Whatever other writings of these gallant gentlemen and teachers of Queen Anne’s time the reader may have upon his shelves, he cannot do better than equip them with that little story (excerpted from the Spectator) of “Sir Roger De Coverley.” No truer or more winning picture of worthy old English knighthood can you find anywhere in literature; nowhere such a tender twilight color falling through books upon old English country homes. Those papers made the scaffolding by which our own Irving built up his best stories about English country homesteads, and English revels of Christmas; and the De Coverley echoes sound sweetly and surely all up and down the pages of Bracebridge Hall.
The character of Sir Roger will live forever—so gracious—so courteous—so dignified—so gentle: his servants love him, and his dogs, and his white gelding.
“It being a cold day,” says his old butler, “when he made his will, he left for mourning to every man in the parish a great frieze coat, and to every woman a black riding-hood. Captain Sentry showed great kindnesses to the old house-dog my master was so fond of. It would have gone to your heart to have heard the moans the dumb creature made on the day of my master’s death. He has never joyed himself since—no more has any of us.”
Yet there were plenty of folks who sneered at these papers even then—as small—not worthy of notice. That great, bustling, slashing, literary giant, Dean Swift, says to Mistress Hester Johnson, “Do you read the Spectators? I never do; they never come in my way. They say abundance of them are very pretty.” “Very pretty!” a vast many satiric shots have been fired off to that tune. And yet Swift and Addison had been as friendly as two men so utterly unlike could be.
To complete the De Coverley picture, and give it relish in the boudoirs of the time, the authors paint the old knight in love—delicately, but deeply and wofully in love—with a certain unnamed widow living near him, and whose country house overlooks the park of the De Coverley estate.
“Oh, the many moonlight nights that I have walked by myself, and thought on the widow, by the music of the nightingales!”
This sounds like Steele. And the old knight leaves to her
“Whom he has loved for forty years, a pearl necklace that was his mother’s, and a couple of silver bracelets set with jewels.”
This episode has an added interest, because about those times the dignified and coy Mr. Addison was very much bent upon marrying the elegant Lady Warwick, whose son had been correspondent—perhaps pupil of his. He did not bounce into marriage—like Steele—with his whole heart in his eyes and his speech; it was a long pursuit, and had its doubtful stages; six years before the affair really came about, he used to write to the Warwick lad about the tom-tits, and the robin-redbreasts, and their pretty nests, and the nightingales. But Addison, more or less fortunate than Sir Roger, does win the widow’s hand, and has a sorry time of it with her. She never forgets to look a little down upon him, and he never forgets a keen knowledge of it.
He has the liberty, however, after his marriage—with certain limitations—of a great fine home at Holland House, which is one of the few old country houses still standing in London, in the midst of the gardens, where Addison used to walk, in preference to my Lady’s chamber. His habits were to study of a morning—dine at a tavern; then to Button’s coffee-house, near to Covent Garden, for a meet with his cronies; and afterward—when the spectre of marriage was real to him—to the tavern again, and to heavier draughts than he was wont to take in his young days.