Historical Characters in the Reign of Queen Anne

might be the chances of journalism, must have been very strong. And what was stronger still was the delight of his own vivacious, restless, ready mind, with its sense of boundless power and infinite resource, to which difficulty was a delight and the exercise of walking over hot coals or dancing on a sword-point the most exhilarating possibility, in making its triumphant way over obstacles which would have baffled almost all his contemporaries. “The danger’s self was lure alone” to this skilled and cunning fencer, this master of all the arts. In a very different sense from that of Tennyson’s noble hero, “Faith Unfaithful” was inspiration and strength to him, and to be falsely true the most delightful situation. He loved to support his principles by a hundred dodges, and plead them from the other side, and make of himself the devil’s advocate in the interest of heaven. All this was life to his mind. He must have had a positive pleasure in proving to himself first, and then to all England, that the happiest thing a Whig could do was to find the Tory measures exactly those which he would have recommended, and that his allegiance to the queen required a change of policy on his part whenever circumstances compelled her to change her ministry. It was all devotion—not time-serving, as the vulgar thought. Defoe took infinite pleasure in proving that it was so, in making everything clear. The commonplace and humdrum expedient of following your party would have been dull to him—a proceeding without interest as without danger. He wanted excitement, obstacles to get over; a position which would make sudden claims upon his ingenuity to account for and fortify it. Such a mind is rare, and still more rarely is it accompanied by genius. But when such a combination does occur it is a very curious spectacle.

In the mean time, however, all that Defoe had to do was simple enough. He had to support peace and the union—two things which in his free estate he had already advocated with all his powers. He did it with the utmost skill, fervor, and success, and to all appearance contributed much to the great public act which was the subject of so many struggles and resistances on the part of the smaller nation—the union. This great expedient, of which from the first he had seen the advantage, Defoe worked for with unwearying zeal. He praised and caressed Caledonia—upon which subject he wrote one of those vigorous essays in verse which he called poetry—and the tolerance of the Presbyterian Church, and the good sense of the nation generally, which was not always perceptible to English politicians; and even risked a visit to Edinburgh in performance of the orders of the government, though at the risk of rude handling to himself. In all this there cannot be the slightest doubt that he was entirely honest and patriotic, and acted from an enlightened personal view of the necessities of the case. When the curious incident of the Sacheverell prosecution occurred, he had once more a subject entirely to his own mind, and expressed his own feelings in supporting with all his might the measures of the government against that High Church firebrand, one of the chief of those whom he had held up to public ridicule in the “Shortest Way.” So far he was fortunate, being employed upon subjects entirely congenial to his mind, and on which he had already strong convictions. The equivocal part of the matter is that he never ceased to assert and insist upon his independence. “Contemn,” he says, “as not worth mentioning, the suggestions of some people of my being employed to carry on the interests of a party. I have never loved any party, but with my utmost zeal have sincerely espoused the great and original interest of this nation and of all nations—I mean truth and liberty”—which was the truth, yet not all the truth. Again, with still more violent protestations, he refers to his private circumstances, of which nothing is known, to prove how little he was protected by power. It would seem from this statement that he was still being pursued for the remnant of old debts, or those new ones with which the failure of his tile factory and his long imprisonment had saddled him.

If paid, gentlemen, for writing [he cries], if hired, if employed, why still harassed with merciless and malicious men; why pursued to all extremities of law for old accounts which you clear other men of every day? Why oppressed, distressed, and driven from his family, and from all his prospects of delivering them and himself? Is this the fate of men employed and hired? Is this the figure the agents of courts and princes make?

The argument is a feeble one for such a practised reasoner as Defoe, without considering the trifling detail that it was untrue, for debts are by no means unknown to favorites of the crown. Nor could he have been saved by Harley’s pay, which probably was never very great, from the consequences of previous misfortunes. The reader will think that a judicious silence would have been more appropriate, but that was not Defoe’s way. The only wonder is that he did not adduce such detailed evidence of his own freedom as would have deceived any man, and shown to demonstration that it was he who subsidized the ministry, and not they him. The wonderful thing is that he was free through all, maintaining his own favorite opinions, working as an independent power. Servile journalists have existed in plenty, but seldom one who took the pay of his masters and served their interests, yet fought under his own flag with honesty and a good conscience all the while.

This happy state, however, did not last. Harley fell, but with his last breath (as a minister) adjured his champion not to sacrifice himself, but to come to an understanding with his successor, Godolphin. This necessitated a certain revolution in respect to peace, which Defoe managed cleverly with the excellent device above mentioned. And there was still higher ground which he felt himself entitled to take. The public safety was involved in the stability of the new ministry such as it was. And he faces the dilemma with boundless pluck and assurance. “Though I don’t like the crew, I won’t sink the ship; I’ll pump and heave and haul and do everything I can, though he that pulls with me were my enemy. The reason is plain. We are all in the ship and must sink or swim together.” These admirable reasonings brought him at last to the calm rectitude of the following conclusion:

It occurred to me instantly as a principle for my conduct that it was not material to me what ministers her Majesty was pleased to employ. My duty was to go along with every ministry so far as they did not break in upon the constitution and the laws and liberties of my country, my part being only the duty of a subject, viz: to submit to all lawful commands, and to enter into no service that was not justifiable by the laws, to all of which I have exactly obliged myself.

When Harley returned to power, another modification became necessary, but Defoe piously felt it was providential that he should thus be thrown back upon his original protector; and had the matter ended here, as was long supposed, it is difficult to see what indictment could be brought against him. It is not expedient certainly that a director of public opinion should have state pay, and does not look well when the secret is betrayed. But so long as the scope of all his productions is good, honest, and patriotic, with only as much submission in trifles as is inevitable, the bargain is a personal meanness rather than a public crime, and this was long supposed to have been the case. It was believed that after the death of Queen Anne and Harley’s final fall, Defoe’s eloquent mouth was closed, and he disappeared into the calm of private life to earn a better hire and a more lasting influence through the two immortal works of fiction by which alone, but for the painful labors of biographers, his name would have been known. Had the matter been left so, how much happier would it have been for the hero of this romance of literary life, how much more edifying for posterity! We could have imagined the tired warrior retiring from that hot and painful field in which even the laurels were not worth the plucking, where defeat was miserable and success mean, and scarcely any combatant could keep his honor intact, to the quietness of some suburban house in which his three pretty daughters could care for him and idolize him, and where his wonderful imagination, no longer a slave to the exigencies of political warfare, could weave its dreams into a sober certainty of life awake. We should then have said of the author of “Robinson Crusoe” and the “Journal of the Plague,” that in his poverty and anxiety and overhaste he had been beguiled into a bargain which might have been a shameful one had not his marvelous power of seeing every side of a subject, and that insight of genius which divines the real unity of honest souls through all the external diversities which fill the limited vision of common men, carried him triumphantly through. And upon what real fault there was we should have thrown a veil. The age would have borne the blame—an age which was corrupt to the core, and in which men changed their principles every day. In the garden at Newington, where the young ladies entertained their lovers, we could have pictured him benevolent and friendly in the flowing peruke under which his keen eyes sparkled, looking on at the love-making with prudent, tradesmanlike thoughts of Sophia’s portion, and how much the young people would have to set up housekeeping upon, coming in not inappropriately between the pages of Crusoe—perhaps taking a suggestion about Robinson’s larder from some passing talk about the storeroom, or modifying for the use of Friday some rustical remark of the young serving-man from the country, or in the renewing of old recollections produced by some old friend’s visit finding an anecdote, a detail, to incorporate into the “Journal of the Plague.” And we should have asked ourselves by what strange play of genius the unenchanted island, where all the sober elaborations of fact clothed so completely the vivid realizations of imagination, should have risen out of the mists amid those trim, old-fashioned alleys, and green plots, and stiff parterres of flowers.

