Joseph Addison.
Addison’s character was, in a measure, the complement of Steele’s. He was coy, dignified, reticent—not given to easy familiarities at sight—nor greatly prone to over-fondling. He was the son of an English rector down in Wiltshire; was born in a cottage still standing in Milston—a few miles north of Salisbury. He was a Charter-house boy and Oxford man; had great repute there as scholar—specially as Latinist—became a Fellow—had great Whig friends, who, somehow, secured him a pension, with which he set out upon European travel; and he wrote about what he saw in Italy, and other parts, in a way that is fresh and readable now. He was a year or two younger than Congreve, and a few weeks[101] only younger than Steele; nine years younger than De Foe, of whom it is probable he never knew or cared to know.
Very early in his career Addison had the aid of Government friends: his dignity of carriage gave them assurance; his reticence forbade fear of babbling; his elegant pen gave hope of good service; and he came to high political task-work—first, in those famous verses where he likens the fighting hero, Marlborough—then fresh from Blenheim—to the angel, who,
“——by Divine command,
With rising tempests shakes a guilty land,
…
And pleased th’ Almighty’s orders to perform,
Rides in the whirlwind and directs the storm.”
That poem took him out from scholarly obscurity, and set him well afoot in the waiting-rooms of statesmen. Poetry, however, was not to be his office; though, some years after, he did win the town by the academic beauties of his tragedy of “Cato”—the memory of which has come bobbing down over school-benches, by the “Speech of Sempronius,” to days some of us remember—
“——My voice is still for war!
Gods, can a Roman Senate long debate
Which of the two to choose—slavery or death!”
I suppose that speech may have slipped out of modern reader-books; but it used to make one of the stock declamations, on which ambitious school-boys of my time spent great floods of fervid elocution.
Addison wrote somewhat, as I have said, for Steele’s first periodic venture in the Tatler, attracted by its opportunities and the graces of it; and they together plotted and carried into execution the publication of the Spectator. I trust that its quiet elegance has not altogether fallen away from the knowledge of this generation of young people. Dr. Johnson, you know, said of its Addison papers, that whoever would write English well should give his days and nights to their perusal. Yet such a journal could and would never succeed now: it does not deal with questions of large and vital interest; its sentences do not crackle and blaze with the heat we look for in the preachments of our time. Its leisurely discourse—placid as summer brooks—would beguile us to sleep. A ream of old Spectators discussing proprieties and modesties would not put one of our daring ball-room belles to the blush. The talk of these old gentlemen about the minor morals were too mild, perhaps too merciful; yet it is well to know of them; and one can go to a great many worse quarters than the Spectator, even now, for proper hints about etiquette, manners, and social proprieties.