prettily about nightingales and birds'-nests, which he has found at Fulham for his lordship. Those nightingales were intended to warble in the ear of Lord Warwick's mamma. Addison married her ladyship in 1716; and died at Holland House three years after that splendid but dismal union.1 But it is not for his reputation as the great author of "Cato" and the "Campaign," or for his merits as Sec 1 "The lady was persuaded to marry him on terms much like those on which a Turkish princess is espoused to whom the Sultan is reported to pronounce, 'Daughter, I give thee this man for thy slave.' The marriage, if uncontradicted report can be credited, made no addition to his happiness; it neither found them, nor made them, equal. . . Rowe's ballad of 'The Despairing Shepherd' is said to have been written, either before or after marriage, upon this memorable pair." — DR. JOHNSON. "I received the news of Mr. Addison's being declared Secretary of State with the less surprise, in that I knew that post was almost offered to him before. At that time he declined it, and I really believe that he would have done well to have declined it now. Such a post as that, and such a wife as the Countess, do not seem to be, in prudence, eligible for a man that is asthmatic, and we may see the day when he will be heartily glad to resign them both." LADY WORTLEY MONTAGU to POPE: Works, Lord Wharncliffe's edit., vol. ii. p. 111. The issue of this marriage was a daughter, Charlotte Addison, who inherited, on her mother's death, the estate of Bilton, near Rugby, which her father had purchased. She was of weak intellect, and died, unmarried, at an advanced age. Rowe appears to have been faithful to Addison during his courtship, for his Collection contains "Stanzas to Lady Warwick, on Mr. Addison's going to Ireland," in which her ladyship is called "Chloe," and Joseph Addison "Lycidas;" besides the ballad mentioned by the Doctor, and which is entitled "Colin's Complaint." But not even the interest attached to the name of Addison could induce the reader to peruse this composition, though one stanza may serve as a specimen: "What though I have skill to complain — Though the Muses my temples have crowned; The virgins sit weeping around. "Ah, Colin! thy hopes are in vain ; Thy pipe and thy laurel resign; Thy false one inclines to a swain retary of State, or for his rank and high distinction as my Lady Warwick's husband, or for his eminence as an Examiner of political questions on the Whig side, or a Guardian of British liberties, that we admire Joseph Addison. It is as a Tatler of small talk and a Spectator of mankind, that we cherish and love him, and owe as much pleasure to him as to any human being that ever wrote. He came in that artificial age, and began to speak with his noble, natural voice. He came, the gentle satirist, who hit no unfair blow; the kind judge who castigated only in smiling. While Swift went about, hanging and ruthless a literary Jeffreys — in Addison's kind court only minor cases were tried: only peccadilloes and small sins against society: only a dangerous libertinism in tuckers and hoops;1 or a nui 1 One of the most humourous of these is the paper on Hoops, which, the Spectator tells us, particularly pleased his friend Sir Roger: "MR. SPECTATOR, — You have diverted the town almost a whole month at the expense of the country; it is now high time that you should give the country their revenge. Since your withdrawing from this place, the fair sex are run into great extravagances. Their petticoats, which began to heave and swell before you left us, are now blown up into a most enormous concave, and rise every day more and more; in short, sir, since our women know themselves to be out of the eye of the SPECTATOR, they will be kept within no compass. You praised them a little too soon, for the modesty of their head-dresses; for as the humour of a sick person is often driven out of one limb into another, their superfluity of ornaments, instead of being entirely banished, seems only fallen from their heads upon their lower parts. What they have lost in height they make up in breadth, and, contrary to all rules of architecture, widen the foundations at the same time that they shorten the superstructure. "The women give out, in defence of these wide bottoms, that they are airy and very proper for the season; but this I look upon to be only a pretence and a piece of art, for it is well known we have not had a more moderate summer these many years, so that it is certain the heat they complain of cannot be in the weather; besides, I would fain ask these tender-constitutioned ladies, why they should require more cooling than their mothers before them? "I find several speculative persons are of opinion that our sex has of late years been very saucy, and that the hoop-petticoat is made use of to It sance in the abuse of beaux' canes and snuff-boxes. may be a lady is tried for breaking the peace of our sovereign lady Queen Anne, and ogling too dangerously from the side-box; or a Templar for beating the watch, or breaking Priscian's head: or a citizen's wife for caring too much for the puppet-show, and too little for her husband and children: every one of the little sinners brought before him is amusing, and he dismisses each with the pleasantest penalties and the most charming words of admonition. Addison wrote his papers as gaily as if he was going out for a holiday. When Steele's "Tatler" first began his prattle, Addison, then in Ireland, caught at his friend's notion, poured in paper after paper, and contributed the stores of his mind, the sweet fruits of his reading, the delightful gleanings of his daily observation, with a wonderful profusion, and as it seemed an almost endless fecundity. He was six-and-thirty years old: full and ripe. He had not worked crop after crop from his brain, manuring hastily, subsoiling indifferently, cutting and sowing and cutting again, like other luckless cultivators of letters. He had not done much as yet; a few Latin poems graceful prolusions; a keep us at a distance. It is most certain that a woman's honour cannot be better entrenched than after this manner, in circle within circle, amidst such a variety of outworks of lines and circumvallation. A female who is thus invested in whalebone is sufficiently secured against the approaches of an ill-bred fellow, who might as well think of Sir George Etheridge's way of making love in a tub as in the midst of so many hoops. 