Alas! That demon of research which in its poking and prying sometimes puts old bones together, and sometimes scatters to the winds the ashes of the dead, has spoiled this pleasant picture. Impelled by its influence, an unwary or else too painstaking student, some twenty years ago, was seized with the idea of roaming the earth in search of relics of Defoe. And the diabolical powers which put this fatal pursuit into his mind directed him to a bundle of yellow papers in the State Paper Office which has, alas! for ever and ever made an end of our man of genius. These treacherous papers give us to wit under his own hand that he was in reality in full action in the most traitorous of employments during the period of his supposed retirement. The following, which is the first of these fatally self-elucidatory letters, will reveal at once the inconceivable occupation to which Defoe in his downfall lent himself. He had perhaps compromised himself too much, and been too completely identified with Harley at the end to be considered capable of more honorable and evident employment. The letter is addressed to the secretary of the minister who had given him his disgraceful office:

It was proposed by my Lord Townsend that I should appear as if I were as before under the displeasure of the government, and separated from the Whigs, and that I might be more serviceable in a kind of disguise than if I appeared openly. In the interval of this, Dyer, the “News-Letter” writer, being dead, and Dormer, his successor, being unable by his troubles to carry on that work, I had an offer of a share in the property as well as in the management of that work.

I immediately acquainted my Lord Townsend of it, who, by Mr. Buckley, let me know it would be a very acceptable piece of service, for that letter was really very prejudicial to the public, and the most difficult to come at in a judicial way in case of offense given. My Lord was pleased to add, by Mr. Buckley, that he would consider my service in that case, as he afterwards did.

Upon this I engaged in it, and that so far, that though the property was not wholly my own, yet the conduct and government of the style of news was so entirely in me, that I ventured to assure His Lordship the sting of that mischievous paper should be entirely taken out, though it was granted that the style should continue Tory, as it was, that the party might be amused and not set up another, which would have destroyed the design, and this part I therefore take entirely on myself still.

This went on for a year before my Lord Townsend went out of the office, and His Lordship, in consideration of the service, made me the appointment which Mr. Buckley knows of, with promise of a further allowance as service presented.

My Lord Sunderland, to whose goodness I had many years ago been obliged, when I was in a secret commission sent to Scotland, was pleased to approve and continue this service, and the appointment annexed, and, with His Lordship’s approbation I introduced myself, in the disguise of a translator of the foreign news, to be so far concerned in this weekly paper of Mist’s as to be able to keep it within the circle of a secret management, also prevent the mischievous part of it, and yet neither Mist, or any of those concerned with him, have the least guess or suspicion by whose direction I do it.

There is nothing, it seems to us, for any apologist to say in explanation of this extraordinary statement. The emissary of a Whig and Hanoverian government acting as editor of a Tory and Jacobite newspaper,—nay, of three newspapers,—in order to take the harm out of them, to amuse the Tory party with a pretense of style and subjects suitable to their views, while balking all their purposes, is at once the most ingenious and the most shameless of all devices. It continued for a long period, and was very successful. But when the deceit was discovered at last, Mist, the deluded publisher, made a murderous assault upon the deceiver, and the journalists of the period seem to have risen unanimously against him. That Defoe must have fallen sadly before he came to this is very evident; but how he fell, except by the natural vengeance of deterioration, which makes a man who has long paltered with the truth unable at last to distinguish the gradations which separate the doubtful from the criminal, no one can say. He must, however, have fallen indeed in position and importance before he could be put to such miserable work; and he must have fallen more fatally, like that other son of the morning, deep down into hades, where he became the father of lies and the betrayer of mankind, before he could have been capable of this infamous mission.

We turn with relief to the work which, of all these manifold labors, is the only portion which has really survived the effects of time. Defoe’s political writings, with all their lucidity, their brilliant good sense, daring satire, and astonishing readiness and variety, are for the student, and retain a place among the materials of history, studied no longer for their own sake, but for the elucidations they may give. But “Robinson Crusoe” lives by his own right, and will, we may confidently affirm, after the long trial he has had, never die. We need not discuss the other works of fiction which are all as characteristic as distinct narratives of apparent fact, as carefully elaborated in every detail. They are almost all excellent in their beginning, but, a fault which is shared by Crusoe himself, run into such a prodigality of detail toward their close, that the absence of dramatic construction and of any real inspiration of art, becomes painfully (or rather tediously, which is worse) apparent. We do not, however, share the opinion of those critics who disparage Defoe’s marvelous power of narrative. “The little art he is truly master of, of forging a story and imposing it on the world for truth,” is an art which he possesses in common with but very few who have ever lived; and even among these few he has it in a very high degree. The gift is peculiar; we are not moved by it to pity or tenderness, and not much to admiration of the hero. The inner circle of our emotions is seldom, if ever, entered; but, on the other hand, there is nothing in that island where the shipwrecked mariner finds a shelter, and which he makes into a home, which we do not know and see, as well as if we had dwelt in it like Robinson. It is an island which is added to the geography of the world. Not only would no child ever doubt of its existence, but to the most experienced reader it is far more true and real than half of those of which we have authentic histories, which our relatives and countrymen have visited and colonized. Those South Sea Islands, about which we have so many flowery volumes, are not half so certain. And every detail of the life of its solitary inhabitant comes up before us like our own personal proceedings—more than visible, incontestable experiences. Not one of us but could draw the picture of the solitary in his furs, with all his odd implements about him; and, more wonderful still, not a child from four upward but could tell who it was. The tale does not move us as do imaginative histories on a more poetic level; but in its humbler range it is as living as the best. And there is something in this very absence of emotion which gives a still more wonderful force to the tale. Men in such desperate circumstances, driven to the use of all their faculties for the mere preservation of their lives, have presumably but little time for feeling. The absorption of every faculty in this one primitive need brings a certain serenity, a calm which is like the hush of the solitude—the silence of the seas. The atmosphere is full of this stillness. There is the repose of Nature, not filled with reflections of human sentiment, but imposing her patience, her calm repetition of endless endeavor upon the solitary flung into her bosom; and there is a sobriety in the story which adds immensely to the power. Other unknown islands have been in fiction, but none where the progress of events was so gradual, where there were so few miraculous accessories. One of the most able of English romancers, the late Charles Reade, is the last who has carried us to a desolate island. His story is full of charm, of humor, and sentiment far beyond the reach of Defoe. Nothing could be more tender, more delightful, than the idyl of the two lovers cut off from all mankind, lost in the silence of the seas. But in every way his isle is an enchanted isle. Not only is it peopled with love and all the graces, but it is running over with every convenience,—everything that is useful and beautiful. The inexhaustible ingenuity of the lover is not more remarkable than the wealth of necessary articles of every kind that turns up at every step. He builds his lady a bower lined with mother-of-pearl; he clothes her in a cloak of sealskin; he finds jewels for her; she has but to wish and to have, as if Regent street had been within reach. Very different is the sober sanity of the elder narrative. Defoe knows nothing about lovers; all his heroes marry with prodigality; but he has no love, any more than he has pearls or gutta-percha, on his island. Conveniences come very slowly to Robinson Crusoe; he has to grope his way, and find his living hardly, patiently. Day after day, and year after year, the story-teller goes on working out the order of events. It is as leisurely as nature, as little helped by accident, as sober even as matter of fact, and yet what a potent, clear, all-realizing fancy—a faculty which in its limited sphere saw and felt and acted in completest appropriation of the circumstances—this sober imagination was!

