar, or of causes ter- minating by different operations in some resemblance of effect. But the mention of another like consequence from a like cause, or of a like performance by a like agency, is not a simile, but an exemplification. It is not a simile to say that the Thames waters fields, as the Po waters fields; or that as Hecla vomits flames in Iceland so iEtna vomits flames in Sicily. When Horace says of Pindar, that he pours his vio- lence and rapidity of verse as a river swollen with rain rushes from the mountain; or of himself, that his genius wanders in quest of poetical declarations as the bee wanders to collect honey, he in either case produces a simile : the mind is impressed with the resemblance of things generally unlike, as unlike as intellect and body. . . . Marlborough is so like the Angel in the poem that the action of both is almost the same, and per- formed by both in the same manner. Marlborough teaches the battle to rage, the Angel directs the storm; Marlborough ADDISON. HI is unmoved in peaceful thought, the Angel is calm and serene; Marlborough stands unmoved amidst 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 second time. But perhaps this thought, though hardly a simile, was remote from vulgar conceptions, and required great labor of research or dexterity of application. Of this Dr. Madden, a name which Ireland ought to honor, once gave me his opinion. ' If I had set,' said he, ' ten schoolboys to write on the Battle of Blenheim, and eight had brought me the Angel, I should not have been surprised.' " 27 For Maeaulay's theory of particularity, see his Essay on Milton, page 7. 28 Santa Croce has been called the Westminster Abbey of Florence. Michael Angelo, Galileo, Machiavelli, and many noted Italians rest beneath fine monuments in its nave. 29 A street in London at one time inhabited by people of social standing. Fashion, however, went westward, and the locality was abandoned to boarding-house keepers, faring much as the region about the British Museum in this respect. It was a short walk from the publishing center, and sheltered many writers of small incomes who lived by their wits. The term became proverbial, so that any writer who wrote for immediate return was likely to be called an inhabitant of Grub Street. Now called Milton Street. 30 " Sponging-house. A victualing house or tavern, where persons arrested for debt were kept by a bailiff for twenty- four hours before being lodged in prison, in order that their friends might have an opportunity of settling the debt. Sponging-houses were usually the private dwellings of bailiffs, and were so named from the extortionate charges made upon prisoners for their accommodation therein." — Century Dic- tionary. 31 A Mr. John Partridge, astrologer, had issued almanacs for some thirty years containing such prognostications as might aid his sales among the credulous. Swift, under the pen name of Isaac Bickerstaff, issued a pamphlet called Pre- dictions for the Year 1708, in which he inveighed against false predictions, and gave a variety of predictions which might be 112 MACAULAY'S ADDISON. relied upon, including the death of the King of France, and in- cidentally stating that Partridge would die March 29th, 11 p.m. As soon aS the hour of Partridge's alleged death was past, Swift issued a second pamphlet, setting forth cir- cumstantially An Account of Partridge's Death in the most doleful language imaginable. Partridge was infuriated, and issued a pamphlet insisting that he was still alive. Bicker- staff replied, commiserating Partridge on suffering under a hallucination, and assuring him that he was really dead. Thus a seesaw of pamphlets was kept up for two years, set- ting the coffee houses in a roar. Benjamin Franklin, profit- ing by the wit of Swift, perpetrated a similar joke on a Phila- delphia rival. 32 A gentle rap at Carlyle. 83 A band of riotous and profligate young men who went so far as to assault evening wayfarers. Finally they rose to such a pitch of infamy that they were forced to disband, under royal penalty of outlawry. "London is divided into several districts. The central business portion about the Bank of England and St. Paul's is known as the City. 35 Iliad, vi, 226-229, Bryant's translation: " And let us in the tumult of the fray Avoid each other's spears, for there will be Of Trojans and of their renowned allies Enough for me to slay, whene'er a god Shall bring them in my way. In turn for thee Are many Greeks to smite, whomever thou Canst overcome." 36 See Pope's Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot. 8T In a letter to Napier, written a few weeks after this pas- sage was written, Macaulay felicitates himself on having picked up an old book for a sixpence which fully confirmed his view of " Little Dicky." In fact, the suggestion of the essay as published in the Review was " ' Little Dicky ' was evi- dently the nickname of some comic actor who played." etc. The present positive assertion was substituted in the later re- vised edition published in book form. SAMUEL JOHNSON. SAMUEL JOHNSON.' Samuel Johnson, one of the most eminent Eng- lish writers of the eighteenth century, was the son of Michael Johnson, who was, at the beginning of that century, a magistrate of Lichfield, 2 and a book- seller of great note in the midland counties. Mi- chael's abilities and attainments seem to have been considerable. He was so well acquainted with the contents of the volumes which he exposed to sale, that the country rectors of Staffordshire and Worcester- shire thought him an oracle on points of learning. Between him and the clergy, indeed, there was a strong religious and political sympathy. He was a zealous churchman, and, though he had qualified him- self for municipal office by taking the oaths to the sovereigns in possession, was to the last a Jacobite 3 in heart. At his house, a house which is still pointed out to every traveller who visits Lichfield, Samuel was born on the 18th of September, 1709. In the child, the physical, intellectual, and moral peculiarities which afterward distinguished the man were plainly discernible — great muscular strength accompanied by much awkwardness and many infirmities; great quick- ness of parts,* with a morbid propensity to sloth and procrastination; a kind and generous heart, with a gloomy and irritable temper. He had inherited from 10 113 114 MACAULAY'S his ancestors a scrofulous taint, which it was beyond the power of medicine to remove. His parents were weak enough to believe that the royal touch was a spe- cific for this malady. 5 In his third year he was taken up to London, inspected by the court surgeon, prayed over by the court chaplains, and stroked and pre- sented with a piece of gold by Queen Anne. One of his earliest recollections was that of a stately lady in a diamond stomacher and a long black hood. Her hand was applied in vain. The boy's features, which were originally noble and not irregular, were distorted by his malady. His cheeks were deeply scarred. He lost for a time the sight of one eye, and he saw but very imperfectly with the other. But the force of his mind overcame every impediment. Indolent as he was, he acquired knowledge with such ease and rapidity, that at every school to which he was sent he was soon the best scholar. From sixteen to eighteen he re- sided at home, and. was left to his own devices. He learned much at this time, though his studies were without guidance and without plan. He ransacked his father's shelves, dipped into a multitude of books, read what was interesting, and passed over what was dull. An ordinary lad would have acquired little or no useful knowledge in such a way; but much that was dull to ordinary lads was interesting to Samuel. He read little Greek; for his proficiency in that lan- guage was not such that he could take much pleasure in the masters of Attic poetry and eloquence. But he had left school a good Latinist, and he soon ac- quired, in the large and miscellaneous library of which he now had the command, an extensive knowl- edge of Latin literature. That Augustan 6 delicacy of JOHNSON. 115 taste which is the boast of the great public schools of England, he never possessed. But he was early familiar with some classical writers who were quite unknown to the best scholars in the sixth form at Eton. He was peculiarly attracted by the works of the great restorers of learning. Once, while search- ing for some apples, he found a huge folio volume of Petrarch's works. The name excited his curiosity, and he eagerly devoured hundreds of pages. Indeed, the diction and versification of his own Latin compo- sitions show that he had paid at least as much atten- tion to modern copies from the antique as to the orig- inal models. While he was thus irregularly educating himself, his family was sinking into hopeless poverty. Old Mi- chael Johnson was much better qualified to pore upon books, and to talk about them, than to trade in them. His business declined: his debts increased; it was with difficulty that the daily expenses of his household were defrayed. It was out of his power to support his son at either university; but a wealthy neighbor offered assistance, and, in reliance on promises which proved to be of very little value, Samuel was entered at Pembroke College, Oxford. When the young scholar presented himself to the rulers of that soci- ety, they were amazed not more by his ungainly figure and eccentric manners than by the quantity of ex- tensive and curious information which he had picked up during many months of desultory, but not un- profitable study. On the first day of his residence, he surprised his teachers by quoting Macrobius; 7 and one of the most learned among them declared that he had never known a freshman of equal attainments. 116 MACAULAY'S At Oxford, Johnson resided during about three years. He was poor, even to raggedness; and his ap- pearance excited a mirth and a pity which were equally intolerable to his haughty spirit. He was driven from the quadrangle of Christ Church 8 by the sneering looks which the members of that aristocrat- ical society cast at the holes in his shoes. Some char- itable person placed a new pair at his door; but he spurned them away in a fury. Distress made him, not servile, but reckless and ungovernable. No opulent gentleman commoner, 9 panting for one and twenty, could have treated the academical authorities with more gross disrespect. The needy scholar was gen- erally to be seen under the gate of Pembroke, a gate now adorned with his effigy, haranguing a circle of lads, over whom, in spite of his tattered gown and dirty linen, his wit and audacity gave him an undis- puted ascendency. In every mutiny against the dis- cipline of the college, he was the ringleader. Much was pardoned, however, to a youth so highly distin- guished by abilities and acquirements. He had early made himself known by turning Pope's Messiah into Latin verse. The style and rhythm, indeed, were not exactly Virgilian; but the translation found many ad- mirers, and was read with pleasure by Pope himself. The time drew near at which Johnson would, in the ordinary course of things, have become a bachelor of arts; but he was at the end of his resources. Those promises of support on which he had relied had not been kept. His family could do nothing for him. His debts to Oxford tradesmen were small indeed, yet larger than he could pay. In the autumn of 1731 he was under the necessity of quitting the university JOHNSON. 117 without a degree. In the following winter his father died. The old man left but a pittance; and of that pittance almost the whole was appropriated to the support of his widow. The property to which Samuel succeeded amounted to no more than twenty pounds. His life, during the thirty years which followed, was one hard struggle with poverty. The misery of that struggle needed no aggravation, but was aggra- vated by the sufferings of an unsound body and an unsound mind % Before the young man left the uni- versity, his hereditary malady had broken forth in a singularly cruel form. He had become an incurable hypochondriac. He said long after, that he had been mad all his life, or at least not perfectly sane; and, in truth, eccentricities less strange than his have often been thought grounds sufficient for absolving felons and for setting aside wills. His grimaces, his ges- tures, his mutterings, sometimes diverted and some- times terrified people who did not know him. At a dinner table he would, in a fit of absence, stoop down and twitch off a lady's shoe. He would amaze a drawing-room by suddenly ejaculating a clause of the Lord's Prayer. He would conceive an unintelligible aversion to a particular alley, and perform a great circuit rather than see the hateful place. He would set his heart on touching every post in the streets through which he walked. If by any chance he missed a post, he would go back a hundred yards, and repair the omission. Under the influence of his disease, his senses became morbidly torpid, and his imagination morbidly active. At one time he would stand poring on the town clock without being able to tell the hour. At another, he would distinctly 118 MAC AULA Y'S hear his mother, who was many miles off, calling him by his name. But this was not the worst. A deep melancholy took possession of him, and gave a dark tinge to all his views of human nature and of human destiny. Such wretchedness as he endured has driven many men to shoot themselves or drown themselves. But he was under no temptation to commit suicide. He was sick of life, but he was afraid of death; and he shuddered at every sight or sound which reminded him of the inevitable hour. In religion he found but little comfort during his long and frequent fits of de- jection; for his religion partook of his own character. The light from heaven shone on him indeed, but not in a direct line, or with its own pure splendor. The rays had to struggle through a disturbing medium: they reached him refracted, dulled, and discolored by the thick gloom which had settled on his soul; and, though they might be sufficiently clear to guide him, were too dim to cheer him. With such infirmities of body and of mind, this celebrated man was left, at two and twenty, to fight his way through the world. He remained during about five years in the midland counties. At Lichfield, his birthplace and his early home, he had inherited some friends, and acquired others. He was kindly noticed by Henry Hervey, a gay officer of noble family, who happened to be quartered there. Gilbert Walmesley, a registrar of the ecclesiastical court of the diocese — a man of distinguished parts, learning, and knowledge of the world — did himself honor by patronizing the young adventurer, whose repulsive person, unpolished manners, and squalid garb, moved many of the petty aristocracy of the neighborhood to laughter or to JOHNSON. 