The aim of Addison was "to temper wit with morality and to enliven morality with wit," and he succeeded so well that, to this day, if one opens a volume of "The Spectator" for any reason, one cannot lay it down. The spectacle of that world comes before us in all its aspects—toy shops, theatres, streets, coffee-houses, masquerades: there are allegories, sportive or serious, reflections at the opera, or among the monuments of the dead at Westminster Abbey; there are letters, real or "done in the office," asking for advice on points of etiquette; there are musical strains of solemn prose, or passages of exquisite banter; there are creations of character, Sir Roger de Coverley, Will Wimble, and the rest. There are criticisms, as of Milton, which led taste back from the fantasies of the Restoration to that great poet who lived lonely, fallen on evil days and evil tongues. Even the folk-poetry of the past, "songs and fables that are come from father to son, and are most in vogue among the common people of the countries through which I passed," give Addison "a particular delight," he says, in his paper on Chevy Chase, "the favourite ballad of the common people of England". In our time, a critic would fall back on the history of the ballad, showing how "Chevy Chase" is a later version of "Otterbourne," a poem common, with patriotic variations, to England and Scotland. For Addison "Chevy Chase" is an heroic poem: as such he treats it, and shows how touches of Nature make it akin to Homer and Virgil.
Here we are far away from the Restoration, and the age of conceits; we are on the way to the romantic movement, to Scott and "The Lay of the Last Minstrel". In quite another style take Addison's musings on a "lady's library," mixed with "a thousand odd figures in China ware," Japanese lacquer, and old silver. Leonora has "all the Classic Authors—in wood," dummies! "A set of Elzevirs," small classic volumes of the famous Dutch press, "by the same hand"—the cabinetmaker's. There are several of the huge wandering heroic French romances, and "Locke of Human Understanding, with a paper of patches in it": "Clelia, which opened of itself in the place that describes two lovers in a bower." Most of the books were bought, not "for her own use," but "because the lady had heard them praised, or because she had seen the authors of them".
Addison, it must be confessed, did not take the learning of the sex very seriously. Now the learning of many of them is serious indeed; but, we ask, are either men or women more seriously inclined, on the whole, to study than they were in Queen Anne's day? Addison, says Thackeray, "walks about the world watching women's pretty humours—fashions, follies, flirtations, rivalries, and noting them with the most charming humour". It was not he, but Steele, who found in a lady's society "a liberal education". But it was Addison whom Lady Mary Wortley Montagu proclaimed to be "the best companion in the world".
There is still no better companion: we can still hear him "sweetly talk and sweetly smile" in his Essays. He knows so much, and he is never tedious in giving information. Like Coleridge in talk with Keats, he deals in ghost stories: and this child of an age of reason does not scout them. He makes the judicious remark that Lucretius, the Roman materialist, does not believe that the soul can exist apart from the body, yet "makes no doubt of the reality of apparitions, and that men often appeared after their death... he was so pressed with the matter of fact, which he could not have the confidence to deny...." He explains by "one of the most absurd unphilosophical notions that was ever started"—in a different way of statement this theory of Lucretius has lately been revived.
What a variety of themes Addison illustrates and adorns! His writings are like better conversation than was ever held save in the Fortunate Islands by the happy Dead.
The humour and the drawing of character in the papers on Sir Roger de Coverley, have a delicacy, a minuteness, a happy humour, which we scarcely meet again in our literature till they reappear, a century later, in the novels of Miss Austen. It must be admitted that Addison's manner of writing sent son vieux temps, is not "up to date," but this only lends an agreeable quaintness. Nobody, to-day, in writing of the scene in the "Odyssey" where the hero beholds, in the next world, "the far-renowned brides of ancient song," would speak of them as "a circle of beauties," "the finest women". Nor, when the hero says "each of them gave me an account of her birth and family," would a critic now say "this is a gentle satire upon female vanity"! To give such an account is the universal practice in Homer, when strangers meet, whether men or women.
"The Spectator" was dropped after running for about two years, not before Addison had praised in his paper Pope's "Essay on Criticism". Steele introduced Pope to Addison; perhaps they never were very attached friends, for a man of Addison's sense could not but be watchful of himself in the company of the vain and irritable little satirist. Pope's jealousy and suspicions produced a coldness, and, after Addison was dead, Pope emitted his venom in the poisonous character of "Atticus":—
Blest with each talent and each art to please,
And born to live, converse, and write with ease;
yet,
Bears, like the Turk, no brother near the throne,"