Addison did not end his periodical work with the “Spectator.” He took up that familiar character once again for a short time, long enough to produce an additional volume,—the eighth,—in which he had no longer the help of his old vivacious companion. The series is full of fine things, but we are not sure, though Macaulay thinks otherwise, that we do not a little miss the light and shade which Steele helped to supply. And other publications followed. Steele himself set up the “Guardian,” in which Addison had little share; and various others after that in which he had no share at all. And Addison himself had a “Freeholder,” in which he said some notable things; but these are all dead and gone, like so much of the contemporary furnishings of the age. Students find and read them in the old, collected editions; but life and recollection have gone out of them. Perhaps his own time even had by then got as much as it could enjoy and digest out of Addison. We, at least, have done so after these hundred and fifty years, and are capable of no more.
He died in 1719, at the early age of forty-seven. The story goes that he sent for young Warwick when he was on his death-bed, that he might see how a Christian could die: which we should say was unlike Addison, save for the reason that he had been drawing morals all his life, and might at that supreme moment be beyond seeing the ridicule of a last exhibition. Perhaps it was in reality a message of charity and forgiveness to the wayward boy, who, there seems reason to believe, was not fond of his stepfather. And thus the great writer glided gently out of a life in which he had more honor than falls to the lot of most men, and, let us hope, a great deal of mild satisfaction and pleasure. Thackeray has a little scoff at him as a man without passion. “I doubt until after his marriage whether he ever lost his night’s rest or his day’s tranquillity about any woman in his life.” Neither, perhaps, did Sir Roger, whose forty years’ love-making and unrequited affection was a sentimental luxury of the most delicate kind, as his maker intended it to be. But Addison’s fine and meditative genius had no need of passion. He is the “Spectator” of humankind. He had little temptation in his own calm nature to descend into the arena; the honors of the fight came to him somehow without any soil of the actual engagement. No smoke of gunpowder is about his laurels, no spot of blood upon his sword. He looks on at the others fighting, always with a nod of encouragement for the man of honor and virtue, of keen scorn for the selfish and evil-minded, of pity for the fallen. But it is not his part to fight. He makes no pretense of any inclination that way. He is the looker-on; and, as such, more valuable than a thousand men-at-arms.
He died at Holland House, that fine historical mansion sacred to the wits of a later age, but which in Addison’s time contained no tyrannical tribunal of literary patronage, whatever else there might be there which was contrary to peace. His life and death there make an association more touching, and at the same time of sweeter meaning, than the after-struggles of the Whig men of letters for Lady Holland’s arbitrary favors. The great humorist died in the middle of summer, in June, 1719, and was carried from that leafy retirement to the Jerusalem Chamber, where he lay in state: why, it seems difficult to understand—but his position had in it a kind of gentle royalty unlike that of other men. He was buried at Westminster by night, the wonderful solemn arches over the funeral party, half seen by the wavering lights, going off into vistas of mysterious gloom, echoing with the hymns of the choir, who sang him to his rest. Did they sing, one wonders, one of those verses which had been the most intimate utterance of his life: that great hymn of creation, scarcely inferior to the angelic murmurings of medieval Francis in his cell at Assisi?—
Soon as the evening shades prevail
The moon takes up the wondrous tale,
And nightly to the listening earth
Repeats the story of her birth;
Whilst all the stars that round her burn,
And all the planets in their turn,
Confirm the tidings as they roll,
And spread the truth from pole to pole.
Or one of those humble and more fervent human utterances of faith and humility and thanksgiving?—
Through every period of my life,
Thy goodness I’ll pursue,
And after death, in distant worlds,
The glorious theme renew.
When nature fails, and day and night
Divide thy works no more,
My ever-grateful heart, O Lord,
Thy mercy shall adore.
Through all eternity to thee
A joyful song I’ll raise,
But, oh! eternity’s too short
To utter all thy praise.
With such a soft, yet rapturous, strain the lofty arches and half-seen aisles, perhaps with a summer moon looking in, taking up the wondrous tale, might have echoed over Addison—the gentlest soul of all those noble comrades who lie together awaiting the restitution of all things—when our great humorist, our mildest kind “Spectator,” all his comments over, was laid in the best resting-place England can give to those whom she loves.