119 disgust. At Lichfield, however, Johnson could find no way of earning a livelihood. He became usher 10 of a grammar school in Leicestershire; he resided as a humble companion in the house of a country gentle- man; but a life of dependence was insupportable to his haughty spirit. He repaired to Birmingham, and there earned a few guineas by literary drudgery. In that town he printed a translation, little noticed at the time, and long forgotten, of a Latin book about Abyssinia. 11 He then put forth proposals for pub- lishing by subscription the poems of Politian, with notes containing a history of modern Latin verse; but subscriptions did not come in, and the volume never appeared. While leading this vagrant and miserable life, Johnson fell in love. The object of his passion was Mrs. Elizabeth Porter, a widow who had chil- dren as old as himself. To ordinary spectators, the lady appeared to be a short, fat, coarse woman, 12 painted half an inch thick, dressed in gaudy colors, and fond of exhibiting provincial airs and graces which were not exactly those of the Queensberrys and Lepels. To Johnson, however, whose passions were strong, whose eyesight was too weak to distin- guish ceruse from natural bloom, and who had seldom or never been in the same room with a woman of real fashion, his Titty, as he called her, was the most beau- tiful, graceful, and accomplished of her sex. That his admiration was unfeigned cannot be doubted, for she was as poor as himself. She accepted, with a readiness which did her little honor, the addresses of a suitor who might have been her son. The mar- riage, however, in spite of occasional wranglings, 120 MACAULAY'S proved happier than might have been expected. The lover continued to be under the illusions of the wed- ding day till the lady died, in her sixty-fourth year. On her monument he placed an inscription extolling the charms of her person and of her manners; and when, long after her decease, he had occasion to men- tion her, he exclaimed, with a tenderness half ludi- crous, half pathetic, "pretty creature!" His marriage made it necessary for him to exert himself more strenuously than he had hitherto done. He took a house in the neighborhood of his native town, and advertised for pupils. But eighteen months passed away; and only three pupils came to his acad- emy. Indeed, his appearance was so strange, and his temper so violent, that his schoolroom must have resembled an ogre's den. Nor was the tawdry painted grandmother whom he called his Titty, well qualified to make provision for the comfort of young gentle- men. David Garrick, who was one of the pupils, used many years later to throw the best company of Lon- don into convulsions of laughter by mimicking the endearments of this extraordinary pair. At length Johnson, in the twenty-eighth year of his age, determined to seek his fortune in the cap- ital as a literary adventurer. He set out with a few guineas, three acts of the tragedy of Irene in manu- script, and two or three letters of introduction from his friend Walmesley. Never since literature became a calling in Eng- land had it been a less gainful calling than at the time when Johnson took up his residence in London. In the preceding generation, a writer of eminent merit was sure to be munificently rewarded by the JOHNSON. 121 Government. The least that he could expect was a pension or a sinecure place; and, if he showed any aptitude for politics, he might hope to be a member of Parliament, a lord of the treasury, an ambassador, a secretary of state. It would be easy, on the other hand, to name several writers of the nineteenth cen- tury, of whom the least successful has received forty thousand pounds from the booksellers. But Johnson entered on his vocation in the most dreary part of the dreary interval which separated two ages of prosper- ity. Literature had ceased to flourish under the pat- ronage of the great, and had not begun to flourish under the patronage of the public) One man of letters, indeed, Pope, had acquired by his pen what was then considered as a handsome fortune, and lived on a foot- ing of equality with nobles and ministers of state. But this was a solitary exception. Even an author whose reputation was established and whose works were popular — such an author as Thomson, whose Seasons were in every library; such an author as Fielding, whose Pasquin had had a greater run than any drama since the Beggar's Opera — was some- times glad to obtain, by pawning his best coat, the means of dining on tripe at a cookshop underground, where he could wipe his hands, after his greasy meal, on the back of a Newfoundland dog. It is easy, there- fore, to imagine what humiliations and privations must have awaited the novice who had still to earn a name. One of the publishers to whom Johnson ap- plied for employment measured with a scornful eye that athletic though uncouth frame, and exclaimed, "You had better get a porter's knot, 13 and carry trunks." Nor was the advice bad; for a porter was 122 MACAULAY'S likely to be as plentifully fed and as comfortably lodged as a poet. Some time appears to have elapsed before John- son was able to form any literary connection from which he could expect more than bread for the day which was passing over him. He never forgot the generosity with which Hervey, who was now residing in London, relieved his wants during this time of trial. "Harry Hervey," said the old philosopher many years later, " was a vicious man; but he was very kind to me. If you call a dog Hervey, I shall love him." At Hervey's table, Johnson sometimes en- joyed feasts which were made more agreeable by con- trast. But in general he dined, and thought that he dined well, on sixpennyworth of meat and a penny- worth of bread at an alehouse near Drury Lane. The effect of the privations and sufferings 14 which he endured at this time was discernible to the last in his temper and his deportment. His manners had never been courtly. They now became almost savage. Being frequently under the necessity of wearing shabby coats and dirty shirts, he became a confirmed sloven. Being often very hungry when he sat down to his meals, he contracted a habit of eating with ravenous greediness. Even to the end of his life, and even at the tables of the great, the sight of food affected him as it affects wild beasts and birds of prey. His taste in cookery, formed in subterranean ordinaries and a la mode beefshops, was far from deli- cate. Whenever he was so fortunate as to have near him a hare that had been kept too long, or a meat pie made with rancid butter, he gorged himself with such violence, that his veins swelled and the moisture JOHNSON. 123 broke out on his forehead. The affronts which his poverty emboldened stupid and low-minded men to offer to him, would have broken a mean spirit into sycophancy, but made him rude even to ferocity. Unhappily, the insolence, which, while it was de- fensive, was pardonable and in some sense respectable, accompanied him into societies where he was treated with courtesy and kindness. He was repeatedly pro- voked into striking those who had taken liberties with him. All the sufferers, however, were wise enough to abstain from talking about their beatings, except Osborne, the most rapacious and brutal of booksellers, who proclaimed everywhere that he had been knocked down by the huge fellow whom he had hired to puff the Harleian Library. About a year after Johnson had begun to reside in London, he was fortunate enough to obtain regular employment from Cave, an enterprising and intelli- gent bookseller, who was proprietor and editor of the Gentleman's Magazine. That journal, just enter- ing on the ninth year of its long existence, was the only periodical work in the kingdom which then had what would now be called a large circulation. It was, indeed, the chief source of parliamentary intelligence. It was not then safe, even during a recess, to publish an account of the proceedings of either House with- out some disguise. Cave, however, ventured to enter- tain his readers with what he called " Eeports of the Debates of the Senate of Lilliput." France was Ble- fuscu; London was Mildendo; pounds were sprugs; the Duke of Newcastle was the Nardac secretary of state; Lord Hardwicke was the Hurgo Hickrad; and William Pulteney was Wingul Pulnub. To write the 124 MACAULAY'S speeches was, during several years, the business of Johnson. He was generally furnished with notes — meagre indeed, and inaccurate — of what had been said; but sometimes he had to find arguments and eloquence, both for the ministry and for the oppo- sition. He was himself a Tory, not from rational conviction — for his serious opinion was, that one form of government was just as good or as bad as another — but from mere passion, such as inflamed the Capulets against the Montagues, 15 or the Blues of the Eoman circus against the Greens. 16 In his infancy he had heard so much talk about the villainies of the Whigs and the dangers of the Church, that he had become a furious partisan when he could scarcely speak. Be- fore he was three, he had insisted on being taken to hear Sacheverell 17 preach at Lichfield Cathedral, and had listened to the sermon with as much respect, and probably with as much intelligence, as any Stafford- shire squire in the congregation. The work which had been begun in the nursery had been completed by the university. Oxford, when Johnson resided there, was the most Jacobitical place in England; and Pembroke was one of the most Jacobitical colleges in Oxford. The prejudices which he brought up to Lon- don were scarcely less absurd than those of his own Tom Tempest. Charles II and James II were two of the best kings that ever reigned. Laud, a poor creature who never did, said, or wrote anything indi- cating more than the ordinary capacity of an old woman, was a prodigy of parts and learning, over whose tomb Art and Genius still continued to weep. Hampden deserved no more honorable name than that of " the zealot of rebellion." Even the ship JOHNSON. 125 money, condemned not less decidedly by Falkland and Clarendon than by the bitterest Soundheads, Johnson would not pronounce to have been an un- constitutional impost. Under a government the mild- est that had ever been known in the world, under a government which allowed to the people an unprece- dented liberty of speech and action, he fancied that he was a slave; he assailed the ministry with obloquy which refuted itself, and regretted the lost freedom and happiness of those golden days in which a writer who had taken but one-tenth part of the license al- lowed to him would have been pilloried, mangled with the shears, whipped at the cart's tail, and flung into a noisome dungeon to die. He hated dissenters and stockjobbers, the excise and the army, septennial par- liaments and continental connections. He long had an aversion to the Scotch, an aversion of which he could not remember the commencement, but which, he owned, had probably originated in his abhorrence of the conduct of the nation during the Great Ee- bellion. It is easy to guess in what manner debates on great party questions were likely to be reported by a man whose judgment was so much disordered by party spirit. A show of fairness was, indeed, neces- sary to the prosperity of the magazine. But John- son long afterwards owned, that, though he had saved appearances, he had taken care that the Whig dogs should not have the best of it; and, in fact, every passage which has lived, every passage which bears the marks of his higher faculties, is put into the mouth of some member of the opposition. A few weeks after Johnson had entered on these obscure labors, he published a work which at once 126 MACAULAY'S placed him high among the writers of his age. It is probable that what he had suffered during his first year in London had often reminded him of some parts of that noble poem in which Juvenal had described the misery and degradation of a needy man of let- ters, lodged among the pigeons' nests in the totter- ing garrets which overhung the streets of Eome. Pope's admirable imitations of Horace's Satires and Epistles had recently appeared, were in every hand, and were by many readers thought superior to the originals. What Pope had done for Horace, Johnson aspired to do for Juvenal. The enterprise was bold, and yet judicious. For between Johnson and Juvenal there was much in common — much more, certainly, than between Pope and Horace. Johnson's London appeared without his name in May, 1738. He received only ten guineas for this stately and vigorous poem; but the sale was rapid, and the success complete. A second edition was re- quired within a week. Those small critics who are always desirous to lower established reputations, ran about proclaiming that the anonymous satirist was superior to Pope in Pope's own peculiar department of literature. It ought to be remembered, to the honor of Pope, that he joined heartily in the ap- plause with which the appearance of a rival genius was welcomed. He made inquiries about the author of London. Such a man, he said, could not long be concealed. The name was soon discovered; and Pope, with great kindness, exerted himself to obtain an academical degree, and the mastership of a gram- mar school, for the poor young poet. The attempt failed, and Johnson remained a bookseller's hack. JOHNSON. 