He was fifty-eight at the time this book was written—a man worn with endless work and strife, but ever ready for more—a man who had fallen and failed, and made but little of his life. It is said that he was at his highest point of external prosperity when he published “Robinson Crusoe”; but when we remember that he was at that time engaged in the inconceivable muddle of “Mist’s Journal,” it seems almost impossible to believe this, or to understand how anything but poverty could drive him into such a disgraceful employment. No doubt, to a man who at heart had once been an honest man, and was so no more, it must have been a relief and blessed deliverance to escape away into the distant seas, to refresh his ever-active soul with the ingenious devices of the shipwrecked sailor, and bury himself in that life so different from his own, the savage necessities, the primitive cares. The goats and the parrot and poor Friday: what an ease and comfort to escape into their society after bamboozling Mist, and reporting to my lord at St. James’s! Was it a desperate expedient of nature to save him from utter self-contempt? Such a man, even if his conscience had grown callous, must have required some outlet from the dreadful slavery to which he had bound himself.

“Robinson Crusoe” is the work by which Defoe is best known, which is, after all, the most effectual guarantee that it is his best work. But it is not, to our thinking, worthy of being placed in competition with the “Journal of the Plague”—a history so real, so solemn and impressive, so full of the atmosphere and sentiment of the time, that it reaches a far higher point of literary art than anything else Defoe has written. For this is not prose alone, nor that art of making fiction look like truth, which is supposed to be his greatest excellence: it is one of the most impressive pictures of a historical incident which has struck the poetic imagination everywhere, and of which we have perhaps more authentic records than of any other historical episode. Neither Boccaccio nor Manzoni have equaled Defoe in the story of the plague. To the old Italian it was a horror from which the life-loving fled with loathing as well as fear, and which they tried to forget and put out of their sight. Defoe’s minute description of the argument carried on within his own mind by the narrator is curiously characteristic of the tendency to elaborate and explain which enters so largely into all his works. The mental condition of the respectable citizen, divided between concern for his life and concern for his property, seeing with reasonable eyes that death was not certain, but that in case of flight ruin was,—moved by the divination which he uses in all good faith, yet perhaps not with sufficient devoutness to have allowed himself to be guided by it had it been contrary to his previous dispositions, and at bottom by a certain vis inertiæ and disinclination to move, which is clearly indicated from the beginning,—is in his best manner, and so real that it is impossible to resist its air of absolute truthfulness. But the state of the shut-up streets, the dreadful sounds and sights, the brooding heat and stillness of the long and awful days, the cloud of fate that is about the doomed city, are beyond description impressive. This curious spectator of all things, this impartial yet eager looker-on, determined to see all that can be seen, prudent yet fearless, adopting every precaution, yet neglecting no means of investigation, inquiring everywhere, always with his eyes and ears open, at once a philosophical inquirer and an eager gossip, is without doubt Defoe himself. But he is also a marked figure of the time. He is like Pepys; he is almost, but for the unmistakable difference between the bourgeois and the fine gentleman, like Evelyn. He is one of the special kind of man born to illustrate that period. Pepys would have found means for some piece of junketing even in the midst of his alarm, whereas Defoe thinks of his property, when he has time to think of anything but the plague, which is a very natural modification consequent on the changes of the times. But they are at bottom the same. While, however, this central figure remains the characteristic but not elevated personage with whom we are already acquainted, the history which he records is done with a tragic force and completeness which it is impossible to surpass. In this there is nothing commonplace, no wearying monotony; the very statistics have a tragic solemnity in them; the awful unseen presence dominates everything. We scarcely breathe while we move about the streets emptied of all passers-by, or with a suspicious throng in the middle of the way keeping as far apart as possible from the houses. This is not mere prose: it is poetry in its most rare form; it is an ideal representation, in all its sober details, of one of the most tragical moments of human suffering and fate.

Nothing else that Defoe has done is on the same level. It is pitched on too high a key perhaps for the multitude. His innocent thief, “Colonel Jack,” begins with a picture both amusing and touching of the curious moral denseness and confusion of a street boy; his “Cavalier” is a charming young man. But both these and all the rest of Defoe’s heroes and heroines grow heavy and tedious at the end. The “Journal of the Plague” is not like them in this respect. The conclusion—the sudden surprise and delicious sense of relief, the joy which makes the passers-by stop and shake hands with one another in the streets, and the women call out from windows with tears and outcries of gladness—is sudden and overwhelming as the reality. We are caught in the growing despair, and suddenly in a moment deliverance comes. Here alone Defoe is not too long; the unexpected is brought in with a skill and force not less remarkable than that which in the previous pages has portrayed the slow growth and inevitable development of the misery. Up to this anticlimax of unlooked-for joy the calamity has grown, every new touch intensifying the awful reality. But the recovery is sudden, and told without an unnecessary word. It is the only instance in which Defoe has followed the instinct of a great artist and shown that he knew how to avail himself of the unwritten code and infallible methods of art.

