life. He could not have made his own position; the accident of the times rendered literary service valuable, and he was virtually nothing more than the literary retainer and protégé of the leaders of a party. His easy indolent habits, with some other features of his character, appear in the following sketch by Johnson:

"Of the course of Addison's familiar day, before his marriage, Pope has given a detail. He had in the house with him Budgell, and perhaps Philips. His chief companions were Steele, Budgell, Philips [Ambrose], Carey, Davenant, and Colonel Brett. With one or other of these he always breakfasted. He studied all morning; then dined at a tavern; and went afterwards to Button's. Button had been a servant in the Countess of Warwick's family, who, under the patronage of Addison, kept a coffee-house on the south side of Russell Street, about two doors from Covent Garden. Here it was that the wits of the time used to assemble. It is said, when Addison had suffered any vexation from the Countess, he withdrew the company from Button's house. From the coffee-house he went again to a tavern, where he often sat late, and drank too much wine. In the bottle discontent seeks for comfort, cowardice for courage, and bashfulness for confidence. It is not unlikely that Addison was first seduced to excess by the manumission which he obtained from the servile timidity of his sober hours."

His conduct generally was marked by great prudence. He made few enemies. He was at great pains to conciliate Swift. "Of his virtue it is a sufficient testimony that the resentment of party has transmitted no charge of any crime." Yet his irritable temper was not under thorough control. On one occasion he put an execution in force against Steele for a hundred pounds that his improvident friend had borrowed, and he has never been cleared of the charge of jealous intriguing against Pope. De Quincey, in his 'Life of Pope,' says that "Addison's petty manoeuvring against Pope proceeded entirely from malignant jealousy. That Addison was more in the wrong even than has generally been supposed, and Pope more thoroughly innocent as well as more generous, we have the means at a proper opportunity of showing decisively."

Opinions. In practical politics he adhered steadfastly to the Whigs. In 1707 he elaborately justified the war with France, maintaining that France and Britain were natural enemies. He strongly supported the Hanoverian succession, and turned his most malicious and unqualified ridicule against the "Pretender" and his foreign adherents. With equal animosity he satirised the Tory country gentlemen, or Tory fox-hunters, as he delighted to nickname them.

Party politics, as we have said, had no place in the 'Tatler,' the 'Spectator,' and the Guardian.' The professed object of our author in these periodicals was "to banish vice and ignorance out of the territories of Great Britain," and "to bring philosophy out

of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and coffee-houses."

The minor immoralities that he attacked were such as affectation, presumption, foppery, fashionable extravagance, upstart vulgarity. As "vices" of the same class, he contrived to satirise the rustic manners of the objects of his constant aversion, the Tory squires, "who had never seen anything greater than themselves for twenty years."

In criticising polite literature, he gave his opinions on the Opera, on Tragedy, on True and False Wit, on Sappho, on Ovid, on Milton, and on the Pleasures of the Imagination. He “decided by taste rather than by principles ;" and the taste of such a man, while elegant in the highest degree, had a tendency to be captious and narrow. He sneered at the scenery and stage-machinery both of the opera and of the theatre, considering that the effect upon the audience should be produced mainly by the language of the play. He ridiculed the use of Italian in the opera; for which De Quincey makes some game of him. Under False Wit he reckoned Puns, Anagrams, Acrostics, Chronograms, Crambo, and other agreeable ingenuities. In the case of Milton, his application of Aristotle's rules for epic poetry, and his selection of fine passages, have the credit of first drawing general notice to 'Paradise Lost.'1 His papers on the Pleasures of the Imagination have no analytic value; he gets no farther than that there is a pleasure in beholding the great, the beautiful, and the new.

ELEMENTS OF STYLE.

Vocabulary.-Were we to judge from the papers on Milton, we should pronounce Addison's command of language rather under than above the average of eminent literary men.2 He is constantly repeating the same epithets-" inexpressibly beautiful," "wonderfully poetical," "wonderfully fine and pleasing." Upon lighter themes his vocabulary is more varied. Choiceness and not profusion is at all times his characteristic; yet we find him varying his expression with the greatest ease on simple themes. Thus, in his paper in the 'Lover upon the female passion for china-ware, he describes it with considerable variety-" brittle ware," "frail furniture," "perishable commodity," "all china-ware is of a weak and transitory nature," ," "the fragility of china is such as a reasonable being ought by no means to set its heart upon."

1 It is sometimes said that Addison was the first to discern Milton's excellence. This is saying too much. Defoe had praised Milton several years before; and Steele, in one of his early Tatlers,' had expressed his admiration.

2 Lord Lytton is of opinion that Addison's command of expression was not first-rate.

Sentences. Among our classic prose writers, Addison is the standing example of a loose style. He is ostentatiously easy and flowing, making no effort to be periodic, but rather studiously avoiding the periodic structure. În his expository papers, when he is not expressly aiming at point, he takes the utmost freedom in adding clauses of explanation and amplification after he has made a full statement. Thus

"Everything that is new or uncommon raises a pleasure in the imagination, because it fills the soul with an agreeable surprise, gratifies its curiosity, and gives it an idea of which it was not before possest. We are indeed so often conversant with one set of objects, and tired out with so many repeated shows of the same things, that whatever is new or uncommon contributes a little to vary human life, and to divert our minds for a while, with the strangeness of its appearance: it serves us for a kind of refreshment, and takes off from that satiety we are apt to complain of in our usual and ordinary entertainments."