127 It does not appear that these two men — the most eminent writer of the generation which was going out, and the most eminent writer of the generation which was coming in — ever saw each other. They lived in very different circles, one surrounded by dukes and earls, the other by starving pamphleteers and index makers. Among Johnson's associates at this time may be mentioned Boyse, who, when his shirts were pledged, scrawled Latin verses, sitting up in bed with his arms through two holes in his blank- ets, who composed very respectable sacred poetry when he was sober, and who was at last run over by a hackney coach when he was drunk; Hoole, sur- named the metaphysical tailor, who, instead of at- tending to his measures, used to trace geometrical dia- grams on the board where he sat cross-legged; and the penitent impostor, George Psalmanazar, who, after poring all day, in a humble lodging, on the folios of Jewish rabbis and Christian fathers, indulged himself at night with literary and theological conver- sation at an alehouse in the city. But the most re- markable of the persons with whom at this time John- son consorted, was Richard Savage, an earl's son, a shoemaker's apprentice, who had seen life in all its forms, who had feasted among blue ribbands in St. James's Square, and had lain with fifty-pound weights of irons on his legs in the condemned ward of Newgate. This man had, after many vicissitudes of fortune, sunk at last into abject and hopeless pov- erty. His pen had failed him. His patrons had been taken away by death, or estranged by the riotous profusion with which he squandered their bounty, and the ungrateful insolence with which he rejected 128 MACAULAY'S their advice. He now lived by begging. He dined on venison and champagne whenever he had been so fortunate as to borrow a guinea. If his questing had been unsuccessful, he appeased the rage of hun- ger with some scraps of broken meat, and lay down to rest under the piazza of Covent Garden in warm weather, and in cold weather as near as he could get to the furnace of a glasshouse. Yet, in his misery, he was still an agreeable companion. He had an inexhaustible store of anecdotes about that gay and brilliant world from which he was now an outcast. He had observed the great men of both parties in hours of careless relaxation, had seen the leaders of opposition without the mask of patriotism, and had heard the prime minister roar with laughter, and tell stories not overdecent. During some months, Savage lived in the closest familiarity with Johnson; and then the friends parted, not without tears. Johnson remained in London to drudge for Cave. Savage went to the west of England, lived there as he had lived everywhere, and in 1743 died, penniless and heartbroken, in Bristol jail. Soon after his death, while the public curiosity was strongly excited about his extraordinary charac- ter and his not less extraordinary adventures, a life of him appeared, widely different from the catch- penny lives of eminent men which were then a staple article of manufacture in Grub Street. The style was, indeed, deficient in ease and variety; and the writer was evidently too partial to the Latin element of our language. But the little work, with all its faults, was a masterpiece. No finer specimen of literary biography existed in any language, living or dead; JOHNSON. 129 and a discerning critic might have confidently pre- dicted that the author was destined to be the founder of a new school of English eloquence. The Life of Savage was anonymous; but it was well known in literary circles that Johnson was the writer. During the three years which followed, he produced no important work; but he was not, and indeed could not be, idle. The fame of his abil- ities and learning continued to grow. Warburton pronounced him a man of parts and genius; and the praise of Warburton was then no light thing. Such was Johnson's reputation, that in 1747 several emi- nent booksellers combined to employ him in the arduous work of preparing a Dictionary of the Eng- lish Language, in two folio volumes. The sum which they agreed to pay him was only fifteen hundred guineas; and out of this sum he had to pay several poor men of letters who assisted him in the humbler parts of his task. The Prospectus of the Dictionary he addressed to the Earl of Chesterfield. Chesterfield had long been celebrated for the politeness of his manners, the brilliancy of his wit, and the delicacy of his taste. He was acknowledged to be the finest speaker in the House of Lords. He had recently governed Ireland, at a momentous conjuncture, with eminent firmness, wisdom, and humanity ; and he had since become Sec- retary of State. He received Johnson's homage with the most winning affability, and requited it with a few guineas, bestowed, doubtless, in a very graceful manner, but was by no means desirous to see all his carpets blackened with the London mud, and his soups and wines thrown to right and left over the gowns 130 MACAULAY'S of fine ladies and the waistcoats of fine gentlemen, by an absent, awkward scholar, who gave strange starts, and uttered strange growls, who dressed like a scare- crow, and ate like a cormorant. During some time, Johnson continued to call on his patron, but, after being repeatedly told by the porter that his lordship was not at home, took the hint, and ceased to present himself at the inhospitable door. Johnson had nattered himself that he should have completed his Dictionary by the end of 1750; but it was not till 1755 that he at length gave his huge volumes to the world. During the seven years which he passed in the drudgery of penning defini- tions, and marking quotations for transcription, he sought for relaxation in literary labor of a more agreeable kind. In 1749 he published the Vanity of Human Wishes, 18 an excellent, imitation of the Tenth Satire of Juvenal. It is in truth not easy to say whether the palm belongs to the ancient or to the modern poet. The couplets in which the fall of Wolsey is described, though lofty and sonorous, are feeble when compared with the wonderful lines which bring before us all Eome in tumult on the day of the fall of Sejanus, the laurels on the doorposts, the white bull stalking towards the Capitol, the stat- ues rolling down from their pedestals, the flatterers of the disgraced minister running to see him dragged with a hook through the streets, and to have a kick at his carcass before it is hurled into the Tiber. It must be owned, too, that in the concluding passage the Christian moralist has not made the most of his advantages, and has fallen decidedly short of the sub- limity of his Pagan model. On the other hand, Juve- JOHNSON. 131 nal's Hannibal must yield to Johnson's Charles; 19 and Johnson's vigorous and pathetic enumeration of the miseries of a literary life must be allowed to be superior to Juvenal's lamentation over the fate of Demosthenes and Cicero. For the copyright of the Vanity of Human Wishes, Johnson received only fifteen guineas. A few days after the publication of this poem, his tragedy, begun many years before, was brought on the stage. His pupil, David Garrick, had in 1741 made his appearance on a humble stage in Goodman's Fields, had at once risen to the first place among actors, and was now, after several years of almost uninterrupted success, manager of Drury Lane Thea- tre. The relation between him and his old preceptor was of a very singular kind. They repelled each other strongly, and yet attracted each other strongly. Na- ture had made them of very different clay; and cir- cumstances had fully brought out the natural pe- culiarities of both. Sudden prosperity had turned Garrick's head. Continued adversity had soured Johnson's temper. Johnson saw, with more envy than became so great a man, the villa, the plate, the china, the Brussels carpet, which the little mimic had got by repeating, with grimaces and gesticula- tions, what wiser men had written; and the exqui- sitely sensitive vanity of Garrick was galled by the thought, that, while all the rest of the world was applauding him, he could obtain from one morose cynic, whose opinion it was impossible to despise, scarcely any compliment not acidulated with scorn. Yet the two Lichfield men had so many early recol- lections in common, and sympathized with each other 132 MACAULAY'S on so many points on which they sympathized with nobody else in the vast population of the capital, that though the master was often provoked by the mon- keylike impertinence of the pupil, and the pupil by the bearish rudeness of the master, they remained friends till they were parted by death. Garrick now brought Irene out, with alterations sufficient to displease the author, yet not sufficient to make the piece pleasing to the audience. The public, however, listened, with little emotion, but with much civility, to five acts of monotonous declamation. After nine representations, the play was withdrawn. It is, in- deed, altogether unsuited to the stage, and, even when perused in the closet, will be found hardly worthy of the author. He had not the slightest no- tion of what blank verse should be. A change in the last syllable of every other line would make the versification of the Vanity of Human Wishes closely resemble the versification of Irene. The poet, how- ever, cleared, by his benefit nights and by the sale of the copyright of his tragedy, about three hundred pounds, then a great sum in his estimation. About a year after the representation of Irene, he began to publish a series of short essays on morals, manners, and literature. This species of composition had been brought into fashion by the success of the Tatler and by the still more brilliant success of the Spectator. A crowd of small writers had vainly at- tempted to rival Addison. The Lay Monastery, the Censor, the Freethinker, the Plain Dealer, the Cham- pion, and other works of the same kind, had had their short day. None of them had obtained a permanent place in our literature; and they are now to be found JOHNSON. 133 only in the liberies of the curious. At length John- son undertook the adventure in which so many as- pirants had failed. In the thirty-sixth year after the appearance of the last number of the Spectator, ap- peared the first number of the Eambler. From March, 1750, to March, 1752, this paper continued to come out every Tuesday and Saturday. From the first, the Eambler was enthusiastic- ally admired by a few eminent men. Richardson, when only five numbers had appeared, pronounced it equal, if not superior, to the Spectator. Young and Hartley expressed their approbation not less warmly. Bubb Dodington, among whose many faults indifference to the claims of genius and learn- ing cannot be reckoned, solicited the acquaintance of the writer. In consequence, probably, of the good offices of Dodington, who was then the confidential adviser of Prince Frederick, two of his Royal High- nesses gentlemen carried a gracious message to the printing office, and ordered seven copies for Leicester House. But these overtures seem to have been very coldly received. Johnson had had enough of the pat- ronage of the great to last him all his life, and. was not disposed to haunt any other door as he had haunted the door of Chesterfield. By the public the Rambler was at first very coldly received. Though the price of a number was only twopence, the sale did not amount to five hun- dred. The profits were therefore very small. But as soon as the flying leaves were collected and reprinted, they became popular. The author lived to see thir- teen thousand copies spread over England alone. Separate editions were published for the Scotch and 134 MACAULA^'S Irish markets. A large party pronounced the style perfect, so absolutely perfect, that in some essays it would be impossible for the writer himself to alter a single word for the better. Another party, not less numerous, vehemently accused him of having cor- rupted the purity of the English tongue. The best critics admitted that his diction was too monotonous, too obviously artificial, and now and then turgid even to absurdity. But they did justice to the acute- ness of his observations on morals and manners, to the constant precision and frequent brilliancy of his language, to the weighty and magnificent eloquence of many serious passages, and to the solemn yet pleas- ing humor of some of the lighter papers. On the question of precedence between Addison and John- son — a question which, seventy years ago, was much disputed — posterity has pronounced a decision from which there is no appeal. Sir Roger, his chaplain and his butler, Will Wimble and Will Honeycomb, the Vision of Mirza, the Journal of the Retired Citizen, the Everlasting Club, the Dunmow Flitch, the Loves of Hilpah and Shalum, the Visit to the Exchange, and the Visit to the Abbey, are known to everybody. But many men and women, even of highly cultivated minds, are unacquainted with Squire Bluster and Mrs. Busy, Quisquilius and Venustulus, the Allegory of Wit and Learning, the Chronicle of the Revolutions of a Garret, and the sad fate of Aningait and Ajut. The last Rambler was written in a sad and gloomy hour. Mrs. Johnson had been given over by the physicians. Three days later she died. She left her husband almost heartbroken. Many people had been surprised to see a man of his genius and learn- JOHNSON. 