We forget his shortcomings when we discuss this which is to our mind much his greatest work, and it is well that we should leave him in this disposition. He died mysteriously alone, after a period of wandering and hiding which nobody can explain. Whether he was in trouble with creditors, or with political enemies, or with the exasperated party which he had managed to outwit; whether he kept out of the way that his family might make better terms for themselves, or that he might keep the remains of his money out of the hands of an undutiful son, or a grasping son-in-law, nobody can tell. He died in remote lodgings, all alone, and his affairs were administered by a stranger, perhaps his landlady, no one knows. His domestic circumstances have been referred to during his life only in the vaguest way. He had a wife and a numerous family when he was put in the pillory; he had a wife, a son who was unkind, and three daughters at the end; but that is all we know. He died at seventy-two “of a lethargy,” no doubt fallen into the feebleness and hopelessness of lonely old age; and that is all. His life overflowed with activity and business. To be doing seems to have been a necessity of his being. But he never seems to have enjoyed the importance due to his powers, and in an age when men of letters filled the highest posts never would appear to have risen above his citizen circle, his shop-keeping ways. Something in the man must have accounted for this, but it is difficult to say what it was; for the age did not require a high standard of truthfulness, and the worst of his misdoings were kept secret from the public. Perhaps his manners were not such as society, though very easy in those days, could tolerate; perhaps—but this is simple guesswork. All we know of Defoe is that as a writer he was of the greatest influence and note, but as a man nothing. He died poor and alone; he had little reward for unexampled labor. When Addison was secretary of state, and Prior an ambassador, he was nobody—a sword in the hand of an unscrupulous statesman; a shopkeeper manufacturing his genius and selling it by the yard. A sadder conclusion never was told.

Chapter V

ADDISON, THE HUMORIST

THERE is not a name in the entire range of English literature to which so full and universal an appreciation has been given by posterity as that of Addison. He had his critics in his day. He had, indeed, more than critics, and from one quarter at least has received in his breast the finest and sharpest sting which a friend estranged could put into poetic vengeance. But the burden even of contemporary voices was always overwhelmingly in his favor, and nowadays there is no one in the world, we believe, that has other than gentle words for the gentle writer—the finest critic, the finest gentleman, the most tender humorist of his age. It is not only admiration, but a sort of personal affection with which we look back, detecting in all the bustling companies of that witty and depraved period his genial figure, with a delightful simplicity in the midst of all the formalism, and whole-heartedness among the conceits and pretensions, of the fops and wits, the intriguing statesmen and busy conspirators, of an age in which public faith can scarcely be said to have existed at all. He had his little defects, which were the defects of the time. And perhaps his age would not have loved him as it did had he been entirely without a share in its weaknesses. As it was, no one could call him a milksop then, as no one would venture to record any offensive name against him now. The smile of benevolent good nature, of indulgent humor, of observation always as sweet and merciful as it is acute and refined, is never absent from his countenance. He treats no man hardly; the ideal beings whom he creates are the friends of all: we could, indeed, more easily spare dozens of living acquaintances than we could part with Sir Roger de Coverley. Addison is the very embodiment of that delightful gift of humor on which we pride ourselves so much as a specially English quality; his soft laugh touches all the chords of sympathy and loving comprehension with a tender ridicule in which the applauses of admiration are conveyed with double effect. That his style is the perfection, in its way, of English style is less dear and delightful to us than that what it conveys is the perfection of feeling. His art is the antipodes of that satirical art which allows human excellence only to gird at it, and insinuate motives which diminish or destroy. Addison, on the other hand, allows imperfections which his interpretation turns into something more sweet than virtue, and throws a delightful gleam of love and laughter upon the eccentricities and characteristic follies of individual nature. That he sees everything is one of the conditions of his genial forgiveness of everything that is not mean or base or cruel. With these he makes no terms. They are not within the range of his treatment. Non ragionam di lor. He passes by to the genial rural circle where all is honest, simple, and true; or to town, where in the coffee-houses themselves a kind soul will find humors enough to keep him cheerful without harm to any of his fellow-creatures—even the post-writers whom he jocularly recommends to a supplementary Chelsea as having killed more men in the wars than any general ever did, or the “needy persons” hungry for news, whom he promises to keep supplied with good and wholesome sentiments. He was at the same time the first of his kind. Thackeray associates Congreve—one does not exactly know why—with this nobler name: but at once makes it clear that there could be no comparison between them, since the world of the comedy-writer was an entirely fictitious world, altogether unlike the human nature of the essayist. Of the humorists we may venture to say that Addison is the first, as well as the most refined and complete. Swift draws a heavier shaft, which lacerates and kills, and Pope sends his needle-pointed arrows, all touched with poisonous venom, to the most vulnerable points; but Addison has no heart to slay. He transfixes the veil of folly with light, shining, irresistible darts, and pins it aloft in triumph, but he lets the fool go free—perhaps lets you see even, by some reflection from his swift-flying polished spear, a gleam of human meaning in the poor wretch’s face which touches your heart. Even when he diverts himself with Tom Folio or Ned Softly, instead of plunging these bores into a bottomless gulf of contempt, he plays with them as one might with a child, a twinkle of soft fun in his eye, drawing out their simple absurdities. That habit of his which Swift describes to Stella, as one which she herself shared, of seeming to consent to follies which it is not worth while contradicting, and which Pope venomously characterizes as “assents with evil leer,” lures him, and us along with him, into byways of human nature which the impatient critic closes with a kick, and in which there is much amusement and little harm. Molière’s Trissotin is a social conspirator meaning to build advancement upon his bad verses; but Addison’s poetaster is only an exposition of harmless vanity, humored by the gently malicious, but kind and patient, listener, who amid his laughter finds a certain pleasure in pleasing the victim too. There is sympathy even in the dissection, a conjunction of feelings which is of the very nature of the true humorist. These, no doubt, are of a very different caliber from that creation which still charms the reader—the delightful figure of Sir Roger, and all the simple folks full of follies and of virtues who surround him; but they are scarcely less remarkable. The lesser pictures, taken at a sitting in which the author has had no time to elaborate those features of human character which always draw forth his tenderness, are yet full of this instinctive sweetness, as well as of insight, keen, though always tempered, as the touch of Ithuriel’s spear. The angel, indeed, was far more severe, disclosing the demon under his innocent disguise; but Addison has nothing to do with demons, he has no deep-laid plan of mischief to unveil. The worst he does is to smile and banter the little absurdities out of us—those curious little delusions which deceive ourselves as well as the world.

