public taste have since occurred; and how difficult is it to reconcile the admiration this drama excited with the subsequent appreciation of Shakspeare! Even as a classic play, how inferior in beauty of diction, grandeur of sentiment, and richness of metaphor, to the Grecian theme which the lamented Talfourd vitalized with Christian sentiment, and arrayed in all the charms of poetic art! Neither the fifty guineas that Bolingbroke presented to the actor who personated Cato, nor the Prologue of Pope, could buoy up this lifeless though scholarly performance on the tide of fame. The whole career of Addison as a writer of verse yields new evidence of the inefficacy of erudition, taste, and even a sense of the beautiful, and good literary judgment, where poetry is the object. There must be a divine instinct, a fervor of soul, "an idea dearer than self," or the mechanism of verse is alone produced.

Addison was not a man of ardent feelings. The emotional in his nature was checked and chilled by prudence, by discipline, and by reflection. We can discover but one native sentiment that glowed in his heart to a degree which justified its poetical expression, and that is devotion. Compare his hymns-evidently the overflowing of gratitude, trust, and veneration—with his frigid drama and his political verses. There is a genuine and a memorable earnestness in these religious odes. They were the offspring of his experience, prompted by actual states of mind, and accordingly they still find a place in our worship and linger in our memories. "The earliest compositions that I recollect taking any pleasure in," says Burns, in a letter to Dr. More, "were 'The Vision of Mirza,' and a rhyme of Addison's, beginning 'How are thy servants blest, O Lord!' I particularly remember one halfstanza, which was music to my boyish ear:

For though in dreadful whirls we hung
High on the broken wave.

The hymn referred to was suggested by the writer's providential escape during a fearful storm encountered on the coast of Italy.

An able critic remarks that the love-scenes are the worst in "Cato;" and there is no rhymer of the time who exhibits so little interest in the tender passion. In "The Drummer" and

"Rosamond" there are indications of a playful invention and fanciful zest, which, like the most characteristic passages of the Spectator, evince that Addison's best vein was the humorous and the colloquial. In this his individuality appears, and the man shines through the scholar and courtier. We forget such prosaic lines as

"But I've already troubled you too long,"

with which he closes his "Letter from Italy," and think of him in the more vivid phase of a kindly censor and delightful companion.

Re

The "Dialogues on Medals" is the most characteristic of Addison's works prior to the Spectator. The subject, by its classical associations, elicited his scholarship and gratified his taste. garding "medallic history" as "a kind of printing before the art was invented," he points out the emblematic and suggestive meaning of coins with tact and discrimination, and illustrates the details of numerous medals by reference to the Latin poets. In the style we recognize those agreeable turns of thought and graces of language which soon afterward made the author so famous in periodical literature. His contemplative mind found adequate hints in these authentic memorials of the past, and it was evidently a charming occupation to infer from the garlands, games, costume, ships, columns, and physiognomies, thus preserved on metal, the history of the wars and individuals commemorated. His numerous translations, political essays, and letters, are now chiefly interesting as illustrative of the transitions of public opinion, and the studies and social relations of the author. In his "Remarks on Italy" there are curious facts, which the traveller of our day may like to compare with those of his own experience. The tone of the work is pleasant; but its specialité is classical allusion, and to modern taste it savors of pedantry. The comparative absence of earnest poetical feeling is manifest throughout. The reader who has wandered over the Italian peninsula with Childe Harold or Corinne finds Addison rather an unattractive cicerone. It is remarkable that he was so rarely inspired, during the memorable journey, by those associations which the masterspirits of Italian and English literature have thrown around that

classic land.

At Venice he is not haunted by "the gentle lady wedded to the Moor," nor does the noble Portia rise to view; he passes through Ferrara without a thought of Tasso or Ariosto; and at Ravenna he does not even allude to the tomb of Dante. He seems to have looked upon Fiesole oblivious of Milton, and passed through Verona heedless of Juliet's tomb. The saints and Latin authors won his entire regard. He copied a sermon of St. Anthony, at Bologna, and a letter of Henry VIII. to Anne Boleyn, in the Vatican. His observations on local characteristics, however, are intelligent; he was the first English writer to describe San Marino; and, to appreciate this work, we should remember that it was published before the age of guide-books and steam, and in accordance with the taste for classical learning and the need of information then prevalent.