135 ing stooping to every drudgery, and denying himself almost every comfort, for the purpose of supplying a silly, affected old woman with superfluities, which she accepted with but little gratitude. But all his affection had been concentrated on her. He had nei- ther brother nor sister, neither son nor daughter. To him she was beautiful as the Gunnings, and witty as Lady Mary. Her opinion of his writings was more important to him than the voice of the pit of Drury Lane Theatre, or the judgment of the Monthly Ke- view. The chief support which had sustained him through the most arduous labor of his life was the hope that she would enjoy the fame and the profit which he anticipated from his Dictionary. She was gone; and in that vast labyrinth of streets, peopled by eight hundred thousand hitman beings^ he was alone. Yet it was necessary for hiin to set himself, as he expressed it, doggedly to work* After three more laborious years, the Dictionary was at length complete. J It had been generally supposed that this great work would be dedicated to the eloquent and accom- plished nobleman to whom the prospectus had been addressed. He well knew the Value of such a com- pliment; and therefore, when the day of publication drew near, he exerted himself to soothe, by a show of zealous and at the same time of delicate and judi- cious kindness, the pride which he had so cruelly wounded. Since the Eamblers had ceased to ap- pear, the town had been entertained by a journal called the World, to which many men of high rank and fashion contributed. In two successive numbers of the World the Dictionary was, to use 136 MACAULAYS the modern phrase, puffed with wonderful skill. The writings of Johnson were warmly praised. It was proposed that he should be invested with the author- ity of a dictator, nay, of a pope, over our language, and that his decisions about the meaning and the spelling of words should be received as final. His two folios, it was said, would of course be bought by everybody who could afford to buy them. It was soon known that these papers were written by Chester- field. But the just resentment of Johnson was not to be so appeased. In a letter 20 written with singu- lar energy and dignity of thought and language, he repelled the tardy advances of his patron. The Dictionary came forth without a dedication. In the preface the author truly declared that he owed noth- ing to the great, and described the difficulties with which he had been left to struggle so forcibly and pathetically, that the ablest and most malevolent of all the enemies of his fame, Home Tooke, never could read that passage without tears. The public, on this occasion, did Johnson full justice, and something more than justice. The best lexicographer may well be content if his produc- tions are received by the world with cold esteem. But Johnson's Dictionary 21 was hailed with an en- thusiasm such as no similar work has ever excited. It was, indeed, the first dictionary which could be read with pleasure. The definitions show so much acuteness of thought and command of language, and the passages quoted from poets, divines, and philoso- phers, are so skilfully selected, that a leisure hour may always be very agreeably spent in turning over the pages. The faults of the book resolve themselves, JOHNSON. 169 it at last to the verge of publication, without one act of assistance, one word of encouragement, or one smile of favor. Such treatment I did not expect, for I never had a patron before. " The shepherd in Virgil grew at last acquainted with Love, and found him a native of the rocks. " Is not a patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and when he has reached ground encumbers him with help? The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labors, had it been early, had been kind; but it has been delayed till I am indifferent, and cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary, and cannot impart it; till I am known, and do not want it. I hope it is no very cynical asperity not to confess obligations where no benefit has been received, or to be unwilling that the public should consider me as owing that to a patron which Providence has enabled me to do for myself. " Having carried on my work thus far with so little obli- gation to any favorer of learning, I shall not be disappointed though I should conclude it, if less be possible, with less; for I have been long wakened from that dream of hope, in which I once boasted myself with so much exaltation, my Lord, " Your Lordship's most humble, most obedient servant, " Sam. Johnson." 21 Johnson's Dictionary contains 40,301 words, classified as follows: Nouns, 20,413; pronouns, 41; adjectives, 9,219; verbs, 7,880; adverbs, 2,592; prepositions, 69; interjections, 68; conjunctions, 19. A number of Dr. Johnson's definitions are worth noting: Club. An assembly of good fellows meeting under certain conditions. Coal. The common fossil fewel. Education. Formation of manners in youth; the manner of breeding youth; nurture. Excise. A hateful tax levied upon commodities and ad- judged not by the common judges of property, but by wretches hired by those to whom excise is paid. 13 170 MACAULAY'S Ghost. A spirit appearing after death. Grubstreet. Originally the name of a street in Moor fields in London, much inhabited by writers of small histories, dic- tionaries, and temporary poems, whence any mean produc- tion is called grubstreet. History. A narrative of events and facts delivered with dignity. Lichfield. The field of the dead. A city in Staffordshire, so named from martyred Christians. Lexicographer. A harmless drudge. Oats. A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people. Patron. One who countenances, supports, or protects. Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence and is re- paid with flattery. Pension. An allowance made to any one without an equivalent. In England it is generally understood to mean pay given a state hireling for treason to his country. Pensioner. A slave of state hired by a stipend to obey his master. Reptile. An animal that creeps on many feet. Soap. A substance used in washing, made of a lixivium of vegetable alkaline and any unctuous substance. Tory. One who adheres to the ancient constitution of the state and the apostolical hierarchy of the Church of Eng- land, opposed to a Whig. Whig. The name of a faction. Wolf. A kind of wild dog that devours sheep. 22 Rasselas is well worth several readings. 23 Hector: Paris and Troilus, you have both said well; And on the cause and question now in hand Have glozed, but superficially; not much Unlike young men, whom Aristotle thought Unfit to hear moral philosophy. — Shakespeare, Troilus and Crcssida, act ii, scene 2. 24 See Winter' s Tale, act ii, scene 1, line 183. 25 Pounds sterling, of course. About fifteen hundred dol- lars, but equivalent to an income of twenty-five hundred or JOHNSON. 171 three thousand dollars in the London of to-day. Note Dr. Johnson's definitions of pension and pensioner on page 170. 28 Compare Carlyle's estimate : " Boswell wrote a good Book because he had a heart and an eye to discern Wisdom, and an utterance to render^t-^ortfrrtrecause of his free insight, his lively talent, above all, of his Love and childlike Open- mindedness. His sneaking sycophancies, his greediness and forwardness, whatever was bestial and earthy in him, are so many blemishes in his Book, which still disturb us in its clearness: wholly hindrances, not helps. Towards Johnson, however, his feeling was not Sycophancy, which is the lowest, but Reverence, which is the highest of human feelings. None but a reverent man (which so unspeakably few are) could have found his way from BoswelPs environment to John- son's: . . . But for ourselves, let every one of us cling to this last article of Faith, and know it as the beginning of all knowledge worth the name: That neither James BosweiPs good Book, nor any other good thing, in any time or in any place, was, is, or can be performed by any man in virtue of his badness, but always and solely in spite thereof. " As for the Book itself, questionless the universal favor entertained for it is well merited. In worth as a Book we have rated it beyond any other product of the eighteenth century: all Johnson's own Writings, laborious and in their kind genuine above most, stand on a quite inferior level to it." 27 James Macpherson issued a volume of poetry purporting to be a translation from the Gaelic of fragmentary poems by Ossian, an alleged third century Scottish Homer. According to Macpherson's story he had gathered these traditional fragments with incredible industry among the fishermen and peasantry of the Western Isles. He made much of storm- clouds, rolling waves, deep resounding caverns, of shaggy warriors, of fighting, and of feasting, using enough incident and scenery to have supplied William Black with material for a dozen novels. Had he possessed a trifle more of lit- erary ability — that is to say, had he written more simply and had he sent out his volume as his own conception of third century life in the Western Isles of Scotland, Mac- 172 MACAULAY'S JOHNSON pherson would have won fame. If, instead of pretending that he gave literal translations of poetry that had been passed from bard and minstrel to mother and child for fourteen cen- turies, the deluded writer had been honest and had published his conception of prehistoric Scottish minstrelsy, the name of Macpherson would have had standing, but as the case was, his forgeries were soon discovered and his rhapsodical verses fell short of success by the narrow margin that so narrowly separates the sublime from the ridiculous. 28 1 much desire, if you will, to strive with you. 29 Benjamin Franklin, as well as other " rebels beyond the Atlantic," had a poor opinion of Dr. Johnson's political writings. SUGGESTIVE EXERCISES. 1. Make two lists of proper names. One of names to be looked up with care, the other of names of little significance. Ability to discriminate between significant names and unim- portant names is one of the marks of an intelligent reader. 2. Show by quotation or inference that Johnson and Ma- caulay belonged to different political parties. 3. Make a list of eminent literary people whom Johnson is likely to have met. Make a similar list for Macaulay. 4. Reconcile " he was not and, indeed, could not be idle " (see page 129) with " his constitutional indolence " (see page 141). 5. Gather from this essay an opinion as to whether Ma- caulay came from poverty as did Dr. Johnson. 6. Look out a paragraph in this essay that goes to justify John Morley's assertion that " Macaulay exults in the details that go to our five senses . . . the glories of taste and touch, of loud sound and glittering spectacle." Examine Ma- caulay's nouns and adjectives, making a list, for instance, of those that appeal to the eye. 7. Look through several paragraphs to decide whether, on the whole, Macaulay's sentences are long or short. (1) *BooKs recommended for the 1903. 1904-. and 1905 Examination* in English for College Entrance. FOR STUDY AND PRACTISE. Shakspere's Macbeth. Edited by Richard Jones, Ph. D., Professor of Literature, Vanderbilt University. 195 pages. 30 cents. Burke's Speech on Conciliation with America. Edited by William I. Crane, Head of Department of English, Steele High School, Dayton, Ohio. 185 pages. 30 cents. Selections from Milton's Shorter Poems. Arranged in chronological order and edited, with Introduction and Notes, by Frederic D. Nichols, Associate in English, University of Chicago. 25 cents. Macaulay's Essays on Milton and Addison. Edited by George B. Aiton, A. M., State Inspector of High Schools, Minnesota. 25 cents. FOR READING AND PRACTISE. Shakspere's Merchant of Venice. Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by Richard Jones, Ph. D., Professor of Literature, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tenn. Cloth, 30 cents. Shakspere's Julius Caesar. Edited by W. H. McDougal, Head of De- partment of English in the Belmont School for Boys, Belmont, Cal. Cloth, 30 cents. 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This is done, not in order to burden the reader's memory with useless details, but the aim has been to make the book useful as a book of reference, as well as to convey to the reader a sense of the wide range and the continuity of Roman lit- erature. As compared with other short histories of Roman literature, this book is distinguished for its com- pleteness and for the large number of selections from .the works of the ancient authors. D. APPLETON AND COMPANY, NEW YORK. JOHNSON. 