66 'Among these various conjectures, there are men of superstitious tempers who look upon the hoop-petticoat as a kind of prodigy. Some will have it that it portends the downfall of the French king, and observe, that the farthingale appeared in England a little before the ruin of the Spanish monarchy. Others are of opinion that it foretells battle and bloodshed, and believe it of the same prognostication as the tail of a blazing star. For my part, I am apt to think it is a sign that multitudes are coming into the world rather than going out of it," &c. &c.— Spectator, No. 127. polite book of travels; a dissertation on medals, not very deep; four acts of a tragedy, a great classical exercise; and the "Campaign," a large prize poem that won an enormous prize. But with his friend's discovery of the "Tatler," Addison's calling was found, and the most delightful talker in the world began to speak. He does not go very deep: let gentlemen of a profound genius, critics accustomed to the plunge of the bathos, console themselves by thinking that he couldn't go very deep. There are no traces of suffering in his writing. He was so good, so honest, so healthy, so cheerfully selfish, if I must use the word. There is no deep sentiment. I doubt, until after his marriage, perhaps, whether he ever lost his night's rest or his day's tranquillity about any woman in his life;1 whereas poor Dick Steele had capacity enough to melt, and to languish, and to sigh, and to cry his honest old eyes out, for a dozen. His writings do not show insight into or reverence for the love of women, which I take to be, one the consequence of the other. He walks about the world watching their pretty humours, fashions, follies, flirtations, rivalries; and noting them with the most charming archness. He sees them in public, in the theatre, or the assembly, or the puppet-show; or at the toy-shop higgling for gloves and lace; or at the auction, battling together over a blue porcelain dragon, or a darling monster in Japan; or at church, eyeing the width of their rival's hoops, or the breadth of their laces, as they sweep down the aisles. Or he looks out of his window at the "Garter" in St. James's Street, at Ardelia's coach, as she blazes to the drawing-room with her coronet and six footmen; and remembering 1 "Mr. Addison has not had one epithalamium that I can hear of, and must even be reduced, like a poorer and a better poet, Spenser, to make his own." - POPE's Letters. that her father was a Turkey merchant in the city, calculates how many sponges went to purchase her earring, and how many drums of figs to build her coachbox; or he demurely watches behind a tree in Spring Garden as Saccharissa (whom he knows under her mask) trips out of her chair to the alley where Sir Fopling is waiting. He sees only the public life of women. Addison was one of the most resolute clubmen of his day. He passed many hours daily in those haunts. Besides drinking-which alas! is past praying for you must know it, he owned, too, ladies, that he indulged in that odious practice of smoking. Poor fellow ! He was a man's man, remember. The only woman he did know, he did n't write about. I take it there would not have been much humour in that story. He likes to go and sit in the smoking-room at the "Grecian," or the "Devil; " to pace 'Change and the Mall1to mingle in that great club of the world— 1 "I have observed that a reader seldom peruses a book with pleasure till he knows whether the writer of it be a black or a fair man, of a mild or a choleric disposition, married or a bachelor; with other particulars of a like nature, that conduce very much to the right understanding of an author. To gratify this curiosity, which is so natural to a reader, I design this paper and my next as prefatory discourses to my following writings; and shall give some account in them of the persons that are engaged in this work. As the chief trouble of compiling, digesting, and correcting will fall to my share, I must do myself the justice to open the work with my own history. . . . There runs a story in the family, that when my mother was gone with child of me about three months, she dreamt that she was brought to bed of a judge. Whether this might proceed from a lawsuit which was then depending in the family, or my father's being a justice of the peace, I cannot determine; for I am not so vain as to think it presaged any dignity that I should arrive at in my future life, though that was the interpretation which the neighbourhood put upon it. The gravity of my behaviour at my very first appearance in the world, and all the time that I sucked, seemed to favour my mother's dream; for, as she has often told me, I threw away my rattle before I was two months old, and would not make use of my coral till they had taken away the bells from it. "As for the rest of my infancy, there being nothing in it remarkable, |