Here the structure is very loose, and the easy way of adding clause to clause betrays the writer into not a little confusion, which we shall notice in the proper place. The following is another example of a loose tautologous sentence :

66

They here began to breathe a delicious kind of ether, and saw all the fields about them covered with a kind of purple light, that made them reflect with satisfaction on their past toils, and diffused a secret joy through the whole assembly, which showed itself in every look and feature."

The vice of this careless structure, which within proper limits is not without its advantages, is the misplacing of clauses. The two following examples are from Irving's Elements of Composition:

"This kind of wit was very much in vogue among our countrymen, about an age or two ago, who did not practise it for any oblique reason, but purely for the sake of being witty."

Here the clause "about an age or two ago comes very awkwardly between the relative and its antecedent, and would be much better disposed of at the beginning-" About an age or two ago, this kind of wit," &c.

"The Knight, seeing his habitation reduced to so small a compass, and himself in a manner shut out of his own house, upon the death of his mother, ordered all the apartments to be flung open, and exorcised by his chaplain.'

Irving remarks that here the clause "upon the death of his mother" is so placed as to be ambiguous, and proposes to remedy this by another arrangement—namely, "seeing his habitation, &c., the Knight, upon the death of his mother, ordered all the apartments," &c. This gets rid of the ambiguity, but is rather a clumsy arrangement; it would be better to begin with the

clause of time-"Upon the death of his mother, the Knight,"

&c.

It is chiefly in the papers on the Pleasures of the Imagination that the inconvenience of this loose style is felt, and there chiefly because it goes along with a vague and rambling train of thought. On a light theme he is often smart and pointed, as will be sufficiently illustrated in the examples of his Wit.

Even in the expository papers there are occasional touches of pointed expression. In the following we see two forms of expression that are very largely used by Johnson :

"A man of a polite imagination is let into a great many pleasures that the vulgar are not capable of receiving. He can converse with a picture and find an agreeable companion in a statue. He meets with a secret refreshment in a description, and often feels a greater satisfaction in the prospect of fields and meadows than another does in the possession."

Sometimes, but not often, he makes the effort of a careful balanced comparison. The following comparison between Homer and Virgil is from a paper where he exhibits Homer, Virgil, and Ovid as specimens respectively of "what is great, what is beautiful, and what is new." It is a much simpler comparison than either Temple's or Pope's, being more superficial-dealing with fewer circumstances; besides, it is less just, the facts being adapted to suit the author's theory:

"Homer is in his province when he is describing a battle or a multitude, a hero or a god. Virgil is never better pleased than when he is in his Elysium or carrying out an entertaining picture. Homer's epithets generally mark out what is great, Virgil's what is agreeable. Nothing can be more magnificent than the figure Jupiter makes in the first Iliad, nor more charming than that of Venus in the first Æneid." [Here the passages are quoted]. "Homer's persons are most of them godlike and terrible; Virgil has scarce admitted any into his poem who are not beautiful, and has taken particular care to make his hero so

And gave his rolling eyes a sparkling grace,
And breathed a youthful vigour on his face.

In a word, Homer fills his readers with sublime ideas, and, I believe, has raised the imagination of all the good poets that have come after him. I shall only instance Horace, who immediately takes fire at the first hint of any passage in the Iliad' or 'Odyssey,' and always rises above himself when he has Homer in his view. Virgil has drawn together, into his Eneid,' all the pleasing scenes his subject is capable of admitting; and in his Georgics,' has given us a collection of the most delightful land. scapes that can be made out of fields and woods, herds of cattle, and swarms of bees."

QUALITIES OF STYLE.

Simplicity has always been alleged as a great merit of Addison's style" familiar," says the imperious dictator, "but not coarse." "His prose is the model of the middle style; on grave subjects

not formal, on light occasions not grovelling, pure without scrupulosity, and exact without apparent elaboration; always equable, always easy, without glowing words or pointed sentences. Addison never deviates from his track to snatch a grace; he seeks no ambitious ornaments, and tries no hazardous innovations."

To this merit in the expository papers, there are considerable drawbacks. I would not insist with De Quincey on his superficial treatment of Milton and of the Imagination. It is probably but a slight exaggeration to say that he was "the man of all that ever lived most hostile even to what was good in pedantry, to its tendencies towards the profound in erudition, towards minute precision, and the non-popular; the champion of all that is easy, natural, superficial.' And it is but fair to say, that if, as he boasted, he brought "Philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and coffee-houses," it certainly was Philosophy in a very diluted form. But in a periodical such as the 'Spectator' the superficiality and dilution were not out of place; "an instructor like Addison was now wanting, whose remarks, being superficial, might be easily understood, and being just, might prepare the mind for more attainments."

Still, it should be possible, without going into more abstruse considerations, to make such papers as those on the Pleasures of the Imagination not only more accurate, but even more intelligible and more easily remembered.

One great improvement in the way of rendering the papers more perspicuous would be to state explicitly their real character; to lower their pretensions; to declare them to be not a philosophic explanation of aesthetic pleasures, but an enumeration of objects that give pleasure to the imagination as being great, beautiful, or new. Were this done, the reader would go on smoothly-receiving first an account of pleasing objects in nature; then in artificial works, gardens, and buildings; then in the Fine Arts, statuary, painting, music, poetry, history, natural philosophy. Once aware that the papers were nothing more than a catalogue of things "apt to affect the imagination," the reader could pass lightly over the moral reflections and crude attempts at deeper explanation, as being but irregular excrescences upon the plan.

Such, we say, is the real character and value of the papersthe divisions become simple only when looked upon in this light; and had the author consulted the ease and instruction of the reader, he would have indicated this at the beginning, and repeated the indication as he went on. But the truth is that he did not know their real character-he imagined he was going deeper than he really went; and in perplexing the reader with a