137 for the most part, into one great fault. Johnson was a wretched etymologist. He knew little or nothing of any Teutonic language except English, which, in- deed, as he wrote it, was scarcely a Teutonic lan- guage; and thus he was absolutely at the mercy of Junius and Skinner. The Dictionary, though it raised Johnson's fame, added nothing to his pecuniary means. The fifteen hundred guineas which the booksellers had agreed to pay him had been advanced and spent before the last sheets issued from the press. It is painful to relate, that, twice in the course of the year which followed the publication of this great work, he was arrested and carried to sponging-houses, and that he was twice indebted for his liberty to his excellent friend Eich- ardson. It was still necessary for the man who had been formally saluted by the highest authority as dictator of the English language, to supply his wants by constant toil. He abridged his Dictionary. He proposed to bring out an edition of Shakespeare by subscription; and many subscribers sent in their names, and laid down their money; but he soon found the task so little to his taste that he turned to more attractive employments. He contributed many papers to a new monthly journal, which was called the Literary Magazine. Few of these papers have much interest; but among them was the very best thing that he ever wrote, a masterpiece both of reasoning and of satirical pleasantry, the review of Jenyns's Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil. In the spring of 1758 Johnson put forth the first of a series of essays entitled the Idler. During two years these essays continued to appear weekly. They 11 138 MACAULAY'S were eagerly read, widely circulated, and, indeed, im- pudently pirated while they were still in the original form, and had a large sale when collected into vol- umes. The Idler may be described as a second part of the Eambler, somewhat livelier and somewhat weaker than the first part. While Johnson was busied with his Idlers, his mother, who had accomplished her ninetieth year, died at Lichfield. It was long since he had seen her; but he had not failed to contribute largely, out of his small means, to her comfort. In order to. defray the charges of her funeral, and to pay some debts which she had left, he wrote a little book in a single week, and sent off the sheets to the press without reading them over. A hundred pounds were paid him for the copyright; and the purchasers had great cause to be pleased with their bargain, for the book was Eas- selas. 22 The success of Easselas was great, though such ladies as Miss Lydia Languish must have been griev- ously disappointed when they found that the new volume from the circulating library was little more than a dissertation on the author's favorite theme, the vanity of human wishes ; that the Prince of Abys- sinia was without a mistress, and the princess with- out a lover; and that the story set the hero and the heroine down exactly where it had taken them up. The style was the subject of much eager con- troversy. The Monthly Eeview and the Critical Eeview took different sides. Many readers pro- nounced the writer a pompous pexl^^wiro^Vould never use a word of two syllables where it was pos- sible to use a word of six, and who could not make a JOHNSON. 139 waiting woman relate her adventures without bal- ancing every noun with another noun, and every epi- thet with another epithet. Another party, not less zealous, cited with delight numerous passages in which weighty meaning was expressed with accuracy, and illustrated with splendor. And both the censure and the praise were merited. About the plan of Rasselas little was said by the critics; and yet the faults of the plan might seem to invite severe criticism. Johnson has frequently blamed Shakespeare for neglecting the proprieties of time and place, and for ascribing to one age or nation the manners and opinions of another. Yet Shake- speare has not sinned in this way more grievously than Johnson. Rasselas and Imlac, Nekayah and Pe- kuah, are evidently meant to be Abyssinians of the eighteenth century; for the Europe which Imlac de- scribes is the Europe of the eighteenth century; and the inmates of the Happy Valley talk familiarly of that law of gravitation which Newton discovered, and which was not fully received, even at Cambridge, till the eighteenth century. What a real company of Abyssinians would have been may be learned from Bruce's travels. But Johnson, not content with turn- ing filthy savages ignorant of their letters, and gorged with raw steaks cut from living cows, into philoso- phers as eloquent and enlightened as himself or his friend Burke, and into ladies as highly accomplished as Mrs. Lennox or Mrs. Sheridan, transferred the whole domestic system of England to Egypt. Into a land of harems, a land of polygamy, a land where women are married without ever being seen, he in- troduced the flirtations and jealousies of our ball- 140 MACAULAY'S rooms. In a land where there is boundless liberty of divorce, wedlock is described as the indissoluble com- pact. " A youth and maiden meeting by chance, or brought together by artifice, exchange glances, re- ciprocate civilities, go home and dream of each other. Such," says Easselas, " is the common process of mar- riage." Such it may have been, and may still be, in London, but assuredly not at Cairo. A writer who was guilty of such improprieties had little right to blame the poet who made Hector quote Aristotle, 23 and represented Julio Eomano 24 as flourishing in the days of the oracle of Delphi. By such exertions as have been described, John- son supported himself till the year 1762. In that year a great change in his circumstances took place. He had from a child been an enemy of the reigning dynasty. His Jacobite prejudices had been exhibited with little disguise both in his works and in his con- versation. Even in his massy and elaborate Diction- ary, he had, with a strange want of taste and judg- ment, inserted bitter and contumelious reflections on the Whig party. The excise, which was a favorite re- source of Whig financiers, he had designated as a hateful tax. He had railed against the commis- sioners of excise in language so coarse that they had seriously thought of prosecuting him. He had with difficulty been prevented from holding up the Lord Privy Seal by name as an example of the meaning of the word "renegade." A pension he had defined as pay given to a state hireling to betray his country; a pensioner, as a slave of state hired by a stipend to obey a master. It seemed unlikely that the author of these definitions would himself be pensioned. But JOHNSON. 141 that was a time of wonders. George III had ascended the throne, and had, in the course of a few months, disgusted many of the old friends, and conciliated many of the old enemies, of his house. The city was becoming mutinous. Oxford was becoming loyal. Cavendishes and Bentincks were murmuring. Somer- sets and Wyndhams were hastening to kiss hands. The head of the treasury was now Lord Bute, who was a Tory, and could have no objection to Johnson's Toryism. Bute wished to be thought a patron of men of letters; and Johnson was one of the most emi- nent and one of the most needy men of letters in Europe. A pension 25 of three hundred a year was graciously offered, and with very little hesitation ac- cepted. This event produced a change in Johnson's whole way of life. For the first time since his boyhood, he no longer felt the daily goad urging him to the daily toil. He was at liberty, after thirty years of anxiety and drudgery, to indulge his constitutional indolence, to lie in bed till two in the afternoon, and to sit up talking till four in the morning, without fearing either the printer's devil or the sheriff's officer. One laborious task, indeed, he had bound himself to perform. He had received large subscriptions for his promised edition of Shakespeare; he had lived on those subscriptions during some years; and he could not, without disgrace, omit to perform his part of the contract. His friends repeatedly exhorted him to make an effort; and he repeatedly resolved to do so. But, notwithstanding their exhortations and his reso- lutions, month followed month, year followed year, and nothing was done. He prayed fervently against 142 MACAULAY'S his idleness; he determined, as often as he received 1 the sacrament, that he would no longer doze away and trifle away his time; but the spell under which he lay resisted prayer and sacrament. His private notes at this time are made up of self-reproaches. " My indolence/' he wrote on Easter Eve in 1764, "has sunk into grosser sluggishness. A kind of strange oblivion has overspread me, so that I know not what was become of the last year." Easter, 1765, came, and found him still in the same state. " My time," he wrote, " has been unprofitably spent, and seems as a dream that has left nothing behind. My memory grows confused, and I know not how the days pass over me." Happily for his honor, the charm which held him captive was at length broken by no gentle or friendly hand. He had been weak enough to pay serious attention to a story about a ghost which haunted a house in Cock Lane, and had ac- tually gone himself, with some of his friends, at one in the morning, to St. John's Church, Clerkenwell, in the hope of receiving a communication from the perturbed spirit. But the spirit, though adjured with all solemnity, remained obstinately silent; and it soon appeared that a naughty girl of eleven had been amusing herself by making fools of so many philoso- phers. Churchill, who, confident in his powers, drunk with popularity, and burning with party spirit, was looking for some man of established fame and Tory politics to insult, celebrated the Cock Lane ghost in three cantos, nicknamed Johnson Pomposo, asked where the book was which had been so long promised and so liberally paid for, and directly accused the great moralist of cheating. This terrible word JOHNSON. x 143 proved effectual; and in October, 1765, appeared, after a delay of nine years, the new edition of Shake- speare. V/This publication saved Johnson's character for honesty, but added nothing to the fame of his abil- ties and learning. The preface, though it contains some good passages, is not in his best manner. The most valuable notes are those in which he had an op- portunity of showing how attentively he had, during many years, observed human life and human nature. The best specimen is the note on the character of Polonius. Nothing so good is to be found even in Wilhelm Meister's admirable examination of Hamlet. But here praise must end. It would be difficult to name a more slovenly, a more worthless, edition of any great classic. The reader may turn over play after play without finding one happy conjectural emendation, or one ingenious and satisfactory expla- nation of a passage which had baffled preceding com- mentators. Johnson had, in his Prospectus, told the world that he was peculiarly fitted for the task which he had undertaken, because he had, as a lexicog- rapher, been under the necessity of taking a wider view of the English language than any of his prede- cessors. That his knowledge of our literature was extensive, is indisputable. But, unfortunately, he had altogether neglected that very part of our literature with which it is especially desirable that an editor of Shakespeare should be conversant. It is danger- ous to assert a negative. Yet little will be risked by the assertion, that in the two folio volumes of the English Dictionary there is not a single passage quoted from any dramatist of the Elizabethan age, 144 MACAULAyS except Shakespeare and Ben. Even from Ben the quotations are few. Johnson might easily, in a few months, have made himself well acquainted with every old play that was extant. But it never seems to have occurred to him that this was a necessary preparation for the work which he had undertaken. He would doubtless have admitted that it would be the height of absurdity in a man who was not famil- iar with the works of iEschylus and Euripides to publish an edition of Sophocles. Yet he ventured to publish an edition of Shakespeare without having ever in his life, as far as can be discovered, read a single scene of Massinger, Ford, Dekker, Webster, Marlowe, Beaumont, or Fletcher. His detractors were noisy and scurrilous. Those who most loved and honored him had little to say in praise of the manner in which he had discharged the duty of a commenta- tor. He had, however, acquitted himself of a debt which had long lain heavy on his conscience, and he sank back into the repose from which the sting of satire had roused him. He long continued to live upon the fame which he had already won. He was honored by the University of Oxford with a doctor's degree, by the Royal Academy with a professorship, and by the King with an interview, in which his Majesty most graciously expressed a hope that so ex- cellent a writer would not cease to write. In the interval, however, between 1765 and 1775, Johnson published only two or three political tracts, the long- est of which he could have produced in forty-eight hours, if he had worked as he worked on the Life of Savage and on Rasselas. But, though his pen was now idle, his tongue was JOHNSON. 