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 that 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. He that feels oppression from the presence of those to whom he knows himself superior, will desire to set loose his powers of conversation; and who that ever asked succours from Bacchus was able to preserve himself from being enslaved by his auxiliary?
And yet this was the man who could declare that ‘temperance and abstinence, faith and devotion, are in themselves, perhaps, as laudable as any other virtues.’[195] His essay on Drunkenness, in the Spectator, might well have proceeded from the pen of Hall or Taylor, Decker or Wither. He exclaims:—
A drunken man is a greater monster than any that is to be found among all the creatures which God has made: as indeed there is no character which appears more despicable and deformed, in the eyes of all reasonable persons, than that of a drunkard.... This vice has very fatal effects on the mind, the body, and fortune of the person who is devoted to it. In regard to the mind, it first of all discovers every flaw in it. The sober man, by the strength of reason, may keep under and subdue every vice or folly to which he is most inclined; but wine makes every latent seed sprout up in the soul, and shew itself; it gives fury to the passions, and force to those objects which are apt to produce them. Wine heightens indifference into love, love into jealousy, and jealousy into madness. It often turns the good-natured man into an idiot, and the choleric into an assassin. It gives bitterness to resentment, it makes vanity insupportable, and displays every little spot of the soul in its utmost deformity.
And more to the same effect. But a passage of his, to be found elsewhere, is far more terribly telling:—
Death, the King of Terrors, was determined to choose a Prime Minister; and his pale courtiers, the ghastly train of diseases, were all summoned to attend, when each preferred his claim to the honour of this illustrious office. Fever urged the numbers he had destroyed; Cold Palsy set forth his pretensions by shaking all his limbs; Gout hobbled up and alleged his great power of racking every joint; and Asthma’s inability to speak was a strong though silent argument in favor of his claim; Stone and Colic pleaded their violence; Plague his rapid progress in destruction; and Consumption, though slow, insisted that he was sure. In the midst of this contention the court was disturbed with the noise of music, dancing, feasting, and revelry: when immediately entered a lady, with a bold lascivious air and flushed countenance. She was attended, on the one hand, by a troop of bacchanals, and on the other by a train of wanton youths and damsels who danced half naked to the softest musical instruments. Her name was Intemperance. She waved her hand, and thus addressed the crowd of diseases:—‘Give way, ye sickly band of pretenders, nor dare to vie with my superior merits in the service of this monarch; am I not your Queen? Do ye not receive your power of shortening human life almost wholly from me? Who then so fit as myself for this important office?’ The grisly monarch grinned a smile of approbation, placed her on his right hand, and she immediately became his principal favourite and Prime Minister.
Addison did another good service in exposing, in the Tatler,—
Adulteration.
He says (No. 131):—