This most loved of English writers was the son of one of those English parsons who confuse our belief in the extremely unfavorable account, given by both the graver and the lighter historians of the time, of the condition of country clergymen. Neither Parson Adams in his virtue, nor Parson Trulliber in his grossness, nor Macaulay’s keen and clear picture, nor Thackeray’s fine disrespectful studies of the chaplain who marries the waiting-maid, seem to afford us any guidance to the nature of the household which the Rev. Launcelot Addison, after many wanderings and experiences, set up in the little parish of Milston in Wiltshire somewhere about the year 1670. Steele’s description of it has, no doubt, the artificial form affected by the age, and sets it forth as one of those models of perfection and examples to the world which nowadays we are more disposed to distrust and laugh at than to follow. “I remember among all my acquaintances,” he says, “but one man whom I have thought to live with his children with equanimity and a good grace”; and he goes on to describe the “three sons and one daughter whom he bred with all the care imaginable in a liberal and ingenious way—their thoughts turned into an emulation for the superiority in kind and generous affection toward each other,” the boys behaving themselves with a manly friendship, their sister treated by them with as much complaisance as any other young lady of their acquaintance. “It was an unspeakable pleasure to visit or sit at a meal in this family,” he adds. “I have often seen the old man’s heart flow at his eyes with joy upon occasions which would appear indifferent to such as were strangers to the turn of his mind; but a very slight accident wherein he saw his children’s good will to one another created in him the Godlike pleasure of loving them because they loved one another.” The family tenderness thus inculcated no doubt came from a mind full of the milk of human kindness, and happily transmitting that possession to the gentle soul of the eldest son, who probably was the one whom the father “had the weakness to love much better than the others”—a weakness which “he took as much pains to correct as any other criminal passion that could arise in his mind.” Such a paternity and training does something to account for the prevailing gentleness of Addison’s temper and judgments.

Dr. Addison had seen the world not in a very brilliant or luxurious way. He had been chaplain at Dunkirk, and afterward at Tangier among the Moors, upon which latter strange experience he wrote a book: and he rose afterward to be Dean of Lichfield, a dignified clergyman. One of the brothers went to India, and attained to some eminence; the other was eventually, like Joseph, a fellow of Magdalen. They dispersed themselves in the world as the children of a clergyman might very well do at the present day, and it is evident belonged distinctly to the caste of gentlemen. The sons, or at least the son with whom we have specially to do, after sundry local schoolings went to Charterhouse, which he left at fifteen for Oxford, perhaps because of his unusual advancement, more probably because the custom of the time sent boys earlier to the university, as is still the practice in Scotland. Addison was much distinguished in that elegant branch of learning, the writing of Latin verse, a kind of distinction which remains dear to the finest minds, in spite of all the remarks concerning its inutility and the time wasted in acquiring the art, which the rest of the world has so largely indulged in. A copy of verses upon the accession of King William, written while he was still a very youthful scholar at Queen’s College, no more than seventeen, got him his first promotion. The boy’s verses came—perhaps from some proud tutor at Queen’s, boasting what could be done under the cupola in the High street, finer than anything attempted in more distinguished seats of learning—into the hands of the Provost of Magdalen, to the amazement and envy of that more learned corporation. There had been no election of scholars in the previous year, during the melancholy time when the college was embroiled with King James, and the courtly Quaker Penn had all the disturbed and troubled fellows under his heel; but now that freedom had returned with the revolution and the heaven-sent William, there was room for a double number of distinguished poor demies. Dr. Lancaster of Magdalen decided at once that to leave such Latinity as that of the young author of these verses to a college never very great in such gifts would be a sin against his own: and young Addison was accordingly elected to all the privileges of a Magdalen demyship. It is with this beautiful college that his name is connected in Oxford. There could be no more fit association. The noble trees and velvet lawns of Magdalen speckled with deer, shy yet friendly creatures that embellish the retired and silent glades—the long-winding walk by the Cherwell round the meadows where the fritillaries grow, the time-worn dignity of the place with its graceful old-world architecture and associations, are all in the finest keeping with the shy and silent student who talked so little and thought so much, living among his books in his college rooms, keeping his lamp alight half through the night, or musing under the elms, where the little stream joins the greater. It is dreadful to think that in all probability Addison thought the imposing classicism of Queen’s, at which the cultivated scholar of to-day shudders, much finer than Magdalen: for he had no opinion of Gothic, and lamented the weakness, if not wickedness, of those mistaken ages which wasted ornament upon such antiquated forms; but at least he loved his retired promenade under the trees, with all its sweetness of primrose and thrush in spring, and the wonderful yellow sunsets over the floods in winter, and the pleasant illusions of the winding way. There the stranger may realize still in the quiet of the cloistered shades how the shy young student wandered in Addison’s Walk and pondered his verses, and formed the delicate wealth of speech which was to distinguish him from all his fellows. He spent about ten years in his college, first as a student and then as a fellow, in the position which, perhaps, is more ideal for a scholar than any other in Christendom. But the young man was not much more enlightened than the other young men of his age, notwithstanding his genius at Latin verses, and that still finer genius which had not as yet come to utterance. He wrote an “Account of the Greatest English Poets,” not much wiser than the school-boy essays of our own day which set Lord Tennyson and Mr. Browning down in their right places. Addison went further. He leaves out all mention of Shakspere, and speaks of Cowley as a “mighty genius.” He describes “the spacious times of great Elizabeth” as “a barbarous age,” amused by “Old Spenser” with “long-spun allegories” and “dull morals,” which have lost all power to charm an age of understanding. The youth, indeed, ran amuck among all the greatest names till we shiver at his temerity. But he knew better afterward; and, if he still condescended a little to his elders and betters, learned to love and comprehend them too.

It would seem that he wavered for a time whether he should not take orders, a step necessary to retain his fellowship, and dedicate himself to the church, as was the wish of his father. It would have been entirely suitable to him one cannot but think; to his meditative mood, and shy temper, and high moral tone. He would have missed the humors of town, the coffee-houses, and the wits, and the vagaries of the beaus and belles; but with still a tenderer and more genial humor might have made his villagers live before us, and found out all the amusing follies of the knights and squires, which even in London town did not escape his smiling observation. The manner in which the question was decided is curiously characteristic of the age. That he was not himself inclined that way seems probable, since he bids his muse farewell after the fashion of the time, when this ending seemed imminent, with something like regret, and it is said that he distrusted his own fitness for the sacred office. At all events, the matter came to the ears of Charles Montague, afterward Lord Halifax, himself an elegant scholar, and at that time in office. Young Addison had addressed to him, on the occasion of the Peace of Ryswick in 1697, one of those pieces of Latin verse for which the young man was known among the scholars of his time. He accompanied the gift with a letter couched in the hyperbole of the age, deprecating his patron’s possible disapproval of “the noble subject debased by my numbers,” and justifying himself by the poverty of the verses already published on the same theme. “For my part,” he says, “I never could prevail on myself to offer you a poem written in our native tongue, since you yourself deter all others by your own Compositions from such an Attempt, as much as you excite them by your Favour and Humanity.” Montague returned this compliment by interfering in the young poet’s concerns as soon as he heard of the danger that so promising a youth might fall into the gulf of the church, and be lost to the other kinds of work more useful to statesmen. He wrote to the authorities of Magdalen begging that Addison might not be urged into holy orders, and in the mean time took more active measures to secure him for the state. Lord Somers had also received the dedication of some of Addison’s verses, and was equally interested in the young man’s career. Between them the two statesmen secured for him a pension of three hundred a year, on no pretense of work to be done or duty fulfilled, but merely that he might be able to prepare himself the better for the public service, and be thus at hand and ready when his work was wanted. Public opinion has risen up nowadays against any such arrangement, and much slighter efforts at patronage would be denounced now over all England as a job. And yet one wonders whether it was so profitless a proceeding as we think it. Addison was worth more than the money to England. To be sure, without the money he would still have been Addison; yet something, no doubt, of the mellow sweetness of humanity in him was due to this fostering of his youth.