145 active. The influence exercised by his conversation, directly upon those with whom he lived, and indi- rectly on the whole literary world, was altogether without a parallel. His colloquial talents were, in- deed, of the highest order. He had strong sense, quick discernment, wit, humor, immense knowledge of literature and of life, and an infinite store of curi- ous anecdotes. As respected style, he spoke far better than he wrote. Every sentence which dropped from his lips was as correct in structure as the most nicely balanced period of the Eambler. But in his talk there were no pompous triads, and little more than a fair proportion of words in " osity " and " ation." All was simplicity, ease, and vigor. He uttered his short, weighty, and pointed sentences with a power of voice and a justness and energy of emphasis of which the effect was rather increased than dimin- ished by the rollings of his huge form, and by the asthmatic gaspings and puffings in which the peals of his eloquence generally ended. Nor did the laziness which made him unwilling to sit down to his desk prevent him from giving instruction or entertainment orally. To discuss questions of taste, of learning, of casuistry, in language so exact and so forcible that it might have been printed without the alteration of a word, was to him no exertion, but a pleasure. He loved, as he said, to fold his legs and have his talk out. He was ready to bestow the overflowings of his full mind on anybody who would start a subject — on a fellow-passenger in a stage-coach, or on the per- son who sat at the same table with him in an eating- house. But his conversation was nowhere so brilliant and striking as when he was surrounded by a few 12 146 MACAULAY'S friends, whose abilities and knowledge enabled them, as he once expressed it, to send him back every ball that he threw. Some of these, in 1764, formed them- selves into a club, which gradually became a formi- dable power in the commonwealth of letters. tThe ver- dicts pronounced by this conclave on new books were speedily known over all London, and were sufficient to sell off a whole edition in a day, or to condemn the sheets to the service of the trunk maker and the pastry cook. Nor shall we think this strange when we consider what great and various talents and ac- quirements met in the little fraternity. Goldsmith was the representative of poetry and light literature; Eeynolds, of the arts; Burke, of political eloquence and political philosophy. There, too, were Gibbon, the greatest historian, and Jones, the greatest lin- guist, of the age. Garrick brought to the meetings his inexhaustible pleasantry, his incomparable mim- icry, and his consummate knowledge of stage effect. Among the most constant attendants were two high- born and high-bred gentlemen, closely bound to- gether by friendship, but of widely different charac- ters and habits — Bennet Langton, distinguished by his skill in Greek literature, by the orthodoxy of his opinions, and by the sanctity of his life; and Topham Beauclerk, renowned for his amours, his knowledge of the gay world, his fastidious taste, and his sarcastic wit. To predominate over such a society was not easy. Yet even over such a society Johnson predomi- nated. Burke might, indeed, have disputed the su- premacy to which others were under the necessity of submitting. But Burke, though not generally a very patient listener, was content to take the second part JOHNSON. 147 when Johnson was present; and the club itself, con- sisting of so many eminent men, is to this day popu- larly designated as Johnson's Club. Among the members of this celebrated body was one to whom it has owed the greater part of its ce- lebrity, yet who was regarded with little respect by his brethren, and had not without difficulty obtained a seat among them. This was James Boswell, 26 a young Scotch law yer, heir to an honorable name and a fair estate. That he was a coxcomb and a bore, weak, vain, pushing, curious, garrulous, was obvious to all who were acquainted with him. That he could not reason, that he had no wit, no humor, no elo- quence, is apparent from his writings. And yet his writings are read beyond the Mississippi and under .the Southern Cross, and are likely to be read as long as the English exists, either as a living or as a dead language. Nature had made him a slave and an idolater. His mind resembled those creepers which the botanists call parasites, and which can subsist only by clinging round the stems, and imbibing the juices, of stronger plants. He must have fastened himself on somebody. He might have fastened himself on Wilkes, and have become the fiercest patriot in the Bill of Eights Society. He might have fastened him- self on Whitefield, and have become the loudest field preacher among the Calvinistic Methodists. In a happy hour he fastened himself on Johnson. The pair might seem ill-matched. For Johnson had early been prejudiced against Boswell's country. To a man of Johnson's strong understanding and irritable tem- per, the silly egotism and adulation of Boswell must have been as teasing as the constant buzz of a fly. 148 MACAULAY'S Johnson hated to be questioned; and Boswell was eternally catechising him on all kinds of subjects, and sometimes propounded such questions as, " What would you do, sir, if you were locked up in a tower with a baby?" Johnson was a water drinker, and Boswell was a winebibber, and, indeed, little better than an habitual sot. It was impossible that there should be perfect harmony between two such com- panions. Indeed, the great man was sometimes pro- voked into fits of passion, in which he said things which the small man, during a few hours, seriously resented. Every quarrel, however, was soon made up. During twenty years, the disciple continued to wor- ship the master: the master continued to scold the disciple, to sneer at him, and to love him. The two friends ordinarily resided at a great distance from each other. Boswell practised in the Parlia- ment House of Edinburgh, and could pay only occa- sional visits to London. During those visits, his chief business was to watch Johnson, to discover all John- son's habits, to turn the conversation to subjects about which Johnson was likely to say something re- markable, and to fill quarto notebooks with minutes of what Johnson had said. In this way were gath- ered the materials out of which was afterwards con- structed the most interesting biographical work in the world. Soon after the club began to exist, Johnson formed a connection less important, indeed, to his fame, but much more important to his happiness, than his connection with Boswell. Henry Thrale, one of the most opulent brewers in the kingdom, a man of sound and cultivated understanding, rigid prin- JOHNSON. 149 ciples, and liberal spirit, was married to one of those clever, kind-hearted, engaging, vain, pert young women who are perpetually doing or saying what is not exactly right, but who, do or say what they may, are always agreeable. In 1765 the Thrales be- came acquainted with Johnson, and the acquaint- ance ripened fast into friendship. They were aston- ished and delighted by the brilliancy of his conversa- tion. They were flattered by finding that a man so widely celebrated preferred their house to any other in London. Even the peculiarities which seemed to unfit him for civilized society — his gesticulations, his rollings, his puffings, his mutterings, the strange way in which he put on his clothes, the ravenous eager- ness with which he devoured his dinner, his fits of melancholy, his fits of anger> his frequent rudeness, his occasional ferocity — increased the interest which his new associates took in him. For these things were the cruel marks left behind by a life which had been one long conflict with disease and with adver- sity. In a vulgar hack writer, such oddities would have excited only disgust; but in a man of genius, learning, and virtue, their effect was to add pity to admiration and esteem. Johnson soon had an apart- ment at the brewery in Southwark, and a still more pleasant apartment at the villa of his friends on Streatham Common. A large part of every year he passed in those abodes — abodes which must have seemed magnificent and luxurious indeed, when com- pared with the dens in which he had generally been lodged. But his chief pleasures were derived from what the astronomer of his Abyssinian tale called " the endearing elegance of female friendship." 150 MACAULAY'S Mrs. Thrale rallied him, soothed him, coaxed him, and, if she sometimes provoked him by her flippancy, made ample amends by listening to his reproofs with angelic sweetness of temper. When he was diseased in body and in mind, she was the most tender of nurses. No comfort that wealth could purchase, no contrivance that womanly ingenuity, set to work by womanly compassion, could devise, was wanting to his sick-room. He requited her kindness by an af- fection pure as the affection of a father, yet deli- cately tinged with a gallantry which, though awk- ward, must have been more flattering than the atten- tions of a crowd of the fools who gloried in the names, now obsolete, of buck and maccaroni. It should seem that a full half of Johnson's life, during about sixteen years, was passed under the roof of the Thrales. He accompanied the family sometimes to Bath, and sometimes to Brighton, once to Wales, and once to Paris. But he had at the same time a house in one of the narrow and gloomy courts on the north of Fleet Street. In the garrets was his library, a large and miscellaneous collection of books, falling to pieces, and begrimed with dust. On a lower floor he sometimes, but very rarely, regaled a friend with a plain dinner — a veal pie, or a leg of lamb and spinach, and a rice pudding. Nor was the dwelling uninhabited during his long absences. It was the home of the most extraordinary assemblage of in- mates that ever was brought together. At the head of the establishment, Johnson had placed an old lady named Williams, whose chief recommendations were her blindness and her poverty. But, in spite of her murmurs and reproaches, he gave an asylum to an- JOHNSON. 151 other lady who was as poor as herself, Mrs. Desmou- lins, whose family he had known many years before in Staffordshire. Eoom was found for the daughter of Mrs. Desmoulins, and for another destitute damsel, who was generally addressed as Miss Carmichael, but whom her generous host called Polly. An old quack doctor named Levett, who bled and dosed coal heav- ers and hackney coachmen, and received for fees crusts of bread, bits of bacon, glasses of gin, and sometimes a little copper, completed this strange menagerie. All these poor creatures were at con- stant war with each other and with Johnson's negro servant Frank. Sometimes, indeed, they transferred their hostilities from the servant to the master, com- plained that a better table was not kept for them, and railed or maundered till their benefactor was glad to make his escape to Streatham, or to the Mitre Tavern. And yet he, who was generally the haughti- est and most irritable of mankind, who was but too prompt to resent anything which looked like a slight on the part of a purse-proud bookseller, or of a noble and powerful patron, bore patiently from men- dicants, who but for his bounty must have gone to the workhouse, insults more provoking than those for which he had knocked down Osborne, and bidden de- fiance to Chesterfield. Year after year Mrs. Williams and Mrs. Desmoulins, Polly and Levett, .continued to torment him and to live upon him. The course of life which has been described was interrupted in Johnson's sixty-fourth year by an im- portant event. He had early read an account of the Hebrides, and had been much interested by learning that there was so near him a land peopled by a race 152 MACAULAYS which was still as rude and simple as in the middle ages. A wish to become intimately acquainted with a state of society so utterly unlike all that he had ever seen, frequently crossed his mind. But it is not probable that his curiosity would have overcome his habitual sluggishness and his love of the smoke, the mud, and the cries of London, had not Boswell impor- tuned him to attempt the adventure, and offered to be his squire. At length, in August, 1773, Johnson crossed the Highland line, and plunged courageously into what was then considered, by most Englishmen, as a dreary and perilous wilderness. After wandering about two months through the Celtic region, some- times in rude boats which did not protect him from the rain, and sometimes on small shaggy ponies which could hardly bear his weight, he returned to his old haunts with a mind full of new images and new the- ories. During the following year he employed himself in recording his adventures. About the beginning of 1775, his Journey to the Hebrides was published, and was, during some weeks, the chief subject of conversa- tion in all circles in which any attention was paid to lit- erature. The book is still read with pleasure. The narrative is entertaining; the speculations, whether sound or unsound, are always ingenious; and the style, though too stiff and pompous, is somewhat easier and more graceful than that of his early writings. His prejudice against the Scotch had at length become lit- tle more than matter of jest; and whatever remained of the old feeling had been effectually removed by the kind and respectful hospitality with which he had been received in every part of Scotland. It was, of course, not to be expected that an Oxonian Tory JOHNSON. 