To the majority of readers, at this day, the Spectator is doubtless a tame book. They miss, in its pages, the rapid succession of incidents, the melodramatic display, and the rhetorical vivacity, which distinguish modern fiction and criticism. Life is more crowded with events, and the world of opinion more diversified, society is more complex, and knowledge more widely diffused, than at that day, and therefore a greater intensity marks the experience of the individual and the products of literature. But it is in this very direction that popular taste is at fault; the overaction, the moral fever and restlessness of the times, have infected writers as well as readers. Both are dissatisfied with the natural and the genuine, and have recourse to artificial stimulants and conventional expedients; and these are as certain to reäct unfavorably in habits of thought and in authorship, as in scientific and practical affairs. It is to this tendency to conform the art of writing to the standard of a locomotive and experimental age that we ascribe the tricks of pen-craft so much in vogue.

Constable, the painter, used to complain of the bravura style of landscape, the attempt to do something beyond truth,— and he defined the end of art to be the union of imagination with nature. This is equally true of literature. It is now faint praise to apply such epithets as "quiet," "thoughtful," and "discriminating," to a book; but is it not the very nature of written thought and sentiment to address the contemplative and emotional

nature through the calm attention of the reader? Can we appreciate the merits even of a picture without a long and patient scrutiny; or enter into the significance of an author without abstracting the mind from bustle, excitement, and care? A receptive mood is as needful as an eloquent style. Paradise Lost was never intended to be read in a rail-car, nor the Life of Washington to be written in the form of a melodrama.

An author or reader whose taste was formed on the Addisonian or even the Johnsonian model, would be puzzled at the modifications our vernacular has undergone. The introversion of phrases, the coining of words, the mystical expressions, the aphoristic and picturesque style adopted by recent and favorite writers, would strike the novice, as they do every reader of unperverted taste, as intolerable affectations, or mere verbal inventions to conceal poverty of ideas. The more original a man's thought is, the more direct is its utterance. Genuine feeling seeks the most simple expression. Just in proportion as what is said comes from the individual's own mind and heart, is his manner of saying it natural. Accordingly, the verbal ingenuity of many popular writers of the day is a presumptive evidence of their want of originality. Truth scorns disguise, and an author, as well as any other man, who is in earnest, relies upon his thought, and not its attire. The priceless merit of Addison is his fidelity to this law of simplicity and directness of language; and those who cannot revert to his pages with satisfaction may justly suspect the decadence of their literary taste. The true lover of nature, when released a while from the crowd and turmoil of metropolitan life, rejoices, as he stands before a rural scene, to find his sense of natural beauty and his relish of calm retirement unimpaired by the pleasures and the business of the town. His mind expands, his heart is soothed, and his whole self-consciousness elevated, by the familiar and endeared, though long-neglected landscape. Thus is it with books. If we have remained true to the fountains of "English undefiled" amid the glaring and spasmodic allurements of later authors, the tranquil tone, the clear diction, and the harmonized expression of Addison will affect us like the permanent effulgence of a star when the flashing curve of a rocket has gone out in darkness. There are in the style of writing, as well as in

the economy of life, conservative principles; and the return to these, after repeated experiments, is the best evidence of their value. Already a whole group of writers of English prose, whose books had an extraordinary sale and a fashionable repute, are quite neglected. When libraries are founded, or standard books desired, the intelligent purveyor ignores these specimens of galvanized literature, and chooses only writings that have a vital basis of fact or language. This quality is the absolute condition of the permanent popularity of books in our vernacular tongue. There is a certain honesty in its very structure which recoils from artifice as the presage of decay. The manliness, the truth, and the courage, of the Anglo-Saxon race, exact these traits in their literature. Coarseness such as deforms De Foe's graphic stories, elaborate phrases like those that give an elephantine movement to Dr. Johnson's style, fanciful conceits such as occasionally dwarf the eloquence of Jeremy Taylor, are all defects that are referable to the age or the temperament of the respective authors, and do not, in the least, affect the reality of their fame, which rests on a sincere, original, and brave use of their mother tongue; but when inferior minds attempt to perpetuate commonplace sentiments or borrowed thoughts in a harlequin guise made up of shreds and patches of the English language, joined together by a foreign idiom, or a mosaic of new and unauthorized words, the experiment is repudiated, sooner or later, by the veto of instinctive good taste.

RHODES

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Addison commenced writing when literature was mainly sus OXFORD tained by official patronage in the age of witty coteries, ofLIBRARY elegant dedications. Chiefly in political and scholarly circles were the votaries of letters to be found. The Spectator widened the range of literature, rendering it a domestic enjoyment and a social agency; it organized a lay priesthood, and gradually infused the elements of philosophy and taste into conversation. Although the Observator of L'Estrange, the Rehearsals of Leslie, and De Foe's Review, preceded the Tatler, those pioneer essays at periodical writing were mainly devoted to questions of the hour, and to the wants of the masses; they did not, like the work which Addison's pen made classic, deal with the minor morals, the refinements of criticism, and the niceties of human character.