He went abroad in 1699, and addressed himself in the first place to the learning of French, which he did slowly at Blois, without apparently gaining much enlightenment as to the state of France or the other countries which he visited in his prolonged tour. No doubt, with his pension and the income of his fellowship, Addison traveled like a young man of fortune and fashion in those times of leisure, with excellent introductions everywhere, seeing the best society, and the greatest men both in rank and letters. Boileau admired his Latin verses as much as the English statesmen did, and the young man went upon his way more and more convinced that Latin verses were the highroad to fame. From France he went to Italy, making a classical pilgrimage. “Throughout,” says Mr. Leslie Stephen, quaintly, “if we are to judge by his narrative, he seems to have considered the scenery as designed to illustrate his beloved poets.” The much-debated uses of travel receive a new question from the records of such a journey, pursued with the fullest leisure and under the best auspices; and one wonders whether the man who hurries across a continent in a few weeks, catching flying impressions, and forming crude judgments, is, after all, much less advantaged than he who, oblivious of all the human interests around him, discusses Rome, for instance, as if it had no interest later than Martial or Silius Italicus—as if neither Church, nor Pope, nor all the convulsions of the Middle Ages, nor Crusader, nor Jesuit, had ever been. This extraordinary impoverishment of the imagination was the fashion of the time, just as it has been the fashion in other days to fix upon the vile records of the Renaissance as the one thing interesting in the history of a noble country. According to that fashion, however, Addison did everything that a young man of the highest culture could be expected to do. He traced the footsteps of Æneas, and remembered every spot on which a classical battle had been fought, or an ode sung. He wrote an eloquent essay upon medals, and lingered among the sculptures of the museums; and he picked up a subject for a heroic tragedy from the suggestion of a foolish play which he saw at a Venetian theater. With his head full of such themes, he had gone out from Oxford, and with a deepened sense of their importance he came back again. Though in after days he touches lightly with his satiric dart the young man who can talk of nothing better on his return than how “he had like to have been drowned at such a place; how he fell out of a chaise at another”; yet in the hymn of praise with which he celebrates his own return from all the dangers of foreign travel something like the same record is made, though in a more imposing manner:

In foreign Realms and Lands remote,
Supported by thy care,
Thro’ burning Climes I passed unhurt,
And breath’d in Tainted Air.
Thy mercy sweetened every Soil,
Made every Region please,
The hoary Alpine Hills it warmed,
And smooth’d the Tyrrhene Seas.

It is only the vulgarity of our modern imagination that makes us think of hot water-pipes when the idea of warming the Alps is presented to our profane minds. The burrowing of the railway that climbs the St. Gothard may be taken as a large contribution to the carrying out of this suggestion.

When Addison returned home after these four years of classical wanderings, it was to prospects sadly overcast. King William had died a year before, which had stopped his pension; Halifax was out of office, and all the hopes of public life, for which he had been training himself, seemed to drop as he came back. It is said that during the last year he had charge of a pupil; but there is no proof of the statement, nor has any pupil ever been identified by name. An offer was made to him to accompany upon his travels a son of the Duke of Somerset, his services to be paid by the present of a hundred guineas at the year’s end, which did not seem to Addison an advantageous offer: but this, which came to nothing, is the only authentic reference to any possible “bear-leading” such as Thackeray refers to in “Esmond”; and fine as is the sketch made by that kindred humorist, he seems to exaggerate at once the poverty and the neglect into which for the moment Addison fell.

He returned to England in 1703, being then thirty-one, full of every accomplishment, but with only his fellowship to depend upon, and the uncertain chances of Jacob Tonson’s favor instead of the king’s. He is said to have sunk, or rather risen, to a poor lodging in London, in the Haymarket, up three pairs of stairs, which was indeed a sad change from the importance of his position as a rich young Englishman making the grand tour. But if he carried a disappointed or despondent heart to those elevated quarters, he never made any moan on the subject, and it is very likely enjoyed his freedom and the happy sense of being at home like other young men; and he seems to have been at once advanced to the membership of the Kit-Cat Club, which would supply him with the finest of company, and a center for the life which otherwise must have appeared as if it had come to a broken end. It was not long, however, that this period of neglect was suffered to last, and once more the transaction which elevated Addison to the sphere in which he passed the rest of his life is admirably characteristic of the period, and alas! profoundly unlike anything that could happen to a young man of genius now.

We will not return again to any bewildering discussion of the Whigs and Tories of Queen Anne, but only say that Godolphin and Marlborough, those “great twin brethren” of the state, had come into possession of England at this great crisis, and that every means by which they could secure the suffrages of both parties were doubly necessary, considering the disappointment on one side that the policy of the country remained unchanged, and on the other that it had to be carried out by Whig, not Tory, hands. Nothing could be better adapted than the great victory of Blenheim to arouse an outburst of national feeling, and sweep, for a time at least, the punctilios of party away. The lord treasurer, who had everything in his hands at home, while his great partner fought and conquered abroad, was almost comically at a loss how to sound the trumpet of warlike success so as to excite the country, and, if possible, turn the head of the discontented. In one of Leopardi’s fables there is an account of the tremendous catastrophe with which the world was threatened when his illustrious excellency the Sun declined one morning to rise and tread his old-world course around the earth for the comfort of mankind. “Let her in her turn go round me if she wants my warmth and light,” says the potentate—with great reason, it must be allowed, since Copernicus was born, and everything in the celestial spheres was about to be set right. But how to persuade the earth that she must now undertake this circuit? Let a poet be found to do it is the first suggestion. “La via più spedita è la più sicura è di trovare un poeta ovvero un filosofo che persuada alla Terra di muoversi.” Godolphin found himself in the same position as that in which the luckless agencies of the Universe were left when the Sun struck work. A poet!—but where to find a poet he knew not, being himself addicted to other modes of exercise and entertainment. He went to Halifax to ask where he should find what was wanted—a poet. But that statesman was coy and held back. He could, indeed, produce the very man; but why should he interfere to betray neglected merit and induce a man of genius to labor for those who would leave him to perish in obscurity? Godolphin, however, was ready to promise anything in the great necessity of the case; and Halifax permitted himself to be persuaded to mention the name which no doubt was bursting from his lips. He would not, however, undertake to be the ambassador, but insisted that the real possessors of power should ask in their own persons, and with immediate and substantial proofs of their readiness to recompense the service they demanded. That day, all blazing in gold lace and splendor, the coach of the chancellor of the exchequer stopped before the little shop in the Haymarket over which the young scholar had his airy abode: and that great personage clambered up the long flights of stairs carrying with him, very possibly, the patent of the appointment which was an earnest of what the powers that were could do for Addison. This was how the great poem of the “Campaign,” that illustrious composition, was brought into being. Poems made to order seldom fulfil expectation, but in this case there was no disappointment. Godolphin and England alike were delighted, and Addison’s life and success were at once secured.