153 should praise the Presbyterian polity and ritual, or that an eye accustomed to the hedgerows and parks of England should not be struck by the bareness of Berwickshire and East Lothian. But even in censure Johnson's tone is not unfriendly. The most enlight- ened Scotchmen, with Lord Mansfield at their head, were well pleased. But some foolish and ignorant Scotchmen were moved to anger by a little unpalata- ble truth which was mingled with much eulogy, and assailed him whom they chose to consider as the enemy of their country with libels much more dis- honorable to their country than anything that he had ever said or written. They published paragraphs in the newspapers, articles in the magazines, sixpenny pamphlets, five-shilling books. One scribbler abused Johnson for being blear-eyed; another for being a pensioner; a third informed the world that one of the doctor's uncles had been convicted of felony in Scot- land, and had found that there was in that country one tree capable of supporting the weight of an Eng- lishman. Macpherson, 27 whose Fingal had been proved in the Journey to be an impudent forgery, threatened to take vengeance with a cane. The only effect of this threat was that Johnson reiterated the charge of forgery in the most contemptuous terms, and walked about, during some time, with a cudgel, which, if the impostor had not been too wise to en- counter it, would assuredly have descended upon him, to borrow the sublime language of his own epic poem, " like a hammer on the red son of the furnace." Of other assailants, Johnson took no notice what- ever. He had early resolved never to be drawn into controversy; and he adhered to his resolution with a 154 MACAULAY'S steadfastness which is the more extraordinary because he was, both intellectually and morally, of the stuff of which controversialists are made. In conversation, he was a singularly eager, acute, and pertinacious disputant. When at a loss for good reasons, he had recourse to sophistry; and when heated by alterca- tion, he made unsparing use of sarcasm and invective. But when he took his pen in his hand, his whole char- acter seemed to be changed. A hundred bad writers misrepresented him and reviled him; but not one of the hundred could boast of having been thought by him worthy of a refutation, or even of a retort. The Ivenricks, Campbells, MacMcols, and Hendersons did their best to annoy him, in the hope that he would give them importance by answering them. But the reader will in vain search his works for any allusion to Kenrick or Campbell, to MacXicol or Henderson. One Scotchman, bent on vindicating the fame of Scotch learning, defied him to the combat in a de- testable Latin hexameter — "Maxime, si tu vis, cupio contendere tecum." 28 But Johnson took no notice of the challenge. He had learned, both from his own observation and from literary history, in which he was deeply read, that the place of books in the public estimation is fixed, not by what is written about them, but by what is writ- ten in them; and that an author whose works are likely to live is very unwise if he stoops to wrangle with detractors whose works are certain to die. He always maintained that fame was a shuttlecock, which could be kept up only by being beaten back, as well as beaten forward, and which would soon fall if there JOHNSON. 155 were only one battledore. No saying was oftener in his mouth than that fine apothegm of Bentley, that no man was ever written down but by himself. Unhappily, a few months after the appearance of the Journey to the Hebrides, Johnson did what none of his envious assailants could have done, and to a certain extent succeeded in writing himself down. The disputes between England and her American Colonies had reached a point at which no amicable adjustment was possible. Civil war was evidently impending; and the ministers seem to have thought that the elo- quence of Johnson might with advantage be em- ployed to inflame the nation against the opposition here, and against the rebels beyond the Atlantic. He had already written two or three tracts in defence of the foreign and domestic policy of the Government; and those tracts, though hardly worthy of him, were much superior to the crowd of pamphlets which lay on the counters of Almon and Stockdale. But his Taxation no Tyranny 29 was a pitiable failure. The very title was a silly phrase, which can have been recommended to his choice by nothing but a jingling alliteration which he ought to have despised. The arguments were such as boys use in debating societies. The pleasantry was as awkward as the gambols of a hippopotamus. Even Boswell was forced to own that in this unfortunate piece he could detect no trace of his master's powers. The general opinion was, that the strong faculties which had produced the Diction- ary and the Eambler were beginning to feel the effect of time and of disease, and that the old man would best consult his credit by writing no more. But this was a great mistake. Johnson had failed, 156 MACAULAY'S not because his mind was less vigorous than when he wrote Easselas in the evenings of a week, but be- cause he had foolishly chosen, or suffered others to choose for him, a subject such as he would at no time have been competent to treat. He was in no sense a statesman. He never willingly read, or thought, or talked about, affairs of state. He loved biography, literary history, the history of manners; but political history was positively distasteful to him. The ques- tion at issue between the Colonies and the mother country was a question about which he had really nothing to say. He failed, therefore, as the great- est men must fail when they attempt to do that for which they are unfit; as Burke would have failed if Burke had tried to write comedies like those of Sheri- dan; as Reynolds would have failed if Reynolds had tried to paint landscapes like those of Wilson. Hap- pily, Johnson soon had an opportunity of proving most signally that his failure was not to be ascribed to intellectual decay. On Easter Eve, 1777, some persons, deputed by a meeting which consisted of forty of the first book- sellers in London, called upon him. Though he had some scruples about doing business at that 'season, he received his visitors with much civility. They came to inform him that a new edition of the English poets, from Cowley downwards, was in contempla- tion, and to ask him to furnish short biographical prefaces. He readily undertook the task, a task for which he was pre-eminently qualified. Hfs knowledge of the literary history of England since the Restora- tion was unrivaled. That knowledge he had derived partly from books, and partly from sources which had JOHNSON. 157 long been closed: from old Grub Street traditions; from the talk of forgotten poetasters and pamphlet- eers who had long been lying in parish vaults; from the recollections of such men as Gilbert Walmesley, who had conversed with the wits of Button; Cibber, who had mutilated the plays of two generations of dramatists; Orrery, who had been admitted to the so- ciety of Swift; and Savage, who had rendered serv- ices of no very honorable kind to Pope. The biog- rapher, therefore, sat down to his task with a mind full of matter. He had at first intended to give only a paragraph to every minor poet, and only four or five pages to the greatest name. But the flood of anecdote and criticism overflowed the narrow chan- nel. The work, which was originally meant to con- sist only of a few sheets, swelled into ten volumes — small volumes, it is true, and not closely printed. The first four appeared in 1779, the remaining six in 1781. The Lives of the Poets are, on the whole, the best of Johnson's works. The narratives are as entertain- ing as any novel. The remarks on life and on human nature are eminently shrewd and profound. The criticisms are often excellent, and, even when grossly and provokingly unjust, well deserve to be studied; for, however erroneous they may be, they are never silly. They are the judgments of a mind trammeled by prejudice, and deficient in sensibility, but vigor- ous and acute. They, therefore, generally contain a portion of valuable truth which deserves to be sepa- rated from the alloy; and at the very worst they mean something — a praise to which much of what is called criticism in our time has no pretensions. 158 MACAULAY'S Savage's Life Johnson reprinted nearly as it had appeared in 1744. Whoever, after reading that life, will turn to the other lives, will be struck by the difference of style. Since Johnson had been at ease in his circumstances, he had written little and had talked much. When, therefore, he, after the lapse of years, resumed his pen, the mannerism which he had contracted while he was in the constant habit of elaborate composition was less perceptible than for- merly; and his diction frequently had a colloquial ease which it had formerly wanted. The improve- ment may be discerned by a skilful critic in the Journey to the Hebrides; and in the Lives of the Poets is so obvious, that it cannot escape the notice of the most careless reader. Among the lives the best are, perhaps, those of Cowley, Dryden, and Pope. The very worst is, be- yond all doubt, that of Gray. This great work at once became popular. There was, indeed, much just and much unjust censure; but even those who were loudest in blame were attracted by the book in spite of themselves. Malone computed the gains of the publishers at five or six thousand pounds. But the writer was very poorly remunerated. Intending at first to write very short prefaces, he had stipulated for only two hundred guineas. The book- sellers, when they saw how far his performance had surpassed his promise, added only another hundred. Indeed, Johnson, though he did not despise, or affect to despise, money, and though his strong sense and long experience ought to have qualified him to protect his own interests, seems to have been singularly unskilful and unlucky in his literary bargains. He was generally JOHNSON. 159 reputed the first English writer of his time; yet sev- eral writers of his time sold their copyrights for sums such as he never ventured to ask. To give a single instance, Robertson received four thousand five hun- dred pounds for the History of Charles V; and it is no disrespect to the memory of Robertson to say that the History of Charles V is both a less valuable and less amusing book than the Lives of the Poets. Johnson was now in his seventy-second year. The infirmities of age were coming fast upon him. That inevitable event of which he never thought without horror was brought near to him; and his whole life was darkened by the shadow of death. He had often to pay the cruel price of longevity. Every year he lost what could never be replaced. The strange de- pendents to whom he had given shelter, and to whom, in spite of their faults, he was strongly attached by habit, dropped off one by one; and in the silence of his home he regretted even the noise of their scold- ing matches. The kind and generous Thrale was no more; and it would have been well if his wife had been laid beside him. But she survived to be the laughingstock of those who had envied her, and to draw, from the eyes of the old man who had loved her beyond anything in the world, tears far more bitter than he would have shed over her grave. With some estimable and many agreeable qualities, she was not made to be independent. The control of a mind more steadfast than her own was necessary to her respectability. While she was restrained by her hus- band — a man of sense and firmness, indulgent to her taste in trifles, but always the undisputed master of his house — her worst offences had been impertinent 160 MACAULAY'S jokes, white lies, and short fits of pettishness ending in sunny good humor. But he was gone; and she was left an opulent widow of forty, with strong sensibil- ity, volatile fancy, and slender judgment. She soon fell in love with a music master from Brescia, in whom nobody but herself could discover anything to admire. Her pride, and perhaps some better feelings, struggled hard against this degrading passion; but the struggle irritated her nerves, soured her temper, and at length endangered her health. Conscious that her choice was one which Johnson could not approve, she became desirous to escape from his inspection. Her manner towards him changed. She was some- times cold, and sometimes petulant. She did not con- ceal her joy when he left Streatham; she never pressed him to return; and if he came unbidden she received him in a manner which convinced him that he was no longer a welcome guest. He took the very intelligible hints which she gave. He read, for the last time, a chapter of the Greek Testament in the library which had been formed by himself. In a sol- emn and tender prayer, he commended the house and its inmates to the Divine protection, and with emotions which choked his voice, and convulsed his powerful frame, left forever that beloved home for the gloomy and desolate house behind Fleet Street, where the few and evil days which still remained to him were to run out. Here, in June, 1783, he had a paralytic stroke, from which, however, he recovered, and which does not appear to have at all impaired his intellectual faculties. But other maladies came thick upon him. His asthma tormented him day and night. Dropsical symptoms made their appearance. While JOHNSON. 