No doubt the real motive of the interest in Addison shown by Lord Halifax, at that time known as Charles Montague, was an anxiety which he shared with all the leading statesmen of the period, and of which more will be said presently, to secure for his party the services of the ablest writers. Finding his protégé as yet hardly qualified to transact affairs of State, he joined with Lord Somers, who had also fixed his eyes on Addison, in soliciting for him from the Crown, in 1699, a pension of £300 a year, which might enable him to supplement his literary accomplishments with the practical experience of travel. Addison naturally embraced the offer. He looked forward to studying the political institutions of foreign countries, to seeing the spots of which he had read in his favourite classical authors, and to meeting the most famous men of letters on the Continent.
It is characteristic both of his own tastes and of his age that he seems to have thought his best passport to intellectual society abroad would be his Latin poems. His verses on the Peace of Ryswick, written in 1697 and dedicated to Montague, had already procured him great reputation, and had been praised by Edmund Smith—a high authority—as “the best Latin poem since the Æneid.” This gave him the opportunity of collecting his various compositions of the same kind, and in 1699 he published from the Sheldonian Press a second volume of the Musæ Anglicanæ—the first having appeared in 1691—containing poems by various Oxford scholars. Among the contributors were Hannes, one of the many scholarly physicians of the period; J. Philips, the author of the Splendid Shilling; and Alsop, a prominent antagonist of Bentley, whose Horatian humour is celebrated by Pope in the Dunciad.[9]
But the most interesting of the names in the volume is that of the once celebrated Edmond, commonly called “Rag,” Smith, author of the Ode on the Death of Dr. Pocock, who seems to have been among Addison’s intimate acquaintance, and deserves to be recollected in connection with him on account of a certain similarity in their genius and the extraordinary difference in their fortunes. “Rag” was a man of fine accomplishments and graceful humour, but, like other scholars of the same class, indolent and licentious. In spite of great indulgence extended to him by the authorities of Christ Church, he was expelled from the University in consequence of his irregularities. His friends stood by him, and, through the interest of Addison, a proposal was made to him to undertake a history of the Revolution, which, however, from political scruples he felt himself obliged to decline. Like Addison, he wrote a tragedy modelled on classical lines; but, as it had no political significance, it only pleased the critics, without, like “Cato,” interesting the public. Like Addison, too, he had an opportunity of profiting by the patronage of Halifax, but laziness or whim prevented him from keeping an appointment which the latter had made with him, and caused him to miss a place worth £300 a year. Addison, by his own exertions, rose to posts of honour and profit, and towards the close of his life became Secretary of State. Smith envied his advancement, and, ignoring the fact that his own failure was entirely due to himself, murmured at fortune for leaving him in poverty. Yet he estimated his wants at £600 a year, and died of indulgence when he can scarcely have been more than forty years of age.
Addison’s compositions in the Musæ Anglicanæ are eight in number. All of them are distinguished by the ease and flow of the versification, but they are generally wanting in originality. The best of them is the Pygmæo-Gerano-Machia, which is also interesting as showing traces of that rich vein of humour which Addison worked out in the Tatler and Spectator. The mock-heroic style in prose and verse was sedulously cultivated in England throughout the eighteenth century. Swift, Pope, Arbuthnot, and Fielding, developed it in various forms; but Addison’s Latin poem is perhaps the first composition in which the fine fancy and invention afterwards shown in the Rape of the Lock and Gulliver’s Travels conspicuously displayed itself.
A literary success of this kind at that epoch gave a writer a wider reputation than he could gain by compositions in his own language. Armed, therefore, with copies of the Musæ Anglicanæ for presentation to scholars, and with Halifax’s recommendatory letters to men of political distinction, Addison started for the Continent.
CHAPTER III.
ADDISON ON HIS TRAVELS.
Travelling in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries involved an amount of thought and precaution which would have seemed inconvenient to the tourist accustomed to abandon himself to the authority of guide-books, couriers, and railway companies. By ardent spirits like Roderick Random it was regarded as the sphere of enterprise and fortune, and not without reason, in days when adventures were to be met with on almost every road in the country, and in the streets and inns of the towns. The graver portion of society, on the other hand, considered it as part of the regular course of education through which every young man of position ought to pass before entering into active life. French was the universally recognised language of diplomacy. French manners and conversation were considered to be the best school for politeness, while Italy was held in the highest respect by the northern nations as the source of revived art and letters. Some of the most distinguished Englishmen of the time looked, it is true, with little favour on this fashionable training. “Lord Cowper,” says Spence, on the information of Dr. Conybeare, “on his death-bed ordered that his son should never travel (it is by the absolute desire of the Queen that he does). He ordered this from a good deal of observation on its effects; he had found that there was little to be hoped, and much to be feared, from travelling. Atwell, who is the young lord’s tutor abroad, gives but a very discouraging account of it, too, in his letters, and seems to think that people are sent out too young, and are too hasty to find any great good from it.”