No one now, save as an illustration of history, would think of reading the “Campaign,” though most readers are familiar with the famous simile which dazzled a whole generation:

’T was there great Marlborough’s mighty soul was proved,
That in the shock of charging hosts unmoved,
Amidst confusion, horror, and despair
Examined all the dreadful scenes of war,
In powerful thought the field of death surveyed,
To fainting squadrons sent the timely aid,
Inspired repulsed battalions to engage,
And taught the doubtful battle where to rage.
So when an angel by Divine command
With rising tempest shakes a guilty land,
Such as of late o’er pale Britannia past,
Calm and serene he drives the furious blast;
And, pleased the Almighty’s orders to perform,
Rides in the whirlwind, and directs the storm.

Macaulay points out with much felicity how the fact of the Great Storm—so called in English history—which had passed over England in the previous year, and was yet full in the memory of all, gave strength and meaning to this famous simile, which at once opened to Addison the gates of fortune and of fame. Two years after he was promoted to be one of the undersecretaries of state, and from that time languished no more in the cold shade of obscurity where Halifax had upbraided the Government for leaving him. He was not a man born to linger there. Shy though he was, and little apt to put himself forward, this favorite of the muses—to use the phraseology of his time—was also the favorite of fortune. Everything that he touched throve with him. The gifts he possessed were all especially adapted to the requirements of his time. At no other period, perhaps, in history did the rulers of the country bethink themselves of a poet as the auxiliary most necessary: and his age was the only one that relished poetry of Addison’s kind.

This event brought more than mere prosperity to the fortunate young man. If he had been already of note enough to belong to the Kit-Cat Club, with what a blaze of modest glory would he now appear—not swelling in self-conceit, like so many of the wits; not full of silent passion, like the strange big Irish clergyman who pushed into the chattering company in the coffee-house and astounded them with his masterful and arrogant ways: but always modest—never heard at all in a large company, opening out a little when the group dispersed, and an audience fit but few gathered around him—but with one companion half divine. The one companion by and by became often that very same Irishman whose silent prowl about the room in which he knew nobody had amused all the luckier members. Swift found himself in a kind of coffee-house paradise when he got Addison alone, and the two took their wine together, spending their half-crowns according to the stranger’s thrifty record, and wishing for no third. They were as unlike as could be conceived in every particular, and yet what company they must have been, as they sat together, the wine going a little too freely—though Swift was always temperate, and Addison, notwithstanding that common peccadillo, the most irreproachable of men! It was then that the “Travels in Italy” were published, while still the fame of the “Campaign” was warm; and Addison gave his new friend a copy inscribed to “Jonathan Swift, the most Agreeable Companion, the Truest Friend, and the Greatest Genius of his Age.” What quick understanding, what recognition as of two who had been born to know each other! They were both in their prime—Swift thirty-eight, Addison five years younger, still young enough to hope for everything that can befall a man; the one fully entered upon the path of fortune, the other surely so much nearer it for being thus received and welcomed. Addison gave “his little senate laws” for many years in these convivial meetings, and all who surrounded him adored him. But Swift was never again so close a member of the little company. Politics, and the curious part which the Irish parson took in them, separated him from the consistent and moderate politician, who acted faithfully with his party, and who was always true whoever might be false. But Swift held fast to Addison so far at least as feeling was concerned. Over and over he repeated the sentiment, that “if he had a mind to be king he would hardly be refused.” Their meetings ceased, and all those outflowings of wit and wisdom, and the talk long into the night which was the most delightful thing in life; but for years after Swift still continued to say that there was nothing his friend might not be if he would: that his election was carried without a word of opposition when every other member had to fight for his life, and that he might be king in Ireland, or anywhere else, had he the mind. They were used to terms of large applause in those days, but to no one else did it take this particular form.

In 1708 Addison lost his post as under-secretary by a change of the ministry, or rather of the minister, it being the habit in those days to form a government piecemeal, a Whig here, a Tory there, as favor or circumstances required, so that it was by no means needful that all should go out or come in together. In fact, no sooner was the under-secretary deprived of one place than he obtained another, that of secretary to the lord lieutenant of Ireland, the same office, we presume, as that which is now called chief secretary for Ireland, though its seriousness and power are now so much greater. In those days there was no Irish people to deal with, but only a very lively, contentious, pushing, and place-hunting community—the Protestant English-Irish, which, so far as literature and public knowledge go, has been accepted as the type of the much darker and less simple character of the Celt. The wild, mystic, morose, and often cruel nature of the native race, with its gleams of poetry and dreams of fortune, has turned out a very different thing to reckon with. No such problem was presented to the statesmen of that time. The admixture of Irish blood would seem to go to the head of the Saxon and endow him with a gaiety and sparkle which does not exist either in one race or the other unmixed; and it was with the society formed on this basis, the ascendant minority, contemptuous of every possible power of the people so-called, yet far less unsympathetic than the anxious politicians of to-day, that Addison had to deal. His post was “very lucrative,” we are told—in fees and pieces of patronage, no doubt, for the income was but £2000 a year—and he soon acquired an even greater popularity on the one side of the channel than on the other. Something amiable and conciliatory must have rayed out of the man: otherwise it is curious to understand the popularity in brilliant and talkative Dublin of a stranger whose chief efforts in conversation were only to be accomplished tête-a-tête. But he had the foil of a detestable and detested chief—Wharton, whose corrupt and brutal character gave double acceptance to the secretary’s charm and goodness, and the Tories contended with the Whigs, says Swift, which should speak best of this favorite of fortune. “How can you think so meanly of a kingdom,” he exclaims, “as not to be pleased that every creature in it who hath one grain of worth has a veneration for you?” It is not often that even in hyperbole such a thing can be said.