1C1 sinking under a complication of diseases, he heard that the woman whose friendship had been the chief happiness of sixteen years of his life had married an Italian fiddler, that all London was crying shame upon her, and that the newspapers and magazines were filled with allusions to the Ephesian matron and the two pictures in Hamlet. He vehemently said that he would try to forget her existence. He never ut- tered her name. Every memorial of her which met his eye he flung into the fire. She, meanwhile, fled from the laughter and hisses of her countrymen and countrywomen to a land where she was unknown, has- tened across Mount Cenis, and learned, while pass- ing a merry Christmas of concerts and lemonade par- ties at Milan, that the great man with whose name hers is inseparably associated had ceased to exist. He had, in spite of much mental and much bodily affliction, clung vehemently to life. The feeling de- scribed in that fine but gloomy paper which closes the series of his Idlers seemed to grow stronger in him as his last hour drew near. He fancied that he should be able to draw his breath more easily in a southern climate, and would probably have set out for Rome and Naples, but for his fear of the expense of the journey. That expense, indeed, he had the means of defraying; for he had laid up about two thousand pounds, the fruit of labors which had made the fortune of several publishers. But he was un- willing to break in upon this hoard, and he seems to have wished even to keep its existence a secret. Some of his friends hoped that the Government might be induced to increase his pension to six hundred pounds a year; but this hope was disappointed, and 162 MAC AUL AY'S he resolved to stand one English winter more. That winter was his last. His legs grew weaker; his breath grew shorter; the fatal water gathered fast, in spite of incisions which he — courageous against pain, but timid against death — urged his surgeons to make deeper and deeper. Though the tender care which had mitigated his sufferings during months of sickness at Streatham was withdrawn, he was not left desolate. The ablest physicians and surgeons attended him, and refused to accept fees from him. Burke parted from him with deep emotion. Wind- ham sat much in the sick-room, arranged the pillows, and sent his own servant to watch at night by the bed. Frances Burney, whom the old man had cher- ished with fatherly kindness, stood weeping at the door; while Langton, whose piety eminently quali- fied him to be an adviser and comforter at such a time, received the last pressure of his friend's hand within. When at length the moment, dreaded through so many years, came close, the dark cloud passed away from Johnson's mind. His temper be- came unusually patient and gentle; he ceased to think with terror of death and of that which lies beyond death; and he spoke much of the mercy of God and of the propitiation of Christ. In this serene frame of mind he died on the 13th of December, 1784. He was laid, a week later, in Westminster Abbey, among the eminent men of whom he had been the historian — Cowley and Denham, Dryden and Con- greve, Gay, Prior, and Addison. Since his death, the popularity of his works — the Lives of the Poets, and, perhaps, the Vanity of Hu- man Wishes, excepted — has greatly diminished. His JOHNSON. 163 Dictionary has been altered by editors till it can scarcely be called his. An allusion to his Eambler or his Idler is not readily apprehended in literary circles. The fame even of Easselas has grown somewhat dim. But, though the celebrity of the writings may have declined, the celebrity of the writer, strange to say, is as great as ever. BoswelPs book has done for him more than the best of his own books could do. The memory of other authors is kept alive by their works; but the memory of Johnson keeps many of his works alive. The old philosopher is still among us in the brown coat with the metal buttons, and the shirt which ought to be at wash, blinking, puffing, rolling his head, drumming with his fingers, tearing his meat like a tiger, and swallowing his tea in oceans. No human being who has been more than seventy years in the grave is so well known to us. And it is but just to say, that our intimate acquaintance with what he would himself have called the anfractuosi- ties of his intellect and of his temper serves only to strengthen our conviction that he was both a great and a good man. 164 MACAULAY'S NOTES. Three oft-quoted essays on Samuel Johnson occupy so prominent a place in literary criticism that the student should take pains to hold them distinct. First. An article by Macaulay in the Edinburgh Review, September, 1831. The remains of Samuel Johnson were laid at rest in Westminster Abbey, December 20, 1784. The fol- lowing summer James Boswell, a Scottish advocate, who had hung for years on Dr. Johnson's every word and motion, produced a Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, and in 1791 his famous Life of Samuel Johnson, LL. D., appeared. The two works were subsequently published together, and have been known ever since as Boswell's Johnson. Successive editions appeared rapidly. In 1831 the Murrays, an influ- ential publishing house of London, brought out an expensive five-volume edition with voluminous notes by a Mr. John Wilson Croker, a member of Parliament, who held two or three learned degrees and made some pretension to rank as a man of letters. Macaulay disliked Croker intensely; and set about the preparation of an extended review article on Croker's edition in which he not only attacked the work of editor Croker with a degree of bitterness born of political antagonism and personal antipathy, but he continued his review of Boswell and of Dr. Johnson in a tone of such severity that even Macaulay's friends felt that an eminent writer should have showed more courtesy to the memory of one of the greatest intellects that England had ever produced. This article, like most of Macaulay's reviews, was published in the Edinburgh Review, and may be found in any reputable edition of Macaulay's Essays. In form it is a literary estimate of Croker's edition, but in reality it is a partisan paper. To Mr. Croker Macaulay imputes igno- rance, carelessness, negligence, trivial inaccuracy and gross error. Boswell fares no better. Boswell's Life of Johnson is accorded first place among all biographies, but Boswell was " servile and impertinent, shallow and pedantic, a bigot and JOHNSON. 165 a sot," " a tale-bearer and an eaves-dropper," " a bore," " a great fool," " frank," " ridiculous," " a dunce," " a parasite," and " a coxcomb," all of which attributes brought to bear in writing the minute details of a really great man's life have made Boswell " immortal." As an ardent Whig, Macaulay attacks Johnson, who was a notorious Tory, and overwhelms him with equal parts of praise and abuse. All in all, the essay is brilliant and may be read as an example of as grievous a drubbing as was ever bestowed by a literary man without going beyond bounds. Second. An article by Carlyle in Frasef's Magazine, No. 28, May, 1832. With Macaulay 's partisan treatment in mind, but without referring to him, Carlyle contributed an article to Fraser's Magazine on the same topic. This article, usu- ally known as Carlyle's Essay on Boswell's Johnson, went over the same ground in a more judicial spirit. While calmer and less petty, Carlyle really exceeds Macaulay in his merci- less criticism of Croker's work, but he is more appreciative of Boswell and shows a deeper understanding of Johnson's life and literary service. For once Carlyle wrote with a view clearly to soften the harsh expressions of another. He treats Croker with attempted respect, yet likens him to ^sop's fly on the axle of a chariot, glorying in the amount of dust he had raised. Of Croker's edition he declares that " there is no other edition to which Croker's is preferable." Boswell is described as " a strange mixture of the highest and the lowest"; while of Dr. Johnson Carlyle says: "Johnson has been the Prophet of the English; the man by whose light the English people, in public and in private more than by any other man's, have guided their existence." Third. An article by Macaulay in the Encyclopedia Britan- nica. A quarter of a century later a life of Johnson was de- sired for the Encyclopedia Britannica. Macaulay, whose po- litical and personal asperity had now mellowed, willingly accepted an opportunity to set himself right and to do jus- tice to Dr. Johnson. Of these three remarkable essays, the one written by Macaulay for the Britannica in 1856 is the one we are now studying. It is to be regarded as Macaulay's mature and deliberate estimate. 166 MACAULAY'S 2 Lichfield. Lich is akin to our modern like, and means the body, corpse, or the like of a man. How much more ex- pressive lichfield, burying ground, graveyard, and God's acre are than the word cemetery. 3 Jacobite is derived from Jacobus, the Latin word for James. Jacobites were adherents of James, or the Stuart family. 4 The Century Dictionary gives fifteen groups of meanings for parts, and the International gives almost as many. The reference is, of course, to mental quickness and not to bodily activity. 5 Called king's evil, from a popular belief that scrofula was curable under the touch of a royal hand. 6 What we call public schools are known as board schools in England — that is to say, schools under control of a board. The English public schools are in reality expensive boarding schools for boys. Thomas Hughes's Tom Brown at Rugby gives an excellent idea of an English public school. Kip- ling's Stalky and Co. presents a less attractive picture. The English schoolboy in Johnson's day, and even in Macaulay's, was supposed to compose in Latin with an ear for the right word as used in the Augustan Age of Roman literature. Par- liamentary speakers did not hesitate to quote Latin authors, as, indeed, was once the custom in our own Congress. (See Webster's speeches.) 7 An obscure Latin essayist of the fifth century. 8 Christ's Church was the most fashionable of the several colleges which together constitute Oxford University. °A peculiar use of the word commoner, meaning a stu- dent able to pay all charges for maintenance. Commons is a college term for food eaten at a table set for the use of a number in common. A gentleman commoner is a stronger term than commoner and applies to one whose social posi- tion approaches that of the nobility. 10 An instructor in a Latin preparatory school. 11 One is apt to look here for the germ of Johnson's Ras- selas, written without apparent preparation a quarter of a century later. Boswell states that the translation was not from the Latin, but from the French of Father Lobo, a Portu- guese priest and traveller. JOHNSON. 167 "Carlyle's thought is more worthy. He had the best of wives. Macaulay lived single. " ' Better a small bush/ say the Scotch, ' than no shelter.' Johnson learns to be con- tented with humble human things. ... In Birmingham it- self, with his own purchased goose quill, he can earn five guineas; nay, finally, the choicest terrestrial good, a friend who will be wife to him. Johnson's marriage with the good widow Porter has been treated with ridicule by many mor- tals, who apparently had no understanding thereof. ... In the kind widow's love and pity for him, in Johnson's love and gratitude, there is actually no matter for ridicule. Their wedded lot, as is the common lot, was made up of drizzle and dry weather; but innocence and worth dwelt in it; and when death had ended it, a certain sacredness. Johnson's deathless affection for his Tetty was always venerable and noble." Macaulay falls into a more gracious frame of mind when he comes to Mrs. Johnson's death. 13 A sort of pad placed on the head to lessen the pressure of burdens. "Macaulay, who had never known want or the need of rigid economy, very possibly overestimates the privations of Johnson. Johnson's expectations of life in London were based on the experience of a Birmingham acquaintance who had assured him " that thirty pounds a year was enough to enable a man to live there without being contemptible. He allowed ten pounds for clothes and linen. He said a man might live in a garret at eighteenpence a week; few people would inquire where he lodged; and, if they did, it was easy to say, ' Sir, I am to be found at such a place.' By spend- ing threepence in a coffee-house, he might be for some hours every day in very good company; he might dine for six- pence, breakfast on bread and milk for a penny, and do with- out supper. On clean shirt day he went abroad and paid visits." 15 " Two households, both alike in dignity, In fair Verona, where we lay our scene, From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean." — Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet. 168 MACAULAY'S 16 Gibbon, chapter xl, states that rivalry between the fol- lowers of the blue and of the green in the games of the am- phitheater gave rise in time to embittered factions between whom civil strife finally broke out so fiercely that 30,000 people were massacred in the carnage of a single day. 17 Dr. Henry Sacheverell, an English divine, well worth looking up. 18 In part biographical, giving an intense picture of the disappointments of a struggling scholar. 19 Johnson concludes his description of the Swedish Charles XII with these lines : " He left the name, at which the world grew pale, To point a moral or adorn a tale." 20 " To the Right Honorable the Earl of Chesterfield. " February 7, 1755. "My Lord: I have been lately informed, by the proprie- tor of the World, that two papers, in which my Dictionary is recommended to the public, were written by your lordship. To be so distinguished is an honor which, being very little ac- customed to favors from the great, I know not well how to receive, or in what terms to acknowledge. " When, upon some slight encouragement, I first visited your lordship, I was overpowered, like the rest of mankind, by the enchantment of your address, and could not forbear to wish that I might boast myself le minqueur du vainqueur de la terre* that I might obtain that regard for which I saw the world contending; but I found my attendance so little encouraged, that neither pride nor modesty would suffer me to continue it. When I had once addressed your lordship in public, I had exhausted all the arts of pleasing which a re- tired and uncourtly scholar can possess. I had done all that I could; and no man is well pleased to have his all neglected, be it ever so little. " Seven years, my lord, have now passed since I waited in your outward rooms, or was repulsed from your door; during which time I have been pushing on my work through difficulties of which it is useless to complain, and have brought * The conqueror of the conqueror of the earth. V 9^ y i ■**<$> & O* s*V' A < rv\\ /?v< ///) c i/> x"v» \> - * * * s^ .- %rf farm''- ^<* °£mk'' "W a s ^ & ^ , Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process, q^ Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide Treatment Date: March 2009 % o^ PreservationTechnologies M?n KV . ..,oo, n , c.nPR m mi I FCTIONS PRESERVATION <^ A WORLD LEADER IN COLLECTIONS PRESERVATION 111 Thomson Park Drive Cranberry Township, PA 16066 (724)779-2111 ,V ^ ^Vc£ *