the resemblance! How exactly Swift reminds you of Count Benyowski in Siberia, and of Mrs Haller mopping her eyes in the "Stranger!" One really is puzzled to say, according to the negro's distinction, whether Mrs Haller is more like the Dean of St Patrick's, or the Dean more like Mrs Haller. Anyhow, the likeness is prodigious, if it is not quite reciprocal. The other terminus of the comparison is Wieland. Now there is some shadow of a resemblance there. For Wieland had a touch of the comico-cynical in his nature; and it is notorious that he was often called the German Voltaire, which argues some tiger-monkey grin that traversed his features at intervals. Wieland's malice, however, was far more playful and genial than Swift's; something of this is shown in his romance of "Idris," and oftentimes in his prose. But what the world knows Wieland by is his "Oberon." Now in this gay, musical romance of Sir Huon and his enchanted horn, with its gleams of voluptuousness, is there a possibility that any suggestion of a scowling face like Swift's should cross the festal scenes?

From Swift the scene changes to Addison and Steele. Steele is of less importance; for, though a man of greater intellectual activity than Addison, he had immeasurably

son.

* "Activity.”—It is some sign of this, as well as of the more thoroughly English taste in literature which distinguished Steele, that hardly twice throughout the "Spectator" is Shakspere quoted or alluded to by AddiEven those quotations he had from the theatre, or the breath of popular talk. Generally, if you see a line from Shakspere, it is safe to bet largely that the paper is Steele's; sometimes, indeed, of casual contributors; but, almost to a certainty, not a paper of Addison's. Another mark of Steele's superiority in vigour of intellect is, that much oftener in him than in other contributors strong thoughts came forward; harsh and disproportioned, perhaps to the case, and never harmoniously deve loped with the genial grace of Addison, but original, and pregnant with promise and suggestion.

less of genius. But, so far as concerns Addison, I am happy to support the character of Schlosser for consistency, by assuring the reader that, of all the monstrosities uttered by man upon Addison, and of all the monstrosities uttered by Schlosser upon man, a thing which he says about Addison is the worst. But this I reserve for a climax ahead. Schlosser really puts his best leg foremost at starting, and one thinks he's going to mend; for he catches a truth-viz., the following-that all the brilliancies of the Queen Anne period (which so many inconsiderate people have called the Augustan age of our literature) "point to this: that the reading public wished to be entertained, not roused to think; to be gently moved, not deeply excited." (Undoubtedly what strikes a man in Addison, or will strike him when indicated, is the coyness and timidity, almost the girlish shame, which he betrays in the presence of all the elementary majesties belonging to impassioned or idealised human nature. Like one bred in crowded cities, when first left alone in forests or amongst mountains, he is frightened at their silence, their solitude, their magnitude of form, or their frowning glooms. It has been remarked by others, that Addison and his companions never rise to the idea of addressing the "nation" or the "people;" it is always the "town." Even their audience was conceived of by them under a miniature form. se Yet for this they had some excuse in the state of facts. An author would like at this moment to assume that Europe and Asia were listening to him; and as some few copies of his book do really go to Paris and Naples, some to Calcutta, there is a sort of legal fiction that such an assumption is steadily taking root. Yet, unhappily, that ugly barrier of languages interferes. Schamyl, the Circassian chief, though much of a savage, is not so wanting in taste

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and discernment as to be backward in reading any book of yours or mine. Doubtless he yearns to read it. But then, you see, that infernal Tchirkass language steps between our book, the darling, and him, the discerning reader. Now just such a barrier existed for the "Spectator" in the travelling arrangements of England. The very few old heavies that had begun to creep along three or four main roads, depended so much on wind and weather, their chances of foundering were so uncalculated, their periods of revolution were so cometary and uncertain, that no body of scientific observations had yet been collected to warrant a man in risking by them a heavy bale of goods; and, on the whole, even for York, Norwich, or Winchester, a consignment of "Specs" was not quite a safe spec. Still, I could have told the Spectator who was anxious to make money, where he might have been sure of a distant sale, though returns would have been slow -viz., at Oxford and Cambridge. We know from Milton that old Hobson delivered his parcels pretty regularly eighty years before 1710. And, one generation before that, it is plain, by the interesting (though somewhat Jacobinical) letters of Joseph Mede,* the commenter on the Apocalypse, that news and politics of one kind or other (and scandal of every kind) found out for themselves a sort of contraband lungs to breathe through between London and Cambridge; not quite so regular as the tides of ebb and flood, but better than nothing. If you consigned a packet into the proper hands on the 1st of May, "as sure as death" (to speak Scotticè), it would be delivered within sixty miles of the capital before midsummer. Still there were delays; and these forced a man

"Letters of Joseph Mede:"-Published more than thirty years ago by Sir Henry Ellis.

into carving his world out of London. That excuses the word town.

Inexcusable, however, were many other forms of expression in those days, which argued cowardly feelings. One would like to see a searching investigation into the state of society in Anne's days-its extreme artificiality, its sheepish reserve upon all the impassioned grandeurs, its shameless outrages upon all the decencies, of human nature. Certain it is, that Addison (because everybody) was in that meanest of conditions which blushes at any expression of sympathy with the lovely, the noble, or the impassioned. The wretches were ashamed of their own nature, and perhaps with reason; for in their own denaturalised hearts they read only a degraded nature. Addison, in particular, shrank from every bold and every profound expression as from an offence against good taste. He durst not for his life have used the word "passion," except in the vulgar sense of an angry paroxysm. He durst as soon have danced a hornpipe on the top of the "Monument," as have talked of a "rapturous emotion." What would he have said? Why, "sentiments that were of a nature to prove agreeable after an unusual rate." In their odious verses, the creatures of that age talk of love as something that "burns" them. You suppose at first that they are discoursing of tallow candles, though you cannot imagine by what impertinence they address you, that are no tallow-chandler, upon such painful subjects. And, when they apostrophise the woman of their heart (for you are to understand that they pretend to such an organ), they beseech her to "ease their pain." Can human meanness descend lower? As if the man, being ill from pleurisy, therefore had a right to take a lady for one of the dressers in a hospital, whose duty it would be

room.

to fix a burgundy-pitch plaster between his shoulders. Then to read of their Phillises and Strephons, and Chloes and Corydons-names that proclaim the fantasticalness of the life with which they are poetically associated-it throws me into such convulsions of rage, that I move to the window, and (without thinking what I am about) throw it up, calling, "Police! police!" What's that for? What can the police do in the business? Why, certainly nothing. What I meant in my dream was, perhaps [but one forgets what one meant upon recovering one's temper], that the police should take Strephon and Corydon into custody, whom I fancied at the other end of the And really the justifiable fury that arises upon recalling such abominable attempts at bucolic sentiments in such abominable language, sometimes transports me into a luxurious vision sinking back through one hundred and thirty years, in which I see Addison, Phillips (both John and Ambrose), Tickell, Fickell, Budgell, and Cudgell, with many others beside, all cudgelled in a round-robin, none claiming precedency of another, none able to shrink from his own dividend, until a voice seems to recall me to milder thoughts, by saying, "But surely, my friend, you never could wish to see Addison cudgelled? Let Strephon and Corydon be cudgelled without end, if the police can show any warrant for doing it. But Addison was a man of great genius." True, he was so. I recollect it suddenly, and will back out of any angry things that I have been misled into saying by Schlosser, who, by the by, was right, after all, for a wonder.

Now then I will turn my whole fury in vengeance upon Schlosser. And looking round for a stone to throw at him, I observe this: Addison could not be so entirely careless of exciting the public to think and feel as Schlosser