It was while Addison was in Ireland thus gathering golden opinions that an event occurred which was of the utmost importance to his reputation, so far especially as posterity was concerned. Among the little band of friends over whom he held a kind of genial sway, and who acknowledged his superiority with boundless devotion, was one who was more nearly his equal than any other of the band; a friend of youth, one of those erratic but generous natures whose love of excellence is almost rapturous, though they are unable themselves to keep up to the high level they approve. Steele can never be forgotten where Addison is honored. He had been at Charterhouse and at Oxford along with his friend, and no doubt it was a wonder among the reading men in their earlier days how it was that the correct, the polished, the irreproachable scholar of Magdalen, with his quiet ways, could put up with that gay scapegrace who was perpetually in trouble. Such alliances, however, have not been rare. The cheerful, careless Dick, full of expedients, full of animal spirits, always amusing, friendly, generous in his impulses, if unintentionally selfish in the constant breaches of his better meaning, must have had a charm for the steadier and purer nature which was formed with pulses more orderly. No doubt Steele’s perpetual self-revelation, his unfolding of a hundred quips and cranks of human nature, and unsuspicious rendering up of all his natural anomalies and contradictions to the instinctive spectatorship of his amused companion, helped to endear him to the humorist, who must have laughed till he cried on many an occasion over poor Dick’s amazing wisdoms and follies, without any breach of that indulgent affection which between two men who have grown up together can rarely be said to be mingled with anything so keen as contempt. Steele, it is evident, must have known Addison “at home,” as school-boys say, or he could not have made that little sketch of the household where brothers and sisters were taught to be so loving to each other. While the young hero who had, as in the favorite allegories of the time, chosen the right path, and taken the steady hand of Minerva, instead of that more lovely one of fatal Venus to guide him, was reaching the heights of applause and good fortune, the unlucky youth who chose pleasure for his pursuit had gone disastrously the other way, and fallen into all sorts of adventures, extremely amusing for his friend to hear of, though he disapproved, and no doubt very amusing to the actual actor in them, though he suffered. But Addison was not a mere “spectator” so far as the friend of his youth was concerned. When he began to rise there seems little reason to doubt that he pulled Steele up with him, introducing him to the notice of the fine people, who in those days might make the fortune of a gentlemanly and clever adventurer, and that either by his own interest or that of one of his powerful friends he procured him a place and started him in public life. Steele had already floated into literature, and, whether it is true or not that Addison helped him in the concoction of one play at least, it is clear that he kept his purse and his heart well open to his friend, now a man about town ruffling at the coffee-houses with the best, and full of that energy and readiness which so often strike out new ways of working, though it may require steadier heads to carry them out.

It was, however, while Addison was in Ireland that Steele was moved by the most important of these original impulses, an idea full, as it proved, of merit and practical use. Journalism was then in its infancy. A little “News Letter,” or “Flying Post”—a shabby broadsheet containing the bulletin of a battle, a formal and brief notice of parliamentary proceedings, an account of some monstrous birth, a child with two heads, or that perennial gooseberry which has survived into our own time—and an elaborate list of births, deaths, and marriages, was almost all that existed in the way of public record. The post to which Steele had been appointed was that of Gazetteer, which naturally led him to the consideration of such matters: and among the crowd of projects which worked together in his “barmy noddle,” there suddenly surged uppermost the idea of a paper which should come out on the post days, the Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays which were, up to that time, the only days of communication with the country; a paper written after the fancy of the time, in itself a letter from the wits and the knowing persons in town, revealing not only the existing state of public affairs, but all those exquisite particulars of society which have always been the delight of country circles, and which were doubly sure to please at a time when society was governed by talk, when all public criticism was verbal, and the echoes of the wits in the coffee-houses were blown about on all the breezes. Happy the Sir Harry who, sitting mum over his wine in a corner, could hear these gentlemen discussing what Sunderland or Somers had said, what my Lord Treasurer intended, or, more delightful, the newest incident in the tragedy-comedy of the great duchess—how the queen looked glumly at her over the card-table, or let her stand unnoticed at a drawing-room; and still more deeply blest the parson who had Mr. Addison pointed out to him, and heard the young Templars and scholars pressing him with questions as to when his “Cato” was coming out, or asking his opinion on a set of verses. Such worthies would go back to the country full of these reflections from the world, and tell how the gallants laughed at the mantua which was going out of fashion, and made fun of the red heels which, perhaps, were just then appearing at the Manor or the Moated Grange. Steele saw at once what a thing it would be to convey these impressions at first hand in a privileged “Tatler” direct to the houses of the gentry all over the country. Perhaps he did not perceive at first what a still finer thing to have them served up with the foaming chocolate or fragrant tea at every breakfast in Mayfair.

It is an idea that has occurred to a great many heads since with less success. In these latter days there have been many literary adventurers, to whom the starting of a new paper has seemed an opening into El Dorado. But the opening in the majority of cases does not prove a practicable one—for, in fact, there is no longer any need of news; and the concise little essays and elegant banterings of those critics of the time have fallen out of date. News means in our day an elaborate system, and instantaneous reports from all the world; and one London newspaper—far more one of the gigantic journals proper to America—contains as much matter as half a hundred “Tatlers.” One wonders, if Addison’s genius, and the light hand of Steele, and Swift’s tremendous and scathing humor could be conjured up again, whether such a production, with its mingled thread of the finest sentiments and the pettiest subjects, metaphysics and morals, and the “Eneid” and “Paradise Lost,” and periwigs and petticoats, would find sufficient acceptance with “the fair” and the wise to keep it afloat, or would still go up to sages and fine ladies with their breakfast trays.

It was on the immediate foundation of one of Swift’s savage jeux d’esprits that the new undertaking was begun, a mystification which greatly amused the wits then, but which does not, perhaps, appear particularly delightful now. Swift had been seized by a freak of mischief in respect to a certain Partridge, an astrologer, who made an income out of the public by pretended revelations of the future, as is still done, we believe, among those masses, beneath the ascertained audience of literature, who spend their sixpences at Christmas upon almanacs and year-books containing predictions of what is to happen. It occurred to Swift in some merry moment to emulate and to doom the Merlin of the day: and with the prodigious gravity which characterizes his greatest jests he wrote “Predictions for the year 1708,” in which, among many other things, he announced that he had consulted the stars on behalf of Partridge, and had ascertained that the wizard would certainly die on March 29, at eleven o’clock at night, of a raging fever. The reader will probably remember that the jest was kept up, and that, notwithstanding Partridge’s protest that he was not dead at all, Isaac Bickerstaff insisted on asserting that his prophecy had been fulfilled, to the grave confusion of various serious affairs, and the inextinguishable laughter of the wits. It was not a pretty jest, but it brought into being a visionary critic of public matters, a new personage in the literary world, in whom other wits saw capabilities. Steele in particular perceived that Isaac Bickerstaff was just the personality he wanted, and therewith proceeded to make of that shadowy being the Mentor of the time. The design was excellent, the immediate execution cleverly adapted to seize the interest of the public, which had been already amused and mystified under that name. Mr. Isaac Bickerstaff presented his readers with the first number of his journal without charge. “I earnestly desire,” he says, “all persons, without distinction, to take it in for the present gratis, and hereafter at the price of one penny, forbidding all hawkers to take more for it at their peril.” The idea took the town. No doubt there would be many an allusion to this and that which the wits would guess at, and which would to them have a double meaning; but, to do the “Tatler” justice, the kind of gossip which fills the so-called society newspapers in our day was unknown to the witty gentlemen who sometimes satirize a ruffle or a shoe-tie, but never personally a woman. The types of fine ladies who flutter through his pages could never raise a pang in any individual bosom; and when he addressed himself to the reform of the theater, to the difficult duty of checking play and discouraging duels, he had